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How to Actually Make Money Selling eBooks

Ryan Dube — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:00:56 +0000

I get very frustrated whenever I’m looking for legitimate ways to generate additional streams of income, and I come across those horrid get-rich-quick sales pages. You know the ones – where the author can’t seem to decide on a single font size, and every other word is in bold. All you have to do is sign up for their amazing program, or buy their astonishing sales kit, and you too can be earning many thousands of dollars each month. In my quest to write, sell and make money selling eBooks, I’ve waded through mountains of these scams, and I’m here to tell you that it is possible to make money from selling eBooks, but that success does not come overnight and not without a lot of hard work. In this article I’d like to offer a guide (a free one…imagine that!) that you can use to sell your eBooks.

The first step is obviously writing an eBook. Don’t concern yourself too much with copyright. Thanks to the Digital Millenium Act of 1998, anything you generate and publish online is already legally copyrighted under your author name. However, it is true that enforcing that copyright could be somewhat difficult unless you do hold proof of copyright, so if you’re very concerned about someone stealing your work, then submit the claim electronically and pay the fee.

If it sets your mind at ease, it’s well worth the cost. If you’re wondering what format you should write your eBook in, here at MakeUseOf, authors provided a number of excellent tools that can help you generate that first eBook. Saikat wrote about the PHP script converter at EbookHood to convert your eBook into iPod readable format. You’ve also probably read about the cool MyEbook eBook publishing platform, or my favorite one, Zinepal, which creates your PDF eBook in a format that most common readers can display. Another very good option is converting your Word document to PDF format, as Aibek described in his article on doPDF. Once you have your eBook in a format that you can sell, you’re ready to move on into marketing and selling your eBook.

Make Money Selling eBooks Online Just Like Any Other Product

I’ve mentioned some of my own eBay history in my past articles on the auction site, and while my personal experiences as an eBay PowerSeller were not very easy, I do know that any product which you have an unlimited supply of and a high demand for do very well there.

With that said, the eBooks that aren’t very in demand really don’t do well at all. The key, when you choose what topics to write about, is to choose eBook topics in the same way you would choose an online article topic – based on the demand for that topic and the availability of it throughout the net. The smartest thing to do when you go with eBay is to set up a seller store and post your eBooks in a permanent listing for a regular fee. Another fantastic marketplace for eBooks is Craigslist.

This surprises many people, but the truth is that Craigslist has become a very large marketplace with a huge audience. Just like on eBay, if you’re writing on a topic that’s in demand, you’ll get interested buyers.

Reaching the eBook Audience

The very best way to achieve the highest sales for your eBook is to take advantage of those eBook directories that accept submissions from authors. While most major eBook sellers like Amazon or Barnes & Nobles only accept submissions from major book publishers, many of the smaller online firms will accept direct submissions from writers. Jack recently wrote a great article on how to publish your eBook in print using LuLu’s awesome publication service, but LuLu also offers eBook authors a fantastic resource to sell your book in electronic format as well.

Now, selling an eBook on LuLu is not free. The right to publish comes at a price tag that’s currently about $1.49. For me, that’s about the price of a cup of coffee, and considering the fact that LuLu takes care of integrating DRM copy protection and already has a huge audience for your book – it’s well worth it. If your book sells, LuLu takes only a $2.50 cut while you get $10 in revenue. I’m very impressed with LuLu’s rates and service and would recommend them to any potential author. However, if you really only want to use a service that’s absolutely free, there is another excellent option known as TradeBit.

At TradeBit, you can upload your eBooks where the TradeBit community can find it and buy it. For hosting and selling your eBook for you, TradeBit charges absolutely nothing upfront, and when it sells you get 75% of the revenue. Again, this is a very fair deal considering that TradeBit absorbs the costs for hosting, promoting and selling your eBook on their site and with their existing traffic.

