It seems simple enough, but how can you as a small business owner or service provider practice content marketing yourself? And how do you come up with content that’s going to get people’s attention and be valuable to them? The articles below address these questions and others around content marketing. There’s a basic introduction to the topic, an article about setting content marketing goals, a blog post about “Hemingway-esque” content marketing, and finally a practical, straightforward set of 20 content marketing suggestions that any business owner should find useful. Taken together, they provide a good foundation to understanding the why and how of content marketing.

Content Marketing 101: How to Build Your Business With Content
Copyblogger Senior Editor Sonia Sloane lays it out in a clear and concise article, with links to even more useful how-to articles about different aspects of content marketing.

10 Content Marketing Goals Worth Pursuing
Another Sonia Sloane piece, this one about setting content marketing goals. As with any business endeavor, it’s essential to know why you’re doing it and what you want to get out of it. As Sloane writes, “Content all by itself — even terrific content — is just content… It won’t transform your business or get you where you need to go, until you add one thing… Content marketing is a meaningless exercise without business goals.” True true.

The Hemingway Guide to Content Marketing
A useful, literary-minded blog post from Jesse Noyes at Eloqua that uses the example of Ernest Hemingway to show how you should approach content marketing. Even more than the tips that Noyes offers, the post in itself is a good example of content marketing. It’s original, has an angle, and is more engaging than a typical marketing how-to article.

20 Content Marketing Ideas for 2012
So you’ve got a sense of how to practice content marketing, but how do you actually come up with good content? Lisa Barone of Small Business Trends provides 20 ideas to get you started.

What’s been your experience with content marketing? Has it impacted your business, or do you feel like it’s a waste of time? And what challenges have you had with it? Feel free to leave your comments.

Circle Up: How Brands Are Using Google+
Google+ is on a lot of people’s minds these days. Still, most of us don’t have the slightest idea how to use it, especially as a business. Mashable contributor Lauren Hockenson offers good insights, three straightforward tips, and a useful slideshow of 10 brands that are using Google+ well. While no one is sure if Google+ will catch on with a critical mass of people to really rival Facebook, there’s enough attention being paid to it that it’s worth it for any business to start a Google+ page.

Old services meet new media: a tweeting cabbie’s growing business
I love this article by Jacqui Cheng for Ars Technica about a Chicago cabdriver who has built a brand for himself using Twitter, Google Latitudes, and other location-based apps. A great anecdote about the creative uses of these tools.

Who cares how many email addresses your dealership collects
This one is a few months old but it was featured in DealerRefresh’s “Best of 2011″ post last week. Regardless of when it was posted, it’s a good, short piece about common pitfalls in building up a mailing list and using (or not using) it to drive sales and build relationships with prospective customers. A useful article not just for auto dealers but anyone who deals with customers on a regular basis.

Five Easy Steps to Simple Camera Mastery
Good photos are the key to a successful flyer. If you fill your flyer with clear, well-lit, well-composed photos, you’re bound to get more calls from it than you would it your photos were dark and grainy. This article from the New York Times offers 5 basic tips for the amateur photographer to take better pictures on your digital camera.

I hope you enjoy these articles as much as I have. If you have thoughts about any of them, feel free to leave your comments.

And it’s not just in business and tech that I’m seeing this trend. Recently I’ve come across several instances of it across a surprising range of enterprises and disciplines. Here are a few examples that have stood out to me.

ReadWriteWeb reported this week that Philadelphia Media Network, the owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, has launched Project Liberty, a tech startup incubator. They’re beginning with three Philadelphia-area startups, which will share office space in the same building as PMN’s newspapers. Think of it: a newspaper publisher as a startup incubator? It goes against the common storyline of the last decade: the death of big-city newspapers, and their owners’ failure to embrace new technologies or adapt their business models. And yet PMN is bucking the trend, supporting tech startups that may or may not become successful ventures for them. And if they do succeed, their products may have little to do with PMN’s core business. But in any case, Project Liberty has people using the words “newspaper” and “innovative” in the same sentence again, and I hope that other publishers follow PMN’s lead.

