I had a company a couple years ago that advertised heavily on craigslist. I never had much issue with posting, and I always made sure that I deleted a previous ad before posting the next one. (In a busy market like Chicago, your traffic will dwindle to near 0 after a day or so.) I'm just getting started with affiliate marketing (as in, this week), and experimenting with some free advertising to try out some ideas and get my feet wet without too much commitment monetarily. And I've discovered that now, in order to post ANYTHING on craigslist in the services section, you need to have an account, verified by e-mail and phone, with no option to delete your listing. This strikes me as problematic, as my service is national and I'd like to have more than one ad in one market per week. There must be a way around this. I see people on craigslist in multiple categories posting several ads each day, sometimes every several hours. What's the catch? Any other tips you've found in marketing on CL are much appreciated as well. I'm trying to do this smart, and balance doing my homework with putting what I've learned into practice. (I'm susceptible to "paralysis by analysis" otherwise.) Learning what's worked for others who've already succeeded is an important step in that process. Also, hi! I'm new.
They're called 'spammers' and ruin it for real people. As a rule of tuimb, if you see that an ad is a duplicate, you know not to deal with them.
Hey ggypsy. The way around it is, different accounts with different IPs. The services section will allow something like 3 ads every 48 hours and the ad titles must be different. Not 100% but enough to not be triggered as the same ad. My advice is, find the person who has their ad posted again and again, and look at their ad. Look at the exact wording of the title and the exact body ad. They may be using hidden text so just check. Phone verification did change things but I find now that ads stick longer and for me that is better.
Thanks for the info! I'll need to do the math to figure out what I need to post, but I don't plan on posting more than one ad/day in any given market. I'm familiar with hidden text, it was a tool I used in my previous business to great effect. Still wish I had the ability to pull down my old ads, though.
ggypsy even if you can pull down your old ads, unless they "expire" something like 7 - 30 days depending on the city, I think they are still in the craigslist system. I woulnd't worry about deleting old ads. This is a trick I do. I take my title I want to post, say this if I was posting in the computer services section Website Design We Make It Easy For You Best Price Then I break it into 3 sections, beginning, middle and end. I make 10 beginnings, 10 middles and 10 ends that all say basically the same thing, such as Website Design Need a Website? Great looking websites Then the middle part We Make It Easy for You Let Us Show You How Fast, Easy & Simple and finally the end Best Price We Won't Be Beaten You Won't Find Cheaper Then when I am posting I just randomly rotate through those. 3 x 3 x 3 = 27 different ad variations. I usually do at least 10 x 10 x 10 = 1000 different ads. Thats just an example above and you may need to use slightly more variation in text to avoid Craigslist spam filters but hopefully you understand the basic point.
Do you copy/paste or is that part of the "semi-automatic" package you mention on your sales page? I'd be in for that, by the way, if I didn't have a Mac.
ggypsy I believe Ez Ad Poster Deluxe for Windows has a 180 day trial now and it does all that randomizing titles etc, much better than my method. The difference is, once the trial on Ez Ad expires, you gotta buy the program. That's ok if you can afford it. However having a Mac probably won't help you with that. The way I do it could be done on a Mac but Ive never used a Mac and even doing it on a PC is hard if you've never done it before Shoot me a PM and I'll see if I can help you figure it out on a Mac.