Monday, December 31, 2007

80 Posts No Ghosts

Today went well. After some heavy thought, I created a bunch of ads and posted 80 of them again on Craigslist. 100% of those ads stuck. Meaning nothing was ghosted. And I only had 4 ads flagged by users. The best part about today was that I was able to use hyperlinks yet once again. Not the normal hyperlink using a href and anchor text. Just writting http://domain.com automatically creates a hyperlink within Craigslist. I would rather use anchor text, but a link is better than no link at all.

Happy New Years Eve to everyone. Stay safe!

Results from Non-Hyperlink CL Ad

The last couple days have been tough getting ads posted on Craigslist and getting them to stick. I've talked to a few other people and they have been having the same problem that I have scene. Craigslist is dynamic and constantly changing. What works today, may not work tomorrow. So you much test, test, test, and keep trying.

I was finally able to post 95 ads yesterday, of which only 5 ads contained a hyperlink. Out of the ads that I posted I had a dozen flagged, and 10+ ghosted. Still pretty good compared to most people I think. But not up to the standards I would like to see.

I only received 169 new visitors directly related to my Craigslist posting yesterday. However, I made $11 dollars in Google Adsense revenue and got 20 opt-ins. So even though my visits were cut by 75%, my income and opt-in were only down a little bit.

I didn't really like my ad yesterday either. I had the look and feel of SPAM. It wasn't professional by anyones standard. In fact, I'm amazed at the results I got.

Today is a new day. Of course it's New Years Eve also. I'm not sure how much of an effect these holidays are having on posting Craigslist. I would assume that most people who visit Craigslist are pre-occupied right now with the holiday season and festivities. It will be interesting to see what kind of results I start seeing in January, after the holidays are over.

Sunday, December 30, 2007

Craigslist Must Be Going Through Some Changes

Today started off just about the same as yesterday. Nothing worked. However, after some testing I found out that I was able to put some ads up without a hyperlink. That kind of sucks! But an ad without a hyperlink is better than no ad at all right? So I went on to post 55 ads on Craigslist without a hyperlink.

Then I decided to do some testing. I started posting some ads for a friends Transmission Shop. With all new ads, I started posted with a hyperlink in the body of the ad. I was able to post 2 ads successfully. On the 3rd ad I received the following error:

Similar Posting Already Submitted: Error 6557550

I tried changing the hyperlink, still got the same error. I tried changing the anchor text, still got the same error.

Next I put the ad back to it's original state and decided to ad some random hidden text before and after the ad. It worked! I actually hate doing that. However, if Craigslist is not allowing me to post unique and different ads, using the same hyperlink. What are my options here?

It was a test, and not very scientific. I only posted 5 ads total that way. It will be interesting to see if later in the day, or even tomorrow, Craigslist will allow me to post my hyperlinks again without having to put random hidden text in my ads.

Stay tuned! This is actually fun, and pretty informative for myself too!

Saturday, December 29, 2007

Today Was A Bust!

Don't know what happened today, but nothing worked. I posted 80 ads or more, and at least 90% of those ended up being ghosted.

I tried using new email accounts, new passwords, new CL accounts, new IP addresses, new ads, new headlines, new anchor text, new urls, everything that I could think of. I also noticed that there wasn't as many ads being posted today in certain cities. For instance, one city and category that I post in averages about 75 posts per day. Today there were only 15 posts! I noticed this in many cities and categories throughout the country. So I don't think I was doing anything wrong. I think something was up with Craigslist.

Today was a waste as far as posting, and revenue was down also. I was only making half of what I normally make in Adsense revenue. The good news is that the previous ads I posted are still there. And they are still making money for me and people are still reading those ads and still opting-in.

Creating Websites for Craigslist

One thing that I cant stand, and it's a personal pet peeve of mine, is people who use the same ad over and over and over again, in an attempt to send traffic to their affiliate or MLM squeeze page. The flip side of that coin is that it must be working or people wouldn't continue to do it over and over again.

I decided two things prior to posting on Craigslist:
  1. My ads would be unique
  2. My website/squeeze pages would be unique
I built 6 websites for people to visit. Everyday, I send visitors to a different website. So if you were to respond to one of my ads one day, and then by chance respond to another ad the next day, there would be no way for you to know it was the same person or product. It's also a good way for me to do split testing alo.