In the realm of politics, Americans Elect created a good deal of buzz last year with its novel approach to nominating a presidential candidate: enabling voters to register as delegates online, then cast votes (regardless of party affiliation) in successive rounds–again online–for the nominee. Not only that, but to promote bipartisanship, the nominee for vice president must be from a different party than the presidential candidate. AE has already qualified as a party in 13 states and will likely appear on this year’s ballot in more, so it’s likely that the organization will have an impact on the election. While Washington Post columnist Elizabeth Marcus, for one, raises good questions about AE’s sources of funding and the possibility of it being “hijacked” by supporters of a particular candidate, I’m still energized by the prospect of adapting an institution that has seemed so un-adaptable (the party nomination process) to the 21st century and giving citizens a greater voice in deciding our candidates.

Education is another area in which, despite good intentions and lots of good ideas, real change has been extremely difficult to achieve. I was intrigued by a recent article by GOOD Education Editor Liz Dwyer about teaching imagination in schools. Specifically, Dwyer writes about two researchers at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who have launched a project called “Imagination: Creating the Future of Education and Work,” the aim of which is to help educators teach kids creativity and conceptual thinking. Sound wishy washy? It does to me, a little. But when you consider that the world of 2022 will not look like that of 2012, and that today’s students will be entering a job market that we can’t even conceive of, the case for engendering imagination begins to look stronger.

Even in the realm of professional sports, I find the success of the San Francisco 49ers under first-year head coach Jim Harbaugh (captured in an ESPN article by Jeffri Chadiha) to be a good example of the impact of thinking big and taking risks. The Niners have a talented group of players, no doubt, but this could easily have been another losing season for them. Instead, they finished with a 13-3 record and head to the playoffs with a first-round bye and home field advantage. Harbaugh’s success stems largely from the commitment he’s gotten from his players and capitalizing on his team’s strengths, not from designing plays that are particularly creative or risky. But he has to possess a good deal of creativity and gumption to have imagined his team being in the position it’s in now, having finished its first winning season since 2002. The 49ers’ success has been built on hard work, toughness, and precise execution, but it started with Coach Harbaugh imagining a winning 49ers team.

Now, is there really any connection between these stories? Probably not. After all, people have been innovating and looking at their worlds in new ways since, well, people have existed. It’s just that I’m seeing more cases of out-of-the-box thinking and risk-taking now than I’ve ever seen before. Perhaps people’s skins have thickened a bit from the recession. Perhaps we’ve become more critical of the status quo, more focused on what’s really important, less complacent, and are thus more open to creative solutions and risk-taking than before. So whether it’s well-founded or not, I’m choosing to embrace this notion that 2012 will be a year of imagination, innovation, and risk-taking.

If we take vFlyer as an example, we expanded our marketing arsenal by launching vSites this past summer–our first major new service offering since 2006–and are committed to making it the best, most user-friendly website builder on the planet. Achieving this goal will take creative solutions to the common problems people face when building and managing a website, and perhaps even changing the way people think about websites in general. We don’t yet know what this will look like, but this is the direction we’re going in in 2012 and we’re excited to see what we come up with.

So this year, whatever industry or field you’re in, think big. Take risks. Imagine. And then act. You’ll come out stronger and more successful than you would have if you just kept doing the same old thing. If you have thoughts about what 2012 holds in store, or about imagination, creativity, and risk-taking in general, by all means share them!

4 Ways Small Business Websites Can Drive More Sales
A Mashable piece by vFlyer CEO Aaron Sperling on how businesses can better utilize their websites to drive sales. Read this article! It’s direct and practical, just like Aaron.

Breaking Down Clicks Per Connection On Facebook, Google+ and Twitter
A great post by Inman News Chief Evangelist Chris Smith about an experiment he did to find out where the content he was posting was generating the most engagement. More interesting to me than the results is the method by which he set out to quantify the relative engagement of his readers and followers.

3 Marketing Things We Do Wrong That We Could Easily Do Right
A short, succinct, and useful post on three common marketing mistakes and how to avoid them.

Top 5 Trends for Search & Social Media Marketing in 2012
The obligatory “2012 predictions” piece, but valuable nonetheless. Not surprisingly, mobile and social are the focus.

Unboxed: Even a Giant Can Learn to Run
New York Times profile of outgoing IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano and a short history of how he led the company’s remarkable rebound. I think the first of his four questions should be at the top of any business owner’s or professional’s list.

Microsoft Celebrates The Demise Of IE6 In The US
Finishing off this week’s Roundup is this TechCrunch article on how Microsoft is embracing the death of Internet Explorer 6, which clings to a 1% share of the browser market. Is this the other 1%?

I hope you enjoyed the Marketing Monday (Tuesday) Roundup this week. If you have any thoughts on the items posted, leave a comment!