Host Your Own eBooks and Take 100% of the Profit

There is, of course, always the self-hosting option. In this case, you would set up a blog or a website and provide your own eBooks for download through a payment system like Paypal and just offer your books in a simple format just like you would sell Amazon books on your own blog.

The advantage to selling your own eBooks on your blog or website is that you set your own price and collect 100% of the profits. The disadvantage is that you’re starting at ground zero in attracting an audience and potential buyers. Over time, you’ll have a good traffic, a strong reputation, and a steady revenue stream – but getting there will take a bit longer if you opt for the self-hosting approach. The best option might be to start with one of the eBook sales sites in order to get people hooked on the eBooks that you write, and then switch to the self-hosted option once people recognize your name as a premium eBook author.

Do you author your own eBooks? What approach or technique do you take to sell your books? Share your insight and advice in the comments section below.

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How To Email Yourself New Craigslist Search Results

Tim Lenahan — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:00:25 +0000

Craigslist.org is an online wanted ads site that’s been around for a bit. It’s a great tool if you are looking to buy something second hand. As mentioned in other MakeUseOf articles, its design leaves something to be desired but there is no doubt to its usefulness. There are some irritations such as the absence of pictures in the Craigslist search results (check out David Pierce’s list of 5 Tools To Make Craigslist Even More Useful for “ByeByeList”) and they could do a bit better with local search options like having the ability to set a search radius (check out Craiglook).

I also noticed that Craigslist does not offer the ability (out-of-the-box at least) email yourself new Craigslist search results. These basically include latest advertisements you care about. Do you ever get tired of constantly running the same search over and over, hoping the item you’re looking for will show up? Well, since Craigslist search makes use of RSS feeds (Track A Craigslist Category In a Feed Reader), searching for the same item multiple times is a complete waste of time. Let me show you how to take a search term, find the RSS feed for that search term, and have the feed updates emailed to you!

Let’s start with Craigslist, the search, and the feed.

First find your local Craigslist page. Head to Craigslist.org, and look to the lists off to the right to find your local country, state or city (or nearest).

Once you find the closest location you can find, search for what you are looking for. Just type something in the search box. NOTE: you may find better, more narrowed search results by navigating to a category and then running the search, but it’s all up to you.

One thing that Craigslist does do right is it adds RSS feeds… everywhere! For instance, they have feeds set up for categories, subcategories and even search terms! In each case, just check out the bottom right corner of the page for the RSS icon.

Now all there is to do is have the FEED updates emailed to you.

There is a tool called FeedMyInbox (for more information on the tool, check out MakeUseOf’s overview). Basically this site offers you the ability to enter a feed and your email address, and have the updates sent directly to your inbox. You can do this without even signing up for an account! Please note that email updates will only be sent once every 24 hours with all updates from that time frame.

So, head back to Craigslist to copy the feed for your Craigslist search. The easiest way to do this is to right-click on the RSS icon and click COPY (or COPY LINK LOCATION – may depend on your browser of choice).

Now head over to FeedMyInbox and paste the feed address into the website URL field. Then, obviously, enter your email address into the email address field.

Next, you will have a verification email sent to you to make sure it was really you who signed up to receive the updates.

Just click the confirmation link knowing that you always have the option to cancel the updates anytime you want.

And that’s how to save the time of repeating a Craigslist search over and over on Craigslist by have the results sent directly to your email inbox! Did you find this helpful? I am sure there are tons of other ways to email yourself Craigslist search results. Do you have another method? We’d love to hear it in the comments.

Image credits: MorgueFile.com

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PadMapper Helps You to Find Apartments for Rent on CraigsList

Karl L. Gechlik — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:01:58 +0000

Where do you turn when you need to find apartments for rent? Do you go to your local real estate agent? Do you grab the newspaper every day?

Maybe you ask your friends – or beg and plead?

Everyone knows that your first stop should be CraigsList regardless of where you live. I have found my last 3 apartments via CraigsList but this little gem called PadMapper makes it so much easier and more enjoyable! The site isn’t as cutting edge as it used to be (CraigsList that is) but it is very functional. How can we improve the quality of data that we grab from this site? Well I have a way for you!

