craigslist revisited......?

[Jim FL]

Hey folks,
Anyone else here using craigslist as a marketing venue?

I have been, for some time.

Thing is, tracking these ads, aside from having different contact info in them, was a pain.

Anyone else using a hit counter in their ads or anything?

I tried doing that today, and we shall see if it has any benefit?

Thoughts?

Jim FL

[Debbie]

Craigslist doesn't work too well here in my city. It because most Springfieldians aren't aware that it is now available for Springfield (for the past year).

[Credit Coach2]

Jim,

Try this, go to www.proplogin.com, click "sign up" using the referral code sjessen68.

With this you will be able to create a single website automatically for each property you wish FREE!. Unlimited media to upload, create a virtual tour etc....

The part that should interest you is that through this portal you have the ability to post to craigslist with a couple of clicks in a nicely formatted html posting. These websites get fed through RSS feeds to yahoo, oodle, google, elookyloo, zillow and many more. The best part is that you can click on a report that shows you whether they clicked on pictures, virtual tour, etc plus where the hits came from. You will see if a hit came from craigslist, or zillow or yahoo or wherever.

I am making this available to ALL of you. What's in it for me? I want to talk to your buyers or if you are a fsbo, realtor etc.. I want to talk to your sellers, they need financing too. If i see that you have posted 30 listings and I talked to 1 person in 2 months, chances are I am going to call you to find out what is going on.

Now I understand that depending on your selling model, a lot of people may not be ready for financing yet, great, i'll talk to them and coach them on getting ready for financing or talk about credit repair.

This is a tremendous tool, please use it.

Scott

[ryounger]

I look on there quite often (as of lately) for properties. Has anyone found deals on there? There seems to be lots of realtors listing their properties on there.

Jim how do you track your hits? What type of ads do you run on there?
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[Ted_IL]

About a year ago, I purchased an auto poster for craigslist. It worked well for awhile. But craigslist software soon figured it out and myself and others were out quite a bit. I was simply trying to post the same ad to about 6 different cities.

[lrning]

I love Craigslist because its owner's spirit.
It's free for the rich, the poor and the middle class folks, no discrimination.

If you know how much the cost of newspaper ads and it's free on Craigslist.

some government programs designed for the riches, some gov. programs designed for the poor, but Craigslist is for everyone.

That is the kind of spirits that are hard to find on earth, especially in the R.E. investors' world.

I don't like baseball and football because the owners always want government subsidies. Welfare for the riches. Greed never stops.
Taxpayers build the stadiums and owners collect stadium ticket money, oh if not they will move the team to another cities. Same pitch every city every year.

[ZNICK]

We post 3 things daily on Craig's List, Kijiji.com , and backpage.com . We post an ad looking for bird dogs, an ad looking for houses (we buy houses), and another that lets investors get on our wholesale houses for sale list.

We've went from 1 to 50+ bird-dogs in less than 2 months.

Z

[Ted_IL]

Z

Are you using different email addresses to post DAILY to Craigs? That is the only way I know to get around the bot from catching to many postings from the same originator. But then also the bot seems to clue in on not only email addy's but also text. Just curious how you are working around this.

[jwg299]

I have been using craigslist for about a month now and it has helped to get a couple deals done and given what I have to offer added attention.

To avoid having your adds flagged you just need to take the time out to write them all a little different, I post property I'm wholesaling in 6 or 7 different cities but each add is worded different and I haven"t had one flagged yet, and I'm using the same email.

[coglethorpe]

About a year ago, I purchased an auto poster for craigslist. It worked well for awhile. But craigslist software soon figured it out and myself and others were out quite a bit. I was simply trying to post the same ad to about 6 different cities.

Yeah, CL's terms of service don't allow "posting agents" which includes software or people that do the posting for you. From the TOS:

8. POSTING AGENTS

A "Posting Agent" is a third-party agent, service, or intermediary
that offers to post Content to the Service on behalf of others. To
moderate demands on craigslist's resources, you may not use a Posting
Agent to post Content to the Service without express permission or
license from craigslist. Correspondingly, Posting Agents are not
permitted to post Content on behalf of others, to cause Content to
be so posted, or otherwise access the Service to facilitate posting
Content on behalf of others, except with express permission or
license from craigslist.


My little site automatically posts rental listings to Oodle (which feeds to other sites), Google Base and Vast. They are cool with that, and get traffic to our user's listings.

As for the original question, I think most of CL's moderation comes from reports by users. I've heard they only have 18 employees! And as one user stated about the "owner's spirit," the community is very sensitive to anything they might regard as spam and will flag posts quickly.

When I tried to sell a car on CL, I found out two things: 1. CL got responses to my ad, but they weren't the quality I needed -- for example, one user wanted to make payments to me instead of getting a loan. 2. I created a fancy HTML page for my car but a simple text post got more responses.

I ended up selling my car on a site that was dedicated to the task of handling used car classifieds. In the end, it was worth the price as I found a buyer who could swing a car loan. :-)

[ZNICK]

Well, I have several project managers that run my deals, and they each "have a day"... so it's a different person posting every day, with different addresses.

One way around it, that only costs around $20, is to get a phone line modem to connect to the web, instead of cable. (at least for your CL posts) Craig's list checks your IP address, which is like your internet connection's "code number", for lack of a better term. If you have a cable modem, it is static, and never changes, unless you request it, or buy an IP proxy service.

But, if you use a phone modem, it gives a different IP address each time you log out, then back in, because it ends up traveling on a different phone connection, hence a different IP address. So, you can post an ad, disconnect, re-connect, then post again.

Now, that does NOT get you through their text system... so you need to change each ad as well, especially the headline.

As far as the e-mail address, you can get a handful of different ones and rotate them. Or, get a URL (web address), like magicbullets.com for instance, for $10, and use their online e-mail service. Then you create lots of different addresses, like nick @ magicbullets.com, joe @ magicbullets.com, houseguy @ magicbullets.com , etc etc, and have them all go to the same place.

Z

[BRITT REED]

thanks for all of the info

[KCHomebuyers]

I post about 30-40 ads a day on Craigslist with no problems. I also manage to do this from the same IP address with no ill effects. Of course, I had to write my own code, but it posts, and the ads stick.

Posting successfully does take some setup, like creating a ton of GMail accounts, creating image ads, and having a lot of patience.

One thing I'd suggest is not to use email addresses for your domain because you can get blacklisted pretty quickly. Using GMail is fantastic because CL will never blacklist that free email service, and you can forward every GMail account to a single address on your domain - and they'll never know.

Here's my setup:
I have 40 GMail accounts, all forwarding to my main email address.

I have 3 image ads. I have a script that copies those ads to randomly named images, and I load those to a PhotoBucket account. I also have 4-6 PhotoBucket accounts for hosting 60 randomly named images each.

I also used freeheadlinecreator.com to generate about 300 headlines for my ads.

All that info is stuffed into a database. When I run my custom-made auto poster, it posts like this:

It randomly selects an account and city, then generates an ad title. It also generates an ad by picking a random image. It also grabs large chunks of random text from about 200 free RSS news feed sources and dumps that into the ad. That random text is coded to be very tiny, and almost white so that it doesn't detract from the ad.

Once it generates the ad, all I have to do is enter the verification text and post, then move on to the next ad.

It takes a lot of setup, but it gets leads!

[BRITT REED]

thanks

[BRITT REED]

can you do posts from the same email addy but in different states?

[Debbie]

can you do posts from the same email addy but in different states?

Yes.

[BRITT REED]

thanks

[austinki]

I have noticed that in the last few months craigslist has become much less effective. It seems to have gotten overloaded in the number of posts per day.