To say that 2011 was an eventful year would be an understatement. And while it’s tempting to try to sum up all the momentous changes and events in national and international politics, the economy, and technology, among other things, I’m sure there are plenty of others doing that just fine. So in this end-of-year recap I’ll stick to vFlyer, which also had an eventful, mostly fun, often hectic, and ultimately successful 2011.

The big event for us this past year was the launch of vSites, our website builder and hosting service, now all of four months old. In development for over a year, vSites is the second major service offering that vFlyer has introduced, after vMarketing, our classified ads service. In addition to being an easy-to-use yet powerful website service, vSites also means that vFlyer now offers a far more comprehensive marketing service to our users. Rather than using multiple applications for website building, hosting, Craigslist content, listing syndication, and email marketing (among other things), you can now do all of this in one place: your vFlyer account.

In addition to vSites, we introduced the social media toolbar and secondary contact to vMarketing at the beginning of the year and new Craigslist layouts and preview capabilities at the end. We added affiliate and reseller programs, giving even more rewards to people who promote and resell vFlyer services.

It was a good year for us, and we’re looking forward to an even better 2012. We plan to build out the vSites capabilities further and making it even easier for people to create a website. We plan to make flyers even more social, allowing for easier sharing, posting, and tweeting of them. And we’re looking forward to hearing from you all what improvements you want to see and working them into our product roadmap.

So thanks to all vFlyer users this year for your flyers, your websites, and all your great feedback. In particular, we’d like to thank a handful of users who provided especially helpful comments and insights to us this year:

Marcos Avila
Mike Catania
Dennis Favilla
Anthony Gilbert
Laura Pyle Gillott
Eugene Gruzin
James Hronek
Larry Johnson
Joshua Kinney
Greg Markov
Jay Nuss
Doug Parry
Joe Pedersen
Weston Pugh
Vatt Saycocie
Diane Schatz
Betty Simmons
Joann Welch

A big thanks to all of you. Best wishes for a happy new year!

1. Themes and theme editing
When you create your website, you’re given over 120 different theme options. That’s right, we’re in the triple digits. Each theme has a unique color scheme and look – a unique feel. A website’s theme reflects its personality (and that of your business); some of our themes are cool, urban, minimalist, others warm and inviting, others still fun and bright. I recommend that you think about the kind of personality you want your website to have, then look at all the theme options available to you and choose the one that you think will best convey that personality.

Choosing a theme isn’t the end of it, though. Once you’ve created your site, you can use the vSites Theme Editor to change the colors, fonts, background image, and other parts of your site’s theme, thus making the theme entirely your own. For users with some knowledge of CSS, we also provide an Advanced Theme Editor, enabling you to tweak each and every bit of the theme just the way you want.

And if you tire of the theme you’re using and want to shake things up, you can easily choose another theme for your site.

2. Use a good splash image
A good picture can make all the difference on a web page. When I get to a website with a nice photo on the homepage, that site immediately gets points from me. With vSites, each theme includes a different splash image that displays usually below the site menu. Many of the splash images are specific to a business category; for instance, there are several splash images related to hair and beauty salons. And while the stock images that we provide are great, you can also replace them with your own splash images. Either way, the use of a good splash image is a great way to enhance the look of your website.

3. Trick out your photos with Picnik
I wrote briefly about the vSites integration with the online image editing service Picnik a couple weeks ago. Picnik provides a surprising array of editing and enhancement options, from making photos black and white to creating “before and after” images. You can now enhance the images in any Picture Module on your site (including stock splash images) with Picnik by clicking the Enhance Image button in the image editing window.

Our Site of the Week this week shows how Picnik can be used to create a particular feeling on a site, in this case, an “antique” feeling.

4. Layer your Picture Modules
Did you know that Picture Modules in the same section of a page can be layered? Not sure what this even means? Let’s look at an example:

In this case, we have a banner image in the header section of the site. This user wanted to display icons for the social media sites that he uses to promote his business in the header. While normally something like that would require the help of a developer, this user was able to add Picture Modules for a Facebook and Twitter icon to the header section, then select the “Layer” option for each in the “Customize” menu. Doing so put each icon on top of the banner image and the user could then move the icons to where he wanted them to appear.

This is just one case in which having the ability to layer images on top of each other helped the user make his site look the way he wanted it to, but there are many others. Katie on our Customer Success Team recently posted a useful article to our help center on layering modules — check it out!