Over time, maybe 30 days or so, I will have a better idea of what sites convert better than others. I'll keep the sites that do the best, and redesign the sites that convert the worst. At least that is the plan :-)

I've also been making money with Google Adsense for years now. So I decided to implement Adsense as an additional stream of revenue on all the sites I build. As an added bonus, that I really wasn't anticipating, it has proven to be quite successful in my opinion. Making between $20 and $30 per day just on the sites I created for Craigslist.

Background Work Prior To Posting On Craigslist

I'm a newbie at this. Not a rookie. I've never posted on Craigslist before. I've never sold a toaster, purchased a computer, or found a date on Craigslist. However, I have been promoting and marketing different items or services on the Internet for about 7-9 years now. Some successful and some not so successful. I've also been doing web design for about the same amount of time, and I code everything I do by hand. The number one goal I have when building a site is SEO, and load time. I try and use as little graphics as possible and I try and make extensive use of dynamic sites using PHP.

I probably studied Craigslist, the ads that were placed there, and the other methods people use there for about a week before I decided to give it a try. Then I spent another week brainstorming and designing websites and landing pages for the product or service I wanted to promote.

Google Analytics

Well, yesterday I blew it! I got up this morning to see and report my results and noticed that I forgot to setup goals for Google Analytics on my site. So the first thing I did was setup a goal and create a funnel. At least I'll be able to report the results the next time around. What an idiot. Well learn from my mistakes and TEST, TEST, TEST, before you bring a site live.

You may be wondering how I was able to reported results for the other days and not today. Well, that's easy. I have 4-6 web sites that I promote on a rotating basis. I just forgot to setup the web site that I was sending traffic to yesterday. Learn from my mistakes.

Friday, December 28, 2007

Craigslist Variables

Wow! There are so many. Where do I start? Let's see, there is:
  1. Email address
  2. IP address
  3. To post via Craigslist Account or not
  4. Posts per day
  5. Cookies
  6. Browser (IE/Firefox/Other)
  7. Title
  8. Body of the Ad
  9. Hyperlink
  10. Anchor Text
  11. URL of any images
  12. Category of your ad
Then depending of what category you are posting in, there are other variables as well. Such as price, location, rent, compensation, age, and probably more.

I have posted both image only ads as well as text ads successfully. But I prefer text ads with a hyperlink. In my opinion, those are the hardest ads to have stick without being ghosted or flagged. So far in this blog, I have only posted pure text ads. No images anywhere, and all the text ads have included a hyperlink with an anchor text of my choice.

As a side note, in the last 160 ads I have posted, not one ad has been flagged or ghosted! Sorry, I'm bragging. I'm proud of that one. I used to get 50% or more of my ads ghosted. And now, not one ad in the last 160 has been ghosted or flagged.

Got Blocked by Craigslist Today

This evening, after I already posted 50 ads, I was blocked by Craigslist. Kind of cool, I've never seen that before. I would create my ad, then when I enter the captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) code, I would get an error saying that my posting was being blocked, and it gave a number of reasons.

Basically it said that I was duplicating something. I tried changing the Title, URL, and the Anchor Text. Nothing worked. Finally, I changed my ad completely and everything started working again.

Don't know what it was that was getting me blocked, and I probably will never know. However, what I do know is that it was easy enough to fix. I posted another 80 ads today.

Craigslist Posting Guidelines for Jobs

I thought I would reference why I consider a lot of posts on Craigslist SPAM. And why I single some of these ads out as being in violation of Craigslist TOS or Posting Guidelines. Well, here we have it, direct from Craigslist:

Craigslist does not accept the following job posts:
- business opportunities
- multilevel marketing MLM
- referral marketing
- positions requiring upfront fees
- positions involving nudity

There are tons of jobs being posted on Craigslist that violate just about every one of these guidelines. I've just posted a few here that I tend to see over and over again.

EDC Gold


EDC Gold is nothing more than a glorified pyramid scheme. You pay them something like $1000 for the privilege of selling junk ebooks and crappy software. Then you pay them a monthly fee to stay in their program. It's a pyramid scheme. Nothing more, nothing less. And you can make money with pyramid schemes.