I know that I have wished for a Google Maps type application within CraigsList to see my choices on a map with the ability to filter out the same stuff you can on CraigsList’s website like bedrooms, bathrooms and price.

This is exactly what PadMapper did – they mashed up CraigsList’s apartment listings with a Google Map. Now you can see all the available apartments in your area on a map! Let’s take a look at the site:

When you first arrive at PadMapper you will see their slogan which explains it all – Making Apartment Hunting Suck Less! I love it! Simply start typing a city or address into the first field and you will be whisked away to a Google Map. You can set your criteria first but I will get back to that in a minute.

I started typing New York and I immediately had a United States Map on my screen. As I hit GO the map became localized to NYC.

There are a lot of listings here. We would now want to filter out all the undesirable apartments for rent and narrow down our search.

We do this by clicking on the Filter Listings option at the bottom of the PadMapper bubble.

You can see that you can set Max/Min Rent price, number of bedrooms, maximum price per bedroom, maximum age of listing, keywords to be found in the listing or title, and if you are in NYC you can make sure you can get to work via the subway.

Wow! And still there are more options including pictures, sublets or no sublets and they also search Apartments.com (apparently).

After you get to narrow down your choices you can click on one of them and it will bring up a bubble with your selections options like the picture you see below:

Once you have the listing up you can email the owner directly, save to favorites in Google Maps, see a street view or report the listing. Oh and of course you can open the Craigslist listing with one click as well!

How do you find apartments for rent in this day and age? Do you know of other sites that aggregate data on apartments from other sites?

If so, we would love to hear about it in the comments.

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8 Sites For Beating The Job Hunting Blues

Charnita Fance — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:01:37 +0000

With the economy in such a poor state, more and more people are finding it extremely hard to find a job. Sadly, it can literally take months to even be contacted about a job let alone find one, thus resulting in the job hunting blues.

Even though it can get extremely frustrating (I know first hand), the best thing you can do is not give up and keep searching on a consistent basis. If you’ve tried all the usual places like CareerBuilder and Monster and had no luck, here are 8 more that will hopefully get the ball rolling for you.

LinkedIn is definitely growing in popularity for job searching. When searching for jobs, you have the option view jobs that are exclusively on LinkedIn or jobs from the Web.

My favorite thing about LinkedIn is the ability to send and receive recommendations from co-workers and peers. Recommendations are the best way for a company to learn more about you from the people that know you best.

Of course, a complete and up-to-date profile will also give you a better chance of being recruited by employers.

Indeed

Indeed is one of the job search engines I use regularly and is very easy to use. To start, simply enter the type of job you’re looking for and the desired location. There are a lot of options for refining your results such as by salary estimate, title, company, location and more. You can also save any search as an email alert or subscribe to the RSS feed.

As you can see below, Indeed also has extensive advanced search features.

Yahoo! HotJobs

Many people already know about Yahoo! HotJobs. If you have a Yahoo! account, once logged in you will have the pleasure of seeing recommended jobs for you right on the homepage. Also, just like Indeed you can save your search as en email job alert.

What I like best about HotJobs is that you can hide jobs from certain companies. The only downside to that is that there’s a limit of 20 companies so, you can’t hide anymore than that.

TwitterJobSearch

Since Twitter is growing more popular each day, there’s no surprise that there’s a Twitter job search engine. To start just enter the type of job you’re looking for and location (optional) or, click the “Browse” button up top to browse by category. Jobs are listed as tweets so you can see who tweeted it and when. You then have the option to view the actual job listing, retweet it, or follow the user that tweeted it.

SimplyHired

SimplyHired powers a lot of the job search engines that you can find on numerous social networks such as LinkedIn, MySpace, and Plaxo. Once again, searches can be saved as email alerts or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

SimplyHired goes a step further than Yahoo! Hotjobs with the blocking feature; you can block all jobs from a certain company or from a certain website. The best feature, in my opinion, is the option to allow access to your LinkedIn account. By doing this, you can make connections with others that work at a company you’re applying to.