5. Play with page templates
The page template determines the structure of a page on your website: the different sections, the placement of each, and the number of columns in each. I wrote last week that we added four new default page layout options, giving you much more flexibility in structuring the pages on your site. But you don’t need to limit yourself to just five page templates! You can create your own custom page templates to make each page of your site just how you want it to be.

While the option of using a different page template on each page is there for you, from an aesthetics and usability perspective, I recommend using a consistent page template on most of your site’s pages. Often people will use one template on the homepage and another on the other pages of the site. This approach makes it easier for visitors to the site to find what they’re looking for.

We continue to see amazing websites being published and are endlessly impressed with how people are utilizing various vSites features to build beautiful, distinctive sites. If you haven’t used vSites yet, see how it can help you create a great-looking website for your business. I hope the tips above will give you some ideas of how you could make your own incredible site!

Just to put things in perspective, a Zoomerang/GrowBiz Media survey conducted at the end of 2010 revealed that nearly half of small businesses do not have a website. This is a staggering statistic. Imagine how surprised you would be if, in 1991, you read that half of all small businesses didn’t have a phone number; it’s the same thing today with websites. There are so many reasons why every small business should have a website that I couldn’t possibly cover all or even most of them here. I’ve outlined just a few of what I think are the top reasons below.

1. The Internet is here to stay.

Let’s face it folks, the Internet ain’t going away anytime soon. Phone books, newspaper ads, radio spots, and other vestiges of last-century marketing, on the other hand, are quickly becoming obsolete. If you want your business to grow and prosper now, you need to take it online. The easiest and most effective way of doing that is still a website.

2. Building credibility.

No doubt, having a good-looking, up-to-date website lends a great deal of credibility to a business. After all, more and more consumers begin their searches online. Many people today will discount a business immediately if it doesn’t have a website. It might take another minute or two for them to reach the same conclusion about businesses that have stale, poorly designed, clunky sites. By building a well-designed, attractive website and updating it with fresh content, you give yourself a huge leg-up and vastly increase the chances of turning prospective customers into real customers.

3. Being in control.

Some small business owners will tell you that they don’t need a website because their business can still be found online thanks to local listings, review sites like Yelp, and social media. While this is true, leaving your web presence entirely in the hands of another service isn’t a sufficient approach to marketing your business online. Having your own website gives you full control over how your business is presented. Make sure your own site pops up first when somebody “Googles” your business and save yourself the frustration of one bad review ruining your online reputation.

On a similar note, while Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks are effective ways of promoting your business, they should be supplementary to your website, not your entire web presence.

4. Google and the power of local search.

Stepping firmly into the space phone books leave behind, Google and other search engines instantaneously serve up the results people want. Where to eat, where to shop, where to get your hair cut — these are all queries small businesses want to answer.

With a glut of relevant results to display, search engines use a variety of metrics to rank search results. Proximity is one of the most important factors, as many of these queries include a city or neighborhood. The physical location of your business and service area must be consistent and clear, but more importantly, search engines need to be able to find this information. How will Google know where your business is (not to mention how relevant you are to a particular search) without a website?

Simple SEO (search engine optimization) tools, like customizing your site title and metadata, can help ensure that your business pops up when somebody is searching for your services in your area.

5. Inviting the unexpected.

You never know who will stumble upon your website. By establishing an online presence, you’re opening yourself and your business to unexpected, serendipitous influences. New clients, new friends, or new ideas may find their way into your world when they otherwise could not.

6. It’s not rocket science.

Thanks to website builders like vSites, it’s easier than ever to create and maintain your own website. The mystery of the whole process is gone: write a description of your company, upload some photographs, reserve a domain name, and your business is online. Moving? Changing prices? With a do-it-yourself CMS (content management system) like vSites, there’s no need to call your “web guy” and request changes—you can do this all yourself, just as you would send an email or post to Twitter.

I’ll leave it at that for now—plenty of reasons, I think, to take control of your online presence with a professional website. If you’ve already got a rockin’ site, thanks for reading this post and please give yourself a few pats on the back.  If you DON’T have a website, or if yours has been slowly decaying into the mess of dead and dying sites, I recommend you take a look at vSites. It’s a great way to build a high-quality website for your business yourself—quickly, easily, and affordably.

1. Astrid Task/To Do List

For Android
Not available for iPhone yet.

