You want to take advantage of the enormous traffic on Craigslist. Craigslist is highly-ranked and gets over 2 million plus visitors a day. The best part is that most of the categories within Craigslist are free, so you can use the Craigslist Advertising Platform to get your message about your products and services out to a very large audience. You can skyrocket the traffic coming to your website, landing page, sales funnel, capture page, blog or forum by using a clickable image ad on Craigslist to increase your traffic. Here’s how to do it!

You’re going to need to get an image and save it to your desktop. You want to use an image that you have rights to so that there is no dispute over copyrights and that sort of thing. I generally carry my digital camera with me a few days out of the week and take random photos and use them for my image ads, but feel free to use images from whatever source you like, so long as you have the rights for usage.

You’re going to want to get photo hosting for your images with one of the free photo hosting services such as Photobucket, TinyPic, Flickr, WebShots, PhotoLava, Hiboox, FreeImageHosting.net, Photoecoz, Dropshots, ImageCave or VillagePhotos.

Of the photo hosting listed, I’m partial to Photobucket, but you may be comfortable with any of those listed. I like Photobucket for its simplicity, the stats dashboard that allows you to see how many people clicked on your images and the image source linking options it offers. Photobucket gives you the options to use image source links for email and instant messages, a direct image source link, an image code link and a HTML image source link code. Of these for your Craigslist image ad, you are going to use the “HTML Code,” if you decide to use Photobucket.

In your Photobucket account you click on the “HTML Code” of the image you wish to use and it auto-copies the html code.

Next, you want to copy the “HTML Code” into your Craigslist Ad body. Your “HTML Code” will look something like this:

<a href=”http://s580.photobucket.com/albums/ss250/Nerdizen/?action=view&current=WeHaveWhatYoureLookingForAtWorkatHo.jpg” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://i580.photobucket.com/albums/ss250/Nerdizen/WeHaveWhatYoureLookingForAtWorkatHo.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”make money online,work at home,legitimate business onlinestay at home,stay at home,reputable online business,how to make money online,get paid weekly,we train,unlimited earning potential”></a>

You will need to change the Photobucket address highlighted within the quotations above, to the URL that you are promoting when people click on your image. In this example, I changed from the Photobucket URL to the URL that I am promoting and since I want the image ad to be centered in the body of the Craigslist Ad, I’ve added the

<p align=”center”> tag to the revised Photobucket “HTML Code.”

<p align=”center”>

<a href=”http://www.YourDesiredURLYourImageWillGoTo” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://i580.photobucket.com/albums/ss250/Nerdizen/WeHaveWhatYoureLookingForAtWorkatHo.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”make money, making money, making money online, Increase Sales &amp; Profits with Free Video”></a>

Note that in the “ALT” tag, I’ve included some keywords that are relevant to the URL that image will take the visitor. You can leave the “ALT” tag out if you like, but it does help to optimize your image so that the search engines have some idea what the image is about. If, you do use the “ALT” tag in your image source link, use keywords that are relevant to the webpage that the image is going to.

Once you’ve pasted your revised Photobucket “HTML Code” in your Craigslist Ad, press the “Continue” button and you should see your add right away.

When someone clicks on your Craigslist Ad Title and mouses over your image ad, if they click on it, the image ad will open a new window and to the website page you’re promoting.

Click the “Continue” button once again. This will take you to Craigslist Captcha page. Complete the Captcha and you’re almost done.

Next, you want to log into the email account associated with your Craigslist account in about 5 minutes or so and look for the Craigslist email. Open the email and click on your Craigslist Ad Posting and click on your image ad, to be sure that it’s working okay. If, your image ad takes you to the desired site page you’re promoting you’re finished, if not, go back and troubleshoot the code you put in. Be sure that you put your URL within the quotation marks, as that is the most common error. Until next time, all the best!