LinkUp

LinkUp is one of the most unique search engines I’ve seen mainly because everything is done in the same window; no need to open other tabs or windows. After getting your search results, clicking on a listing will open it up a new tab (as pictured below) in the same window, which saves you time and helps reduce screen clutter. You can also apply to jobs right in the same window. From within the LinkUp tabs you can then view other jobs from the same company, view or make connections from LinkedIn (just like SimplyHired) or pick a suggested category.

Craigslist

A well known site for everything from selling items to finding an apartment, Craigslist is also a great site for job hunting. With Craigslist you can search by specific cities and regions.

What I like about Craigslist is that you don’t have to sign up in order to search or respond to listings. Most listings include an email, so applying for a job is as easy as clicking the email link, writing a quick message and attaching your resume. The job section is broken down by categories and you can even subscribe to the RSS feed for a certain category so that you can stay updated on new job listings.

NotchUp

NotchUp is also very unique in that it serves as your own personal career agent. Although it is free to join and use, membership is by application or invitation only. Once you are a member, NotchUp allows you to set a price of what your time is worth and upload your resume. From there, your only job is to sit back and wait to be contacted by potential employers.

Once contacted, these companies will then have to pay you to interview with them. Yes, you heard that right, you get paid to interview for jobs! Applying for membership literally takes 30 seconds, as you can see below there’s not much to fill in.

I wish everyone the best of luck with their job searches. If you know of any other great sites for job hunting please feel free to let us know in the comments.

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Oodle – Another Craigslist, But Slightly Better

Stefan Neagu — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:01:11 +0000

Created by ex-Excite executives Craig Donato, Scott Kister and Faith Sedlin, Oodle offers a significantly better experience than Craigslist. Reported to be the fastest expanding classifieds website, Oodle might just be Craigslist’s nemesis.

In addition to powering classifieds listings to several major newspapers, it recently welcomed Facebook Marketplace, AOL Classifieds as well as MySpace to their network. Why is Oodle the best player when it comes to online classifieds?

First of all, let’s talk about the interface. Craigslist has received a lot of criticism for its barebones 1990’s design but it has a major advantage that most didn’t perceive at first glance:

An extremely simple interface means a low barrier to entry for new users.
No graphics, animations; no distractions at all for the user. While not exactly pleasant for the eye, it means the user would get in and find what they were looking for fast.
Minimal operating costs; transferring text has the lowest bandwidth requirements and it doesn’t use too many CPU resources either. You could literally run a million dollar business out of your closet. No need to hire coders to maintain the service, debug code; designers to create new promotional images/videos/layouts.

The idea behind Craigslist is genius, and so is the implementation – to a point. Create a balance between eye-candy, usability and costs and you’ve got a Craigslist killer: Oodle.

What’s special about Oodle?

It mashes together ‘80,000 sources’ according to their website; which isn’t that far fetched considering they manage classifieds for a number of big players in the market.

Oodle covers listings from national and local marketplaces in 289 regions, 494 colleges in the United States, 120 cities and 84 universities in the UK, and 39 regions and 31 universities in Canada. – Oodle Blog

It has an alert system that notifies the user once a product is available. Instead of searching every day, you sit back and receive the notification in your inbox.
A large inventory – many sources means more products and a good angle for negotiating.
Other classifieds sites use Oodle’s API to provide results – which means your posting will reach more than one single service. These sites are in the ‘hundreds’.
Oodle generates more revenue by attracting advertisers and having a paid inclusion program. Submission to the site is still free – but if you want more exposure you can pay for it.
International reach – just recently opened for Ireland and India.

Oodle is definitely a better implementation of the online classifieds idea – and while it is not as revolutionary as Craiglist was when it first appeared – it does the job better and that’s always what matters for the end-user.

