How To Create Hyperlinks on Craigslist

You have a couple of options when creating hyperlinks on Craigslist. First lets explain a couple of options that you have to get people to your website.

1. Have people respond to your Reply To: address. Then send them an email with your web site address in there. This option is probably what Craigslist was intended for. However, it's the least likely of the scenarios that will get visitors to your site.
   
   
2. You can write out your web site address like this www.MyCoolSite.com . It will not be clickable, but will most likely pass most, if not all, of Craigslist SPAM filters. Clickable hyperlinks are always prefered, but if you can't create one, this is probably the best way to go. Make sure you tell your readers what they are supposed to do:
   Cut-n-Paste this into your Web Browser => www.MyCoolSite.com
   
   
3. Just type out, in plain text, your website address complete with the http:// like this http://www.MyCoolSite.com . By doing this, Craigslist will outomatically wrap your web site in the correct HTML to make it clickable. This works, and it works just fine. Infact, I've never been detected of flagged by Craigslist filters or the SPAM cops by using this technique. My only complaint, is that you cannot define your own anchor text. Your URL is your anchor text.
   
   
4. A better alternative, if possible, is to create your own hyperlink using HTML. You can do this by typing this:
   <a href="http://mycoolsite.com/">Anchor Text</a>
   This works great, when Craiglist allows it. The Anchor Text can be any text you would like. This is the text that people see and you want them to click on. For instance, Anchor Text could be Click Here, Visit My Website, Make Money Today, or My Cool Site.
   
   This is preferred to the other methods mentioned above. With this method you have control of what people actually click on and what they see. However, in my experience, sometimes Craigslist does not allow this kind of link to be created without your entire ad being flagged or ghosted.
   
   
5. The best possible way to create hyperlinkse would be using the method outlined in number 4 above, with a twist. That twist would be to actually hide your personal URL with a psudo or redirected URL. There are many service that allow you to do this. Probably the one most popular is TinyURL. There are many many of these services available for you to use. The only caveat to this is that most of the time, Craigslist will ghost your ad if you use one of these methods. If you can get your ads posting by using a redirector service, it is by far, the best way to post an ad.

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.