However, this is against the TOS on Craiglists.

622 Visits From Craigslist Ad

Whoa! I must be doing something right. Yesterday I "successfully" posted 80 ads on Craigslist. As a direct result of those 80 ads, I had 622 people click through to my website. Out of those 622 people, I had 30+ people opt-in! Place 80 ads and get 30+ opt-ins? Wow! I never got that kind of return even when using Google Adwords.

Speaking of Google. Not only did I get 30+ opt-ins, but I also made $28.75 in Adsense revenue generated solely by those 80 ads placed on Craigslist. I think I'm starting to like this job. Okay, maybe it's not the holy grail of marketing, and I'm certainly not going to retire off of $28.75 per day.

However, it's the best I've done so far. And I'm trying to look at the bigger picture also. Remember, this is just from one day. Don't think for a second that this traffic and revenue ends today. It's residual. Remember the other day when I posted those 41 ads on Craigslist? Well, yesterday I still received over 100 visits to my site from those ads. And those ads generated Google Adsense income as well. This is in ADDITION to my 622 visitors, 30+ opt-ins, and $28.75 in Adsense revenue that I made yesterday!

No one has converted yet. Meaning, even though I have opt-ins, I have not sold a product or service yet. I'm trying, just no conversion yet. Once that starts happening, I'll be reporting on that as well.

Well, it's another day, and I think I'll post another 80 ads on Craigslist. I haven't figured out a system of rotating cities or categories yet. That's the next step. So for now, I'll be posting in the same cities and same categories as I did yesterday. It will be interesting to see if I get the same results today, as I did yesterday.

Wish me luck!

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Shelon PoundsThe Cashflow Queen


Another MLM, pyramid scheme. I'm not knocking their product, or their inability to create wealth. What I don't like is their SPAM techniques and violation of Craigslist TOS agreement. Flag these ads.

Wanna Rake In The Dough

Get paid daily, it's not an MLM, and you'll be raking in the dough. Cute picture. However, this is obviouisly SPAM. It's also against Craigslist Terms of Service. If you see this ad, flag it as Prohibited.

Ad by the way, where do you find an ad like this? Under Sales Jobs of course! With titles like:

Wine Enthusiasts
done that
Eat your veggies
Sunday Nite Blues?

80 Posts on Craigslist Today

Today I tried something a little bit different. Obviously, I am gradually posting more and more ads per day. And so far, they are all sticking. Nothing gets ghosted. And only a very small percentage of ads are being flagged by users. Nothing gets flagged by the Craigslist staff either.

I've changed the way that I am posting the titles to my ads. Just as an experiment. And so far, it's working. It's quite a balancing act to not only get your ads to stick, but also post legitimate ads that don't like everybody else's SPAM out there.

Craiglist is a great place to advertise your product or service. But the SPAMMERS and MLM (Get Rich Quick) crowd are starting to ruin it for all the legit businesses out there.

That gives me an idea. I think I'll start a Craigslist Spammers Section here.

300+ Visitors!

Well after that last post on Craigslist where I posted 41 ads, I received over 300 visitors to my website that came directly from that post. There have been about 200 additional visitors to my site, probably due to the residual effect of people clicking on ads I have posted previously. I think I have this thing finally figured out!

Sunday, December 23, 2007

41 Craigslists Posts

I believe in doing the work up front, to save time in the future. For instance, I may spend 40 hours on a project, if I believe that it will save me a few hundred hours on the back-end. And that is what I've been doing the past few days...

I've been trying different posting techniques and ideas, and maybe I finally figured something out!
Today I posted 41 ads on Craigslist and from what I can tell so far, every single one of the stuck! 100% And the best part is that I did it completely automated.

I'm not convinced that I stumbled upon the holy grail of Craigslist here. But it sure does look promising. Christmas is almost upon us, and it will take a few more days of testing to make sure this is actually working. I need to find out how many of my ads get ghosted? How many get flagged? How many actually stay up? What kind of traffic is this generating? What is my opt
-in rate.

There are a lot of variables here, but as scientifically as possible, I'm breaking it apart piece by piece. Hopefully, I'll have some more answers in a few more days.

Stay tuned. This is fun!