I’ve asked Kirsten Bollen, from Public Relations at Oodle, a couple of questions:

What makes Oodle, in your opinion, better than Craiglist? What feature would you say differentiates you from the other services?

A: Oodle operates the largest network of classifieds services in the U.S., so buyers can easily find the best deals with access to more than 40 million listings aggregated from more than 80,000 different sites. Oodle also offers a compelling platform for sellers to promote their listings by leveraging the reach of Oodle’s extensive network of more than 250 partner sites, including AOL, Comcast and MySpace, among many others.

Q:How would you see the service evolve in the future?

A: Oodle recently launched Facebook’s new Marketplace, where we introduced a new feature – Sell For a Cause – which allows you to donate the proceeds from items you sell to over a million participating charities including UNICEF, the Sierra Club and local organizations like the Boys and Girls Club of San Francisco.

I’d like to hear what you think about Craigslist and Oodle. If you haven’t tried it yet, go to Oodle.com.

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Search Craigslist With The CraigsList Reader (Windows)

Ryan Dube — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:01:44 +0000

One of the most powerful and popular online classified ad websites is clearly Craigslist. In Google Trends, search patterns for Craigslist far surpass those for other free ad services such as Kijiji or USFreeAds.

Much of the power of the multitude of Craigslists are that while they certainly cover local communities, the lists are spread throughout the entire world. With Craigslist, it’s just as easy to search through electronics for sale in Poland as it is to search for auto parts for sale in Greece. The scope of the Craigslist database is just staggering.

However, this size also represents a significant search problem. While it’s fairly easy to search through listings within a specific city or town, how do you search listings posted throughout an entire country, or even the entire world?

Solving The Craigslist Search Dilemma

Everyone who has ever used Craigslist knows that the site is about as non-user friendly as it could possibly be. The front page consists of nothing more than a huge listing of locations that stretch from the U.S. all the way throughout Europe and Asia.

The front page offers not a single search feature. Instead, you must select a location first, and then you can search. A few MakeUseOf articles have covered some potential solutions, such as this article by Abhijeet which discusses the website SearchAllCraigs.com, or CLHack which lets you search Craigslist for listings with pictures.

However, by far the best free tool I’ve found for searching all of the Craigslists is the free CraigsList Reader by Motion Technologies.

Overview of The CraigsList Reader

The CraigsList Reader is a well written application that allows users to drill through the entire database of Craigslists, based on any search criteria whatsoever. The application is aesthetically impressive considering it’s a completely free application. Search results are displayed in the pane to the right, and individual ad content is displayed in the panel below it.

The Reader offers users a comprehensive search based on categories, geographic locations, and even subcategories and ranges (such as price ranges) depending on which category you choose. The selection boxes at the lower left hand portion of the screen allow you to select which demographics and categories to search through, view your saved favorites from previous searches, set up notifications (see below), or configure your Craigslist Reader options.

This is also the corner of the screen where you can view the search status and number of results as the Reader application sifts through the millions of Craigslist listings.

How It Works

The power of this application really comes out when you start using it. While the search itself can take a fair amount of time depending on the number of connections you allow (consider the fact that it’s sifting through millions of ads across the world), the results are more useful than anything you’ll find trying to sift through the website yourself.

For example, whenever I’m hungry for writing work, I will often search the entire world for writing gigs. While this may sound like a bit of a stretch, I’ve found some of my best clients in countries like China, Australia, and even Ireland. The Craigslist Reader is useful for local searches as well, but when you can do work on a global scale, this application can really come in handy. The results for such a search typically take about 20 minutes or more to complete (with 5 connections), but by the time it’s finished there are thousands of results to sift through.

While doing manual searches yourself can provide a lot of opportunities, eventually you’ll make it to the bottom of the list. At that point, the real game on Craigslist is getting to the opportunity faster than anyone else. That’s where the “notifications” feature of Craigslist Reader is useful.

