New Years Day Was Very Very Good

Despite all the problems I had posting yesterday, New Years Day, my stats for that day were the best ever! Even though my posts only stayed up for about 7 hours, and 100% of my posts got flagged, I still had over 600 visitors to my site, and made over $35 in Google Adsense revenue. A personal best for me!

This is turning out to be crazy game and a crazy ride. From all indications, yesterday should have been my worst day ever. After all, having 100% of your ads flagged! Please... And then today, I decided to check my stats. After what I considered was an awful day, I had my second best day ever as far as traffic is concerned, and my best day as far as Adsense was concerned. Go figure?!

Anyways, this year is starting out well :-)

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.

100% Flagged Still Made $30

Today started out well. I created some new ads, found a URL and anchor text that worked, did some testing, then went on to post 55 ads on Craigslist. They all took, and nothing was ghosted. Today was going well, and it's about time after having problems the last few days. Then, in the evening, I decided to post another 25 ads. To my surprise, when I logged into my account, 100% of my previous posts had been flagged! How could all 55 ads that I posted previously been flagged by end users within 7 hours?

Now what are the odds of that? Just about 0%. So I did some investigating. I could not find any other ads that had URLS with anchor text in them. Even the ones that were up this morning were gone. The only ads with hyperlinks were the same time of hyperlink I had to resort to yesterday. http://domain.com

Earlier this morning, there were many ads being posted with hyperlinks including anchor text. I tested my ads, and had 55 of them up and running. I checked my Adsense account and even made over $29 with my 55 ads posted this morning. So they took, they were up, then Craigslist took them all down sometime this evening. Now, when I login to my account and try and post a new ad, it gets ghosted.

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.

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!

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.