Astrid Task/To Do List is a wonderfully designed, deceptively powerful to do list app. A to do list app, you might ask? What’s so special about that? Well, Astrid allows you to easily change priority levels and deadlines, set notifications, add notes and tags for each item on your list. What’s more, you can sync Astrid with your Google Calendar, making it easy to update your to do list on your phone and computer at once. Need to email a flyer on Thursday? Enter it in Astrid, schedule a reminder, and then forget about it. Easy.

For iPhone users, Remember the Milk is another handy to do list app that’s available for iPhone.

2. Evernote

For Android
For iPhone

Do you feel like you’re constantly thinking of things or coming up with promising ideas, only to forget them later? I know I do. Evernote solves that problem by providing an easy way to save notes, web pages, pictures, sounds, and more, and then organize and search for them later. If you’re at a property you’ll be creating a flyer for, you can take notes about the property and save them in Evernote, then pull them up when you’re on your computer and ready to create the flyer.

3. Adobe Photoshop Express

For Android
For iPhone

This is a rather basic image editing app that’s useful if you want to crop, rotate, or add some artistic flourishes to the photos you take on your phone. If you’re at a house you’re going to create a flyer for, you can take photos and edit right from there. The photos are saved in your free Photoshop.com account (though you could also upload them to Picasa, Dropbox [see below], or another image hosting application), so you can access them from there and upload them to your flyer when you’re back at your computer.

4. Dropbox

Dropbox for Android
Dropbox for iPhone

Dropbox is similar in some ways to Evernote, but its focus is on storing files in the cloud. It makes it easy to access documents, photos, videos, and other files across all your devices. No more emailing attachments to yourself — just save the files in Dropbox and then pull them up on your computer or tablet.

5. Google Voice

Google Voice for Android
Google Voice for iPhone

Google Voice has been around for a couple years now and has been adopted by many as their go-to phone number. Why? One, it lets you choose a phone number using any area code (that is, any available number), so if you’re still using the same cell phone number you had in high school, even though you’ve moved across the country (like I am), you can get a local number through Google Voice. The best part (I think) is that Google Voice transcribes your voicemails, so you can read them just as you would emails.

Note: I know that there have been some issues reported with the Google Voice app on certain providers, so check to see if the app will work with your provider before you install it.

6/7. Yelp and AroundMe

Yelp for Android
Yelp for iPhone
AroundMe for Android
AroundMe for iPhone

These are two different apps that I’m putting together because they can serve a similar function for vFlyer users, particularly those in real estate. Yelp is the popular business reviews site and AroundMe shows you what’s, um, around you, wherever you and your phone are. They’re both useful in becoming a “neighborhood expert,” an idea that is becoming increasingly important in real estate sales and a good way for agents to add value to their services.

It’s great when you can identify some nearby restaurants, cafes, and other retail establishments in your house for sale or apartment for rent flyer, and both Yelp and AroundMe make that very easy to do.

8/9. Trulia and HotPads

Trulia for Android
Trulia for iPhone
HotPads for Android
HotPads for iPhone

These are again two different apps that vFlyer users in real estate and rentals may well find useful. For one thing, Trulia and HotPads are syndication partners of vFlyer, so these apps allow you to easily check your vFlyer listings on each site to verify that they’re looking good. But these apps also allow you to see what’s for sale or for rent around you; for a buyer’s agent, this is valuable. I like Trulia’s open house feature, which shows you which properties nearby have upcoming open houses. And HotPads has a great map-based interface that’s perfectly suited for a mobile app.

10. Pandora

Pandora for Android
Pandora for iPhone

Pandora doesn’t really fit this list as it won’t help you become a vFlyer superuser, but it’s an awesome app that deserves a place on any apps list. If you’re not familiar with Pandora, it’s a free music streaming program that allows you to create your own customized radio stations based on artists or genres you like. So if nothing else, you can rock out to your favorite jams while creating flyers.

These are of course just a sampling of the thousands of apps out there. If you’ve discovered an app that’s helped you use vFlyer better, let us know!

Let’s take a look at which networks are the most popular so far:

No surprise here, really, with Facebook way out in front, and Twitter in second place. It’s the margin of Facebook’s lead that’s really notable: used twice as often as Twitter, and three times as often as YouTube and LinkedIn, Facebook is obviously the network of choice in the vFlyer community.

If you haven’t already, add a social media toolbar to your account today.  Here are some instructions.

Note: other social networks selected include WordPress, Blogger, ActiveRain, Foursquare, and Yelp.