When you click the “Add as Notification” box before performing a search, you can add that search to your notification list. What that means is that the Craigslist Reader will repeat the search as often as you tell it to, and when there are any new results, it will immediately notify you through a display, sound, or even an email alert.

This is an excellent feature, especially if you’re in a highly competitive industry and need to jump on opportunities before your competition. You can also tweak the Craigslists search by modifying the application options.

The key feature in the Options section is the ability to modify how many connections, or threads, you want to allow the application to use. This lets you scale back the bandwidth that the Craigslist Reader uses if you want to just let it run in the background while you surf the Internet. By carefully selecting the right thread count, you can tweak the Reader to make the most efficient use of your broadband Internet connection.

Why Craigslist Reader is Unique

While there are a number of web based and application based Craigslist readers out there, Motion Technologies really nailed it with this particular free reader. The search capacity, bug-free features, and the ability to tweak the application and alert settings to your particular needs sets this reader well above the rest.

In particular, if you are looking for job opportunities, just set up your search notifications, let the application run in the background, and before you know it countless job opportunities will be knocking down your door.

Do you have a particular method or tool that you like to use to search the Craigslists? Share your opinion in the comments section below.

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5 Tools To Make Craigslist Even More Useful

David Pierce — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:01:24 +0000

Ah, Craigslist. That oddly-named, terribly-designed, mind-blowingly useful website. I have quite the love-hate relationship with Craigslist. It’s got a ton of information and a ton of users, but without any kind of standard for what to put in a post, what to include and exclude, etc. it can be difficult to find what you’re actually looking for.

Other people evidently feel my pain, as a number of Craiglist mashups have sprung up on the Web that take the Craigslist data, and use it in a better way. These Craigslist tools don’t have everything Craigslist does, but they typically help you look at one category or region of Craigslist far more easily and productively.

Here are five of my favorite ways to navigate Craigslist without typing “craigslist.org”.

Craig’s Helper

One of the things I like the least about Craigslist is that it’s limited to a particular place. If I want to buy, say, a bike, I’m limited to only the small regions Craigslist selects for me, unless I’m willing to do a lot of duplicate work.

With Craig’s Helper, you’re able to set how far away from yourself you’re willing to search for a particular item. I’m in Central Virginia, but I can set Craig’s Helper to search Craigslist to Washington, DC, or even to Vegas if I really want that bike. You set a price range, a category, and a distance, and Craig’s Helper parses Craigslist to find only the results you’re interested in and willing to go get. It does the same thing with eBay, and you can choose to search either or both sites.

Craigslist/Zillow

Real Estate prices are frequently skewed on Craigslist, but many people don’t know what to do, what the right price is, or even what they’re looking for. With the Craigslist/Zillow mashup made using Yahoo! Pipes, you can be more prepared.

All you have to do is input a real estate feed from Craigslist, by clicking the “RSS” icon at the bottom of the page when you search for real estate. Then the pipe shows you on a map where the housing options are, as well as the estimated price on Zillow, a users’ guide to real estate. You’ll get a sense of where things are, what’s available, and what the normal prices are – a major leg up for anyone trying to buy real estate from Craigslist.

Typo Buddy

People are notoriously bad at spelling, and notoriously bad at caring about it. With Typo Buddy, you get to use that to your advantage. Say you want an Apple computer. Type that into Typo Buddy, and it searches through both eBay and Craigslist for all the ways people could misspell that word.

Incorrect spelling means fewer people see the listing, which means cheaper prices for you! Since it relies on the stupidity of other people, it works pretty much all the time. I found eBay to have more results than Craigslist, but with some gold to be found in both places.

ByeByeList

Craigslist’s results page doesn’t show you pictures, which is the thing I like least about it. For every listing that sounds remotely interesting, you have to click through to see the picture, only to decide that “in good condition” actually meant “in thirteen pieces scattered about my house.”

With ByeByeList, you can search through the listings on Craigslist, with the pictures on the front page in a more eBay-style look. If there’s no picture, it says so, but for every listing with a picture you’re able to search just like on Craigslist, but see the image right on the results page. Helpful for when “use for parts” means “only if you’re savvy with a blowtorch.”

