How to make Image ads including clickable ads to explode your craigslist marketing.

Image ads on craigslist should be another arsenal in your marketing
campaigns. It will bring you free leads. And who doesn’t want free leads
anyway?

Have you ever wanted to do more with the ads you place on craigslist? Like
add a picture or even add a video… To make your ad stand out from the rest?
Image ads are made up of HTML code but you don’t need to know anything about
HTML to make a great ad. These ads can either have a picture in them or not,
it is up to you and what your most wanted response is, whether to click on
the ad or call your 800 number or email response.

You can not actually add a video to your image ad but you can trick it to
look like it is a video and send people that actually click on your ad to the
video on your YouTube channel or website.

OK, let’s get started. Here are the steps to making the image ad.

1. Make the actual image of your ad. I use Microsoft PowerPoint but you
can use any presentation program or other type of program that allows you to
save the file as a jpg file.

Start adding your text or pictures to the page and be creative! Change the
fonts, change the coloring, be unique and fun and imaginative. Remember you
want to stand out from the crowd. If this ad is not to be clickable, then
make sure to ad your phone number of email address if that is your most
wanted response when people read the ad.

If this ad will be clickable (clickable means when someone clicks on the ad
they will be taken to where you send them, either your website, your video on
a video sharing site or anywhere else on the net.

Once you have the ad looking like you want it, save the file with the .jpg
extension.

2. Now we will generate the html code for your ad. Sign into your
photobucket account or if you don’t have a photobucket account go to
www.photobucket.com and sign up for an account. Upload your jpg file you
saved from step one. After uploading the file (don’t worry about adding the
title and description), hover your mouse pointer over the file you just
uploaded, it will expand to show the different types of code available.
Highlight and copy the html line.

3. Paste the html code into a text editor like notepad and save the file
so you have it. If this is an image ad that will not be clickable then you
are done and can start posting this ad on craigslist where they allow image
ads to be posted.

4. If this is to be a clickable ad, you will be adding the link where
you want to send them when they click on the ad, to the html code. To do
this, first delete everything between the first set of quotes (the section
that starts with <a href="http: and ends with .jpg” delete everything between
the quotes.) Then copy your link to your video or website and paste between
the fist sections of quotes. That is it. You can now post this ad to
craigslist.

For an image ad that looks like a video, the picture you insert into your ad
on step 1 above is an actual picture of your video on YouTube. To get this
type of picture I use a free program called Jing which is a screen capture
program from www.TechSmith.com. Bring up your video on YouTube and use Jing
to capture the video picture and save as a picture, don’t forget to add the
video controls in your picture so it looks like it is an actual video. And
the link you add to the html code in step 4 above is the url that is listed
for your video on YouTube.

Just a couple of thoughts on posting on craigslist. Craigslist constantly
changes its requirements for posting. At this time I believe you can post
one ad per account per 48 hours. This means if you want to post 20 ads a day
you need 40 phone verified email accounts (to post to the small biz ads on
craigslist they require you to have an account.) You can get phone verified
accounts by using pay phones.

You can also use these ads on any site that allows html in their ads. I know
that backpage.com and I have come across others as well.