Posting Results

Since my last post I only posted 5 more ads. Out of those 5 ads, 4 of them stuck - 80%. Not bad, but in my opinion it's taking to much work. However, the results are very promising. Before I did my initial post of 15 ads on Craigslist, I had 14 visitors to my website. The day I started posting, that number shot up to 30, the next day it was 56, then 15, and 15. Now it's back down to only 4 visits yesterday. So just out of those 15-20 ads being posted, I received 120 new visitors.

10 visits per post?! I'll take that any day of the week. And out of those I had 3 fill out of form. Basically, they did an opt-in. I didn't count, but I'm sure I had about the same number respond directly to my anonymized Craigslist email directly on the ad I posted. Soot that brings the total to 6. Again 6 opt-ins for posting 20 ads. Not bad. But I'd still like to do better.

Stay tooned. I've been working on a system....

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

More CL Postings Completed

Earlier I had 33% of my ads being posted were ghosted ads. Well, a couple hours later, another ad showed up. (Why it took so long, I don't think I'll ever know). So that brings my total to 7 posts out of 9 stuck and only 2 were ghosted.

Feeling cocky, I decided to try and post more ads. Same as before, 3 Craigslist postings per email address per IP address. This time I changed the hyperlink. Instead of using the same hyperlink that I used before, I decided to hide or mask my URL. Here are a couple of the services that I used for making tiny URLs:
http://hurl.it
http://shrinkurl.us
http://offto.net
http://canurl.com

There are tons of these sites out there that will create short/tiny URLs for you. The above are just the ones I chose for my experiment.

I posted 6 more ads on Craigslist and out of 6 posts, all 6 ads stuck! 100% Yea! So today I posted 15 Craigslist ads and out of 15 only 2 were ghosted. Lets see, that a 87% success rate. Not bad. I'd like to get that number higher. But not bad for the first day.

One issue I'll have to work on is quantity. It takes a lot of time to post just 15 ads. If I ever wish to post 60-100 or more ads on Craigslist per day, I'm going to need a different method of posting. But for now, I think it's wise just to find out HOW to post on CL correctly without getting flagged or ghosted. Once I have that figured out, then I can concentrate on quantity.

Craigslist Posting Using Text and a Hyperlink

Lets get started...

First I'm going to start out by posting a bunch of plain text posts. No images or links to images will be included. Just simple text using simple HTML markup when needed. Like using <b> when I want something to be BOLD and to stand out. Nothing fancy or complicated here. Just HTML 101.

I will also include a single hyperlink to my website after my ad. My goal is to drive people to my website and have them take action there.

On every post I change the Posting Title. So every posting title is unique.

The body of my ad will stay the same except for the following exceptions:
  • I have bullet points similar to these. The bullet points will remain the same. However the order in which they appear will be different.
  • In the body of my text, I will make one change. I will include the city name that I am posting to in the body of my text ad.
  • The hyperlink to my website will remain the same. However, the anchor text will change completely.
Let's see what happens... Here are my results:

I used 3 email accounts, 3 separate IP addresses, and cleared my cookies between each posting session. I made 3 Craigslist postings on each Craigslist account for a total of 9 posts.

On one account, I was successful at posting ratio was 1:3. One ad was posted, the other two were ghosted. On another account my posting ratio was 2:3. And on the last account I got a trifecta, 3:3.

So when all things were said and done, after posting a total of only 9 ads ...
33% were ghosted (3 out of 9 ads)
66% were successful (6 out of 9 ads)

Is this good? I don't know. That's why I started this blog, to keep track and hopefully find the best way to Post on Craigslist.

Posting On Craiglist

Craigslist has become quit a phenomenon with 20 million local visitors per month. I decided to take advantage of this and use it for marketing purposes since Google's Adword prices are starting to get kind of out of hand. The price for posting on Craigslist is still very reasonable. It's free :-)

However, from what I've read, and some of the research I have done, posting on Craigslist is part art, part science. You want to post one ad per day and sell your futon or Playstation, not a problem. However, if you want to make 100 posts per day and market your latest and greatest ebook. Well....thats a whole different story.

So this is my story. My adventure, be it success or failure, with Craigslist. Follow along, and lets see what happens...