Considering the benefits of Craigslist, there's no need to search for an alternative. If you're using it for marketing purposes, you just need to learn to stay ahead of the current trend. Don't do what you see everyone else doing. Come up with your own strategy, and keep your mouth shut about it. When you find a winner, you'll know it.
You will get a lot of exposure with Craigslist... Unfortunately you will also get a lot of spam and scams... it's become a haven for spammers and scammers... very few legit ads (mostly local ads for items etc)... and rarely if ever will you get a legit response... I stopped advertising there a long time ago... got tired of all the crap... they're even posting warnings now too about the scammers... found better ways to advertise that won't bombard my email box... and if you do advertise, make sure to set up a new email address for it... actually, I would do that for any classified ad site... the spammers are always scraping addresses to send to...
Craiglist provides me the most traffic among classified sites so I concentrate more on it. Though I must admit that there are lot of scams on that site so be careful on that. If you want an alternative you can also try bravenet.
I have to second the 'backpage' recommendation. I have seen pretty good results using that site. Follow the rules and you won't have any problems!
BackPage is growing rapidly and continues to grab marketshare from Craigslist and other online classifieds sites. It is a Google PR6 backlink and is crawled frequently by Google. Listings get favorable rankings in Google's organic listings so you want to include a link to your site(s). Be sure to include your main keywords in the anchor text. BackPage is currently ranked #912 in the world and #208 in the United States. This is a marketplace affiliate marketers, webmasters and local businesses should not ignore. I just added information on my blog about a new promotion at BackPage in the jobs classifieds. You can be entered to win an Apple iPad for posting legitimate job opportunities in July, August, September and October. Be sure to read the details to make sure you're entered in the contest properly.
I've used them and they do seem to stay up a while. Not sure how good they are as a backlink, as I recall there is a lot of crap posted there.
Hi southcaro, Yes, the numbers are strong. Here is the link to the BackPage Alexa ranking: http://www.alexa.com/search?q=backpage.com&r=home_home&p=bigtop I've found that there are some categories that are stronger than others. Among the best are most of the health and beauty, biz opps, financial, adult categories, the personals, business and rentals. There is a major push on right now with the iPad contest to build up the jobs listings. As BackPage gets more folks into the site I expect all categories to grow steadily over the coming months and years. Some categories aren't busy enough to support a sponsored ad campaign but there is some decent traffic in some of the categories. Watch out because some of the categories are visited more by marketers than by community advertisers. I think it's a good idea to check out the listings and see how many local ads are posted. That should give you some idea whether your ad campaign might do well. And then, test market before you roll out a big nationwide campaign. I usually chooses about 10 of the major cities and run a test. If the results are bad then I may put the campaign on hold indefinitely, waiting to see if the category picks up new viewers over time. If the ad goes well I scale up. The inexpensive test marketing is a big benefit for advertisers. I expect BackPage to continue growing so if your niche market isn't doing well in the ads right now, I'd bookmark it and visit again later. I hope this helps. Hit me up if you have any questions.
I prefer social networks like twitter, facebook and ... to classified ads. Posting to classified ads is a little difficult but social network or social bookmarks are easier than classified sites.