It is very possible, even if it sounds unbelievable, for you to earn a living using Craigslist as a resource. Increasingly, those with the entrepreneurial spirit have been discovering that there are several possibilities for success online. The will to work hard at earning a living by learning about sites like Craigslist is important. However, effective marketing of skills and products to the people are looking for them is equally important. This is different from the set salaries, and ceiling on earnings, of the conventional marketplace of offering of skills and products. While there is no set cap for those offering services online, there is still no guarantee of minimum income.

There are basically two methods that you can earn a living using Craigslist. The first includes providing services in the capacity of an independent contractor, per contract basis or offering skills, products and services. This is the ideal situation for small business owners and entrepreneurs. The second is using Craigslist to find full-time permanent employment in the Jobs category. This is a more traditional approach, but this article will focus on the first method.

Independent Contractors On Craigslist

People offering their skills and services per contract basis, or an independent contractor, are discovering how powerful Craigslist can be. It is a great place for offering your products, skills and services or responding to those posts that are looking for what you provide. The growth in the quantity of outsourcing being done by small businesses or large corporations is prompting many people to capitalize on these opportunities in the marketplace. As mentioned, the two main methods are posting to the appropriate category requesting such opportunities or looking for clients who are searching for what you offer.

Craigslist has a specific category for those offering services. There are several subcategories listed in the services offered section. A contractor may submit a post to an appropriate category for the purpose of connecting with the target audience. If no appropriate category can be found Craigslist has that covered with the Small Business subcategory. The disadvantage is the lack of specific targeting, but it is better than nothing.

People offering their products, skills and services may also augment their business success through responding to ads seeking whatever it is they are offering.

Those seeking a contract position using Craigslist should start with a specific location; browsing through each of the different job categories. One helpful trick is using the search function then checking the contract box to make sure that results only include contract positions.

Small Business Owners

If you are a small business owner, you can use Craigslist for finding more potential customers and growing your business. The same basic idea applies here, as well. You can generate more business by either posting ads or by answering them. Posting ads is a smart bet due to the massive amount of traffic Craigslist gets every month. It is hard for a serious business owner to ignore this fact.

One of the areas most overlooked by the small business owner is the discussion forum section of Craigslist. Even though the forums can create to produce a greater profit potential, you have to keep your posts relevant and avoid the use of spamming techniques. If your posts are informative and helpful you are likely safe. If you are just posting ads to the forums that is spam and all of your posts can be deleted. Your business could also develop a bad reputation, obviously that would be counterproductive.

Do you Squidoo? If not, you should be. It takes very little effort and the publicity and money you can make from it make it well worth your time.

If you haven’t heard of Squidoo, all the more so you MUST pay attention to this resource as an affiliate marketer. It was created a few years ago by a man I admire for his entrepreneurial zeal: marketing genius Seth Godin. Since that time many people have taken advantage of the site to help their Internet Marketing businesses and many other types of ventures.

It’s really very easy to set up a Squidoo lens. All you have to do is go to Squidoo.com and sign up. Then you can start creating a lens right away.

A lens is not exactly a blog, but somehow I mistook for that when I first tried it. To put it simply, it is a single ‘modularized’ web page in which you throw everything you’ve got by adding more information with new modules as you come back to your lens from time to time to update it. I’m happy to show you a lens of mine.

You can create a lens on any topic of your choice. You can create it all about you or you can create the lens about a product or service of yours. It’s completely up to you. Just be careful. You have to put good content on each one of your lenses or your pages might be seen as SPAM and then you’ll probably get kicked off Squidoo.

Creating a lens is super easy, considering that there are thousands of Squidoo lensmasters already registered. If you know basic HTML, that’s good enough. In fact, it’s easier to create a lens than to create a normal web page that looks like a lens from scratch. Once you get the hang of it, it becomes more plain-sailing, your productivity gets higher and you might be addicted to creating more lens in less time. :)

From the Internet Marketing point of view, Squidoo is highly earmarked for SEO and lenses are easily picked up by the search engines. Plus the fact that Squidoo has a community culture and groupings, you can easily receive visitors in a matter of days if you know how to optimized your lenses and get referral traffic via “Web 2.0 social submissions”.

If you want to commercialize your lenses, make your lenses product-focused and project product reviews as the main content. Pepper with relevant keywords throughout your lenses, in your main headline right at the top and in the module titles.

You can also visit other people’s lenses and leave comments for them and rank their lens. Then hopefully they’ll see you left a comment and they’ll visit your lens. This will help you in the rankings on Squidoo.

Lastly, update your lens at least once a week and preferably every other day. You don’t have to make any major changes but you should change something just to keep your lens fresh. Here’s a dirty trick: changing just one word will render your whole lens ‘fresh’. Your lens rankings will go higher when Squidoo’s internal engine register increased frequency in the freshness.

There are many great reports and books on the market that will help you succeed using Squidoo. Just having a lens or two will give you one more spot where you are marketing yourself and/or your products. And you can never have enough marketing opportunities.

So from now one when anyone asks you, “Do you Squidoo?” You better be able to answer, “Yes.”

If you’re looking for a detailed plan that will show you how to use Squidoo to crack the first page of Google just head over to the Ultimate Squidoo guide.