Weekend Treasure

Who doesn’t love other people’s junk, that they can’t wait to get rid of? With Weekend Treasure, you can do a search for all the garage sales nearby. Though the listings come from more than just Craigslist (a good thing, if you ask me), most of them do seem to be pulled in from Craigslist.

They’re mapped out for you, and each listing provides both an address and a link to the sale site (again, mostly Craigslist). Weekend Treasure suggest searching on Friday afternoon or Saturday morning, but there are almost always some listings to be found.

Craigslist is awesome at aggregating material and information, and not so great at displaying it. Using these Craigslist mashups, you can be a better informed, more efficient and more powerful Craigslist user.

Are you a Craigslist fan? Got any Craigslist Tool you like, or wish you’d see?

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Syndicate Your Property For Sale With Postlets

Jerry Kidd — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:49:06 +0000

There are so many websites now where you can search for real estate and each one has their own quirks, foibles, specialties and value to people looking to find a home. It seems that each week another one pops up. You can search these sites by geographic area, price, size, room count and much more. You can see pictures, videos, school scores, vital statistics on the homes and contact the real estate agent who has it listed. You can arrange for showings, get more information and map the home’s location.

All of this is great, but how does the information get to these web sites? The sad truth is that for most of the listings, it’s done by an automatic feed from the local Multiple Listing Service. That feed often does not contain enough information for a prospective buyer to be able to truly understand what they are viewing. Of course, the real estate agent can often “enhance” the listing with additional pictures and more detailed information, but given the sheer volume of real estate web sites to enhance, the process is so time consuming that it simply does not get done all of the time.

Enter a cool web application called Postlets. Postlets is a FREE tool that allows a homeowner selling their own home, or a real estate agent with the listing, to create a free account. Then the user adds information about the property by clicking check boxes and filling in forms to create a very good looking “advertisement”.

The free version will also accept up to 6 JPG photos. There is the ability to “upgrade” to the “Plus” version which removes the ads that support the free version, add up to 18 photos, video and more for US$5.

Once you have created your Postlet, it is syndicated to over eleven real estate listing search sites including Zillow, Trulia and Google Base to name a few. The Postlet has a 60 day life and can be renewed if the listing doesn’t sell.

Finally, the site also creates the HTML that you will need to accomplish a Craigslist posting and will deliver you directly to the Craigslist website so that you can create an ad on Craigslist by pasting the HTML into the appropriate form.

Postlets are also available for those of you trying to sell a car.

Here is how to get started. Go to the signup page, fill in the form and click on Create Account.

After you have created your account you will be able to start your first Postlet by filling in the first of six screens.

The next screen allows you to start filling in information about the property. You can choose from residential, commercial, vacation properties and rental properties, as property types.

The third screen allows you to check off boxes to show all of the different property features, a quick and easy process.

The next screen is where you can upload up to 6 photos for the free version, and up to 18 photos with the “Plus” version.

No web publishing is ever complete until you get a chance to review your work. You can edit any of the entries that you have made and when you are happy with what you have, you can hit the “Continue” button at the bottom of the page to queue up the Postlet for submission to the various websites it serves.

Here is the fruit of our labors! This is an ad destined for Craigslist made with Postlets. The final screen gives you the code to embed in Craigslist (You have to do this yourself for Craigslist due to their terms of service) but the ad is automatically submitted to the sites that you choose.

The price is right (either free or no more than $5), the service is great, and the seller gets their home exposed professionally on many websites. If you are a real estate agent or home seller, what’s not to like? Plus if you are a home hunter, you will find that ads created by Postlets offer a lot more information to you than is usually available.

What websites and advertising services have you used in the past to sell your property? Let us know in the comments.

(By) Jerry Kidd is a California Real Estate Broker, blogger, educator and author of Realty Tech Bytes.

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