I'm sure that for everyone that has had a bad experience on Craigslist, there have been a greater number that swears by them. I've been knocked off a number of times but usually it was my fault. What's your take on CL as a viable marketing tool?
Used to be good but it is getting worse and worse. Partly because it's getting harder to post the stuff we want to and partly because every single thing we post gets flagged within 2 minutes.
I have only started using Craiglist after hearing all the bad hype about it. I have posted a few ads daily and they are all still active at this stage. I will keep you posted Jason
If you follow their rules and not get greedy by putting in a bunch of ads that look the same, you should do alright with CL. Again I've been knocked off too and then realized it was my own fault. Like with most things its only as good as you make it. donrock
I have used it off and on for about a year. Only one of my ads was rejected, and I made a few sales. My ad was for website design and hosting. Has anyone sold Clickbank or other digital products on Craigslist?
ditto what shahab 6 just said. 3 years ago I would have recommended CL as part of anyone's advertising strategy. NOW I'm saying that its not worth the extra time spent IF you have good SEO. When Sacramento had a 30-day time limit (3 years ago) CL was great and the posts were indexed by Google because they had time to crawl them. NOW there is a 7-day period, and your posts are 'EXPIRED' which means its been deleted. Whenever you see a CL posting in searches, You'll get one of those Craigslist error messages "This post is Expired or Deleted"== because by the time Google crawled the post-- It was EXPIRED.
Iv'e been relying on SEO techniques as well... Takes a little longer and you really have to sit there for quite awhile and just deal with it! But in the long run, I believe it's really the best way!! Iv'e had some luck with craigslist, but stopped using them "becoming way to saturated for me."
Craigslist has literally been a living nightmare for me... back in the fall of 2006 (between July and Jan), it was literally HEAVEN... I made between 400-725 dollars A DAY on craigslist... then, more and more in early 07, it started getting harder and harder to post.. they'd keep blocking you, and i also got a little complaicent and lazy also... i could have probably overcome the new rules of blocking but didnt feel like it... i took a break, about a year, and now, march-april 2008 have been trying to post.. and it's, like ive said, been probably one of the top 10 worst experiences of MY ENTIRE LIFE... this new "ghosting" thing didnt exist back then but it rules craigslist now... i tried starting TOTALLY from scratch... i'd get a new ip, a new picture, a new ad body, a new ad title, a new email, post the ad, and nothing... "GHOSTED" (meaning the ad appears live but dosent go live)... I've come to the conclusion that they HAVE to have somebody manually looking at ads and ghosting them... to me thats the only possible thing.. because i was able to post ads in the electronics section for my big screen tv (a used tv imlegimately trying to sell), but as soon as i post an affiliate offer, it gets ghosted... ive tried for hours, days, weeks, all my free time, buying proxies, changing emails, deleting cookiies, reading articles on google about ghosting, emailing people from digital point who say they post on craigslist, nothing... nothing helped... one guy tried to help me , bless his heart, but nothing worked... he, and i, were dumbfounded... i cannot post on craigslist... even a legit post sometimes gets ghosted for no reason... I made an ad in the creative gigs section, looking for a partner to make a dvd with me... ghosted... i got so frustrated with the bs, i tried backpage, but the traffic sucks too badly... i posted in 40 cities today and got 7 clicks... and to be honest, i still see people posting on craigslit, affilite offers, and i get highly jealous and depressed... but ive given up... who knows, maybe they have an inside connect who works for craigslist they are splitting the profits with who have giving their posts immunity... i know thats a stretch, but when you have did everything ive done to possibly try to post, your imagination is going to take you places. R.I.P craigslist (at least for me)
oh and not to mention the craigslist user have went from vultours (spelling) to paranas (spelling)... i did get one ad up in NY.. the ad literally got flagged for removal in about 3 seconds... literally, 3 seconds after my ad was posted it got deleted by members... not to mention members are hip to affiliate programs and will literally snitch on you... way back when when i was doing good i had some guy email me from "craigslistpolice@gmail.com" or something, and told me he had ratted me out... im like, wtf, dude get a life you *beep beep beep beep*... its sickening... anyway, i would NOT recommend craigslist... im close to reccommending spamming emails before i recommend that...
That's the problem people got greedy on it, and they started making large amount of posts on it. It's still good if your a private person and want to sell your item once in a while, but if your a business and want to sell in large scale and you're making a lot of post you won't be able to, at least it's getting difficult. craigslist conversion is one of the best I used to make one sale from every five clicks from craigslist, compared to other website I promoted which was 1/ 50. Adword was 1/30 craigslist was 1/5
As Craigslist introduced telephone account verification it looks like it's going to be harder and harder It looks like CL posting services form India or wherever are dead Is there any big competitor to CL in the US?
no i do not think its over-rated at all. however, it is getting trickier to post mass amounts of ads but it is certainly possible as long as you are willing to think outside the box on the format of your ads! we have customers posting 100 ads a day(we verified), but it certainly is getting harder these days
It depends what you are selling. Craig's list can be good to promote your ebay listings or other tangible products and you will not get flagged. If you just want to get traffic to your web site it is not the best way to go about it.
Main problem CraigsList facing is spams. Being number one classified site makes it target of spammers. No system can protect that 100%, so couldn't CraigsList. Problem is legit users pays off the penalty most without doing anything wrong.
Oddly enough my company just used CL a few months ago to post a job opening on there, and within a few days we got a few decent applicants, and one that we ended up hiring. Not sure if it's dumb luck or the quality of CL, but it sure has done a lot better than the cruddy response we've got form Monster so far (more technical opening this time, or we would have done CL again)
With Craigslist, I only stick to selling actual physical goods to locals. Anything e-commerce related seems to get flagged or "ghosted". At least in my experience.
backpage.com and kijiji.com are strong competitors of craigslist. I recommend these two sites if you aren't able to post on craigslist. I guess craigslist will implement phone verification in all categories within next 6 months. It's huge popularity demands so. CL implemented phone verification in the personals section first few months ago. Now in the services categories. Next may be for sale categories, I guess.