I promised I’d talk about a way to make money online – here it is. Before I begin, let me state that I tried this yesterday – it took me ten minutes to setup and get running, so it was not too difficult a task. My results? 10 replies, three conversions and $3.6 earned. A failure? In my eyes, yes. The problem with doing so is that my ads got flagged around twenty minutes after they were put up – I have hired someone who has specialised in posting on Craigslist/Gumtree, and will have another go today; we’ll see what happens.

Anyways, I will share what I did with you, and you can decide for yourself whether it is a good idea or not. I read about it, and thought it was promising… perhaps had I had managed to get ads that were not flagged, it would have done better.

First off, you’ll need to sign up for an affiliate program that has CPA (cost per action) offers for you to try out. I recommend NeverBlue Ads, solely because of their sweet interface and tons of offers (they have 250+ freebies at any given time). They will call you within a week and from then you can start with them – they have a few offers that seem pretty decent (Easy-Forex for example, which pays $200.00 for a $50 sale) and something that will interest anyone, no matter what your niche.

Once you sign up with NeverBlue Ads, you can also try using Adwords to promote them, like in Geoff’s eBook.

Anyways, here we go. This is what I did:

1) Look for a good offer involving iPhones. Something above $1/email submit. The one I found was $1.2 per submit, and it allowed all forms of promotion. The one thing I’d say was wrong with this was that the offer I chose required a lot more than an email submit – it wanted a name and birth details too I think. I targeted the UK.

2) Create a new email account using Gmail. Use a name, and make it sound legit. In my case, I used the name Peter.Michals@gmail.com

3) Go to Craigslist (and Gumtree, Kijiji, eBay… wherever you want – a high traffic website that has lots of people browsing it at any given time. Create account(s).

4) Post an ad claiming you want to sell your product. Note, this sounds shaky but you’ll see why in a bit. In my case, I was promoting an iPhone offer, so I posted that I had an iPhone for sale. Make sure you have it so that the product is substantially cheaper than the normal price (my price range went from $200 – $325, while Apple normally charge $399 I believe). Here’s the exact ad I posted:

I have one Apple iPhone, new and unopened that I have not used. I bought myself one for Christmas, and this came in the mail a few days later – I had entered a contest on one of those freebie websites, just for fun but I won – wish I knew otherwise I would never have bought it.

Anyways, I’m sitting here with an extra iPhone – I will take the first £150 GBP I get for it, as it would be better off with someone that can actually use it rather than sitting in my cupboard. This is around 3-4 weeks old but unopened. Apple sell it for around £200 brand new.

If you are interested in purchasing the iPhone, or would like to negotiate on price, please email me at Peter.Michals@gmail.com

I will take payment by Paypal – verified users only. If you are near enough (I am around a ten minute drive from Arsenal’s training groud) we can meet up in person.

Cheers,

Peter Michals

Good points of the ad:

- Mentioning where you got it. Saying that you got it off a freebies website helps later on (You’ll see why).

- Mentioning that you will only take payment from verified users and where you live helps seem more legit – people are scared of scammers as there are many of them. Remember to include your email address in the ad.

5) Setup an autoresponder in Gmail. This can be done under settings. Leave the subject field blank so that it will look like you are personally replying to each email. Create a custom email, mentioning that the iPhone is sold, but they can get it from the same site as you did. Here’s the exact email I setup:

Hello,

Thank you for your interest. Unfortunately the iPhone has already been taken – it is pending sale to a very nice young college gentleman that lives nearby. I will contact you if the sale does not go through though, as you were the second person to reply to my listing.

The website I won the iPhone off was Win Free Stuff – I never had faith in these Internet things, but I guess I got lucky

Best Regards,

Peter Michals

Now, if the person is a legit user, you are almost guaranteed that they will click the link to the freebie offer. I did come across two scammers (‘hallo I in Nigeria send money quick quick can you reply I am waiting need ship today’) but out of the ten who emailed me, eight of them (the rest) clicked the link – that’s a decent ratio. Of those eight, three of them signed up – again, a decent ratio. If only the ad wasn’t flagged, eh .

I will be trying this again soon – but in bulk. What do you think were areas of the ad I could have bettered? For me, it was:

- Target USA users. Higher paying and easier to complete email submits

- Launch in bulk, rather than just one ad

- Perhaps mention the freebie offer quicker in the email

If anyone wants to make a go at this, feel free – let me know how you do. It is a free way of making money online, and I know some people that are doing pretty good with Craigslist… mastering the art of posting there is the key to success, I suppose. You will be almost guaranteed a high conversion ratio, because the people you are sending to the website are ones interested in iPhones. You can tweak this for anything – iPod Nanos, Laptops etc – good luck!

I promised a method of making money online, here it is. No crap, 100% honesty – I failed, but you may not, especially if you’ve used Craigslist before. Oh yeah, the contest – I think I’m at around 145 RSS subscribers now, but that could be increased… you guys know what you have to do