Craigslist Advertising Tips – Day 12

Today’s method may seem a little bit on the unethical side, although that all really depends on how you use the knowledge that I’m going to provide in today’s article. Craigslist advertising, when and if used properly can be extremely rewarding. Although there are a few things that you need to look out for before you start your Craigslist marketing campaign.

Not every Craigslist marketing campaign is going to be successful, thats the honest truth. It’s a time consuming advertising method albeit free. It all really depends on what your website/blog is about and your method of attack.  If you just go and spam blast Craigslist that is unethical (blackhat) and will most likely get you banned from the service.

Why Choose Craigslist?

Simple, the website is HUGE! This worldwide nearly free classifieds has a ranking of 40 on Alexa. With an average of 10 million unique visitors a month and the overall appealing classified format Craigslist is a huge hit.  Did I mention free? Well nearly free, unless you post job postings in major cities and even some real estate listings. By the way, those 10 million unique visitors generate over 4 billion page views in a month. Obviously something works at Craigslist, the question is can you successfully?

Posting On Craigslist

Craigslist is broken down by a city/state format. Your initial goal should be to find a city that has alot of action, and alot of action in the city that you will be posting in. I personally suggest focusing on major metropolitan area’s. They will generally have alot more traffic, but it depends on your product and website obviously. If you are selling the idea of bass fishing, New York city probably would not be your first choice to advertise.

Target your city by the demographics and the product that you are marketing. Your results will be significantly better than if you didn’t. Your goal isn’t to SPAM, but to have targeted advertisements. This leads to the next point, select the appropriate category! Find a category that you want to post on that is appropriate for your posting. Craigslist has set up a user based filtration system, which means that if users feel that your posting is too spammy or in an incorrect category they can flag it for removal. Keep this in mind when you are creating your advertisements and postings.

Posting In Multiple Cities

Craigslist has a very innovative filtering system on top of their user based system. When you make postings Craigslist system will automatically filter out similar postings from other cities. Either by blatantly telling you that there is a similar posting in the system, or by ‘ghosting’ your advertisement. Ghosting is when Craigslist tells you that your posting was successful but never makes it onto their website.

How do you get around this? It can be technical and time consuming. Not to mention you need to be very creative if you plan on doing a mass Craigslist advertising campaign.

1. Create an unique headline for each post
2. Create an image based ad, no text based, and use a unique image name for every ad you post.
3. Create accounts for ease of posting control, each account can only post in 5-10 cities.

Create Unique Headline for Each Post

If you use the same headline in each post for each city you won’t even be able to get past the first of the Craigslist filters. This is where you need to get creative and make unique titles for each posting. Don’t think that you can just change the wording around, that isn’t good enough. Each headline must be unique. Thankfully most of this work has been done for you. Head over to Google and type in a keyword around your websites/postings subject. Then look over at the Google Adwords results on the right side of the page. There are TONS of successful headlines that you could use, obviously if they are PAYING to advertise with Adwords they have done some research to make sure that they have a high click through ratio. Use that to your benefit.

I also tend to use the spam filter check to do a quick test on my headlines to make sure that they won’t get filtered out for spam reasons. You can find this utility at the Sitesell website.

Create Image Based Ad

Why? As I talked about before Craigslist spam filter system will search for similar ads and filter them out so that they don’t even make it on the website. Craigslist system can only scan the text of the advertisement and it looks for similarity of ads. Unless you want to create unique headlines, completely unique ads, and accounts then keep reading. Obviously KEEP READING! You don’t have time to do that! Here is how you get around it.

• Create one advertisement ad that you think is going to be successful and captivating. Open up your image editing program, MS Paint, Photoshop, whatever. Type up your advertisement and ad a picture or two.
• Remember to include a captivating headline, your benefits, the call to action and your website URL
• Host your pictures with a hosting picture service, NOT your own host. I suggest using Photobucket.
• Name the image with unique names, this way they don’t ban that one image and then have all your posts fail. So create several of the same picture with different names.
• Make sure to link the picture to your website! That way the person simply clicks on your picture and is taken to your website

Wow, I’m sure that sounds very confusing. But this is what you need to do if you want to successfully post on Craigslist. The goal is UNIQUE content, otherwise you will never make it to their website. If you plan on doing  a very large Craigslist broadcast you will need to learn how to change your IP address. This is the address that your computer is associated with to access the internet. If Craigslist notices postings from your IP address and hundreds of postings, they will ban your IP forever. So take the postings slow if you have to resort to your own IP. Otherwise learn about proxies and you should be in the clear, or even an aircard with your cellular provider. Another example is using your cell phone tethered to your computer. Everytime you disconnect and reconnect (easy) with the tethered connection you get a new I.P.

Remember not to abuse this, this is for posting in a few cities with a few different advertisements and getting away with it and not get ghosted. Craigslist ghosting sucks but if you follow the steps I provided above you won’t have to experience it.

[tags]Craigslist advertising, craigslist posting, craigslist marketing, craigslist help, craigslist guide, craigslist advertising tips[/tags]