One often overlooked feature of craigslist is the FORUMS.

Yes craigslist has forums. Here’s the link Craigslist Forums
It doesn’t matter which city as I will discuss later on.

First you must create a craigslist account, you do not have to verify a phone number for this method.

Find the most related discussion forums section related to your niche.

What you’re going to do, is post a new thread with a catchy title, something that will attract clicks.

In your thread you’re going to insert a simple link to your website with anchor text or just the website is fine. Of coarse accompanied by some quick useful information.

If you notice, at the top of the forum discussion you can see that you have the option to view forum postings in your city, or in ALL cities.

The default setting for this is ALL, which means when someone goes into a discussion forum, in ANY CITY, your thread will be visible. Pick a time of day with the most visibility/least forum postings and post your thread.

Here’s a quick snapshot of what kind of traffic I get OVERNIGHT with one simple thread, one simple link. Notice I can’t fit every city of craigslist bringing me traffic as there are hundreds!! Bringing hundreds of visitors daily when I use this tactic!

Each SPIKE in traffic, is when I implemented this method.

Now here’s a snapshot of a forum where you may post a thread with a link to your website, which is visible to EVERY CITY ON CRAIGSLIST, ONE SIMPLE THREAD POSTING, ONE SIMPLE LINK, HUNDREDS OF UNIQUE VISITORS. Notice the ALL/cityname on top of image. Bicycling is just an example, there are dozens of discussion forums to choose from.

Keep in mind that after you create your required forum handle to post threads, you must wait 7 days until you can post a link in a thread or post.

HOWEVER, here’s a sneaky little way of getting around that to get yourself some instant gratification….God I really hope the craigslist forums don’t get totally spammed because of this thread…Please be respectful.

Well anyways to get around this 7 day waiting period, simple enter your website link in the thread WITHOUT http://www. enter only yourdomain.com

Craigslist automatically parses link text with http://www. prefix, however without this they don’t realize this is a link and forum visitors may still copy and paste your link.

Also…craigslist forum postings CAN BE FLAGGED AS SPAM so don’t enter affiliate links unless its a cloaked redirect within your own domain.

However I do highly suggest linking to your domain or a particular page and not using any sneaky redirects as I feel that is borderline spamming.

This is an amazing source of targeted traffic for many niches. SO PLEASE DON’T SPAM, be courteous, be helpful, create helpful/responsive threads.

Well I hope you guys have fun getting all kinds of sales and traffic as I did.

**UPDATE…EASY WAY TO MAKE FAST MONEY FROM THIS.

1. GET ADSENSE
2. Create a simple 1 or 2 paragraph hubpages Hub related to the discussion. hubpages.com
3. Add your adsense code to your affiliate settings in your account.
4. Adsense ads will automatically be placed into your hub.
5. Add a Youtube video to your hub.
6. Add a clickable image of the video in your hub as a the link to your hub in the thread.
7. Reap the rewards.

If you don’t know how to add a clickable image of a video as a link, here’s how to do it…

* Go to the hub you created. Make sure the video is visible on the screen.
* CLICK “PRINT SCREEN” ON YOUR KEYBOARD
* Open up the PAINT program on your computer
* CLICK CTRL+V or edit paste.
* This will paste a screen shot of your hub, including the video in paint.
* Use the SELECTION tool and drag a box around the video on the page to select it.
* Now click CTRL+X or edit then cut. You should now have the image of the video cut out.
* Next click on file then new. Don’t save your current changes.
* Now click CTRL+V or edit paste.
* You should now have an image of the video from your hub in PAINT.
* Click file then save as.
* Save the file to your desktop as a JPEG.
* Go to Imageshack.com and upload that image.
* Next get the direct link code for your image.

Now in the forums leave the image of that video as a clickable link to your hub.

Like this,

<a href="http://www.hubpages.com/whateverhub"> <img src="http://www.imageshack.com/dkjfkdjf/yourimage.jpg" alt="" /></a>

Now if you mention that they watch the video…they’ll just click on it and be sent right to the video they wanted to watch. They don’t flag that as spam.