One way to quickly gain broad exposure is through syndication, or the automatic distribution of a listing to multiple websites.  vFlyer is one of a number of online services that automatically submits listings to online marketplaces and classifieds sites.  In this post, we’ll break down the various sites to which we syndicate and give you an idea of the exposure our platform can yield.

vFlyer partner site traffic in millions of viewers each month:*

1. Google Maps 35.8
2. Indeed 12.6
3. Yahoo! Real Estate 6.4
4. Zillow 5.1
5. Trulia 4.1
6. Simply Hired 4.0
7. Oodle 3.9
8. eBay Classifieds 3.7
9. Backpage 2.8
10. AOL Real Estate 1.4
11. FrontDoor 1.4
12. OLX 1.2
13. Vast 0.9
14. HotPads 0.9
15. Geebo 0.25
16. Cyberhomes 0.12
17. Jobalot 0.11

*Traffic data from Compete.com. Compete compiles data from a panel of over 2 million consumers – read about their methodology here.

You might be asking yourself, why are vFlyer listings showing up on Google Maps? About a year ago, real estate and rental listings submitted to Google Base were integrated into Google Maps as part of the retiring of Google Base’s search interface.  So while vFlyer continues to send a data feed to Google Base, housing listings now appear on Google Maps. There’s even a separate real estate search option in Maps that allows you to find real estate and rentals in a particular area.

Second on the list with a whopping 12 million unique views per month is the job site Indeed, a job “aggregator” site that, unlike some large job boards (e.g., Monster.com), has recently enjoyed tremendous growth.  An emphasis on search engine optimization has allowed Indeed to capture a huge amount of traffic straight from Google, and for vFlyer users looking to hire, this is good news… indeed.

Getting back to real estate, let’s have a look at the top five real estate-specific sites on the list.  Yahoo! Real Estate comes in first with 6.4 million viewers, Zillow is second with 5.1 million, Trulia third with 4.1 million, AOL Real Estate fourth with 1.4 million, and FrontDoor fifth with 1.4 million.

With the exception of AOL Real Estate, all of these sites show overall growth in the year 2010, with Trulia up 1.17 million unique views per month, and Yahoo! Real Estate up 1.16 million compared to this month last year.  These are companies that, despite a poor housing market, have continued to gain traffic by improving their portals and enabling online consumers with more information.  With Yahoo! Real Estate and Zillow recently teaming up, Yahoo! Real Estate has gotten a nice boost in listings, and Zillow has become an absolute must for syndication.  Combined, traffic on these two sites challenges Realtor.com, the longtime leader in the space.

Let’s now take a look at some of the broader online marketplaces and classifieds sites to which vFlyer syndicates: Oodle, with 3.9 million unique views per month, eBay Classifieds (3.7 million), Backpage (2.8 million), OLX (1.2 million), and Vast (0.9 million).

Check out eBay Classifieds (shown in red), with a stratospheric jump of over 3.6 million monthly visits in the past year.  As many vFlyer users will recall, this site used to be known as Kijiji.  While the name remains in Canada, Kijiji USA was rebranded as eBay Classifieds at the end of March.  This seems to have been an effective move by eBay (note the difference between March and April), and with a parent site (eBay.com) ranked #22 worldwide by Alexa, there’s reason to believe eBay Classifieds will continue to grow in the near future.

To put this all in perspective, let’s look at Craigslist.  With nearly 60 million visitors last month, Craigslist is the undisputed king of classifieds sites.  This should come as no surprise to most of you, but the magnitude of difference between traffic on a top real estate site like Trulia and Craigslist is quite staggering.  Just for fun, let’s throw in Facebook and Twitter as well.

These are three of the top 10 sites in the US (according to Alexa): Facebook at #1, Twitter at #9, and Craigslist at #10. To answer the question I posed earlier, these are now the most important places to establish oneself online.  But let’s not discount the other classifieds sites we reviewed.  Diligent Craigslist posting and staying on top of the social media game take a big chunk out of one’s marketing resources (read: time).  Syndication is the proverbial low-hanging fruit of online marketing.  While these sites alone may not generate the number of leads you might get from posting regularly to Craigslist, they still account for a huge amount of online traffic; having your listings syndicated to them by vFlyer allows you to “pluck the fruit”, and leaves you time to focus on building your audience through Facebook, Twitter, and your blog.

I’ll finish with another question: what role does listing syndication play in your online marketing?  And are there any other classifieds sites that you’d like vFlyer to syndicate to?  (Sorry, Craigslist is not an option.)