A constant struggle for online marketers is finding free advertising sources that produce quality traffic to your website. Craigslist (CL) is quickly becoming a popular venue to advertise your home based business.
There are some options to post on CL that do require a fee, such as Job ads. However, the classified ads are free to post on a variety of goods, services, and even personal ads.
Ghosting
Although the Craigslist site is not flashy by any means compared to something like Ebay, it is definitely effective at driving traffic to your site. So how are you going to achieve this? Craigslist.org is doing a fabulous job of preventing classified ad spam on their site. They have created software that monitors your ads and searches for specific qualifications that allow your ad to be visible or “ghosted.”
Ghosting is a term that refers to what happens when CL says that they accept your ad, but then you go to search for your posting and it does not show up. This is called being ghosted. There are all kinds of techniques that are being utilized to try to outsmart the CL crawlers. We will take a look at a few of your options to avoid being ghosted.
How To Avoid Be Ghosted
The most important thing that you can do to avoid being ghosting on Craigslist.org is to have several disposable emails that you use to post your ads. This is one thing that the Craigslist software is monitoring for. If you post 50 ads in one day using the same email address, you can be guaranteed that they email address will be ghosted. It is best to only post about 10-15 ads to each email address and then use a different one.
Another more obvious technique is to randomize your ad copy. Just as with emails, you are going to have to create new subject lines and ad copy on a weekly basis. This will ensure that your classified ads appear as fresh, new content to Craigslist.
Craigslist also ghosts ads based on your IP address. Every computer has a unique IP address and you have to find a way to get around this issue. There are “Hide My IP” softwares that you can purchase as well as an “Air Card” through your cell phone service. This allows you to disconnect and reconnect to your server with a different IP address after posting 8-10 ads.
Conclusion
In closing, Craigslist is a great medium to post free classified ads. However, there are some limitations. Although it is free, it is not a residual form of advertising. The ads only appear for 7-40 days, depending on the city, so you have to be constantly posting new ads.
You also have to be continually studying and searching for ways to stay ahead of the Craigslist crawlers to avoid being ghosted. There are some different software programs that you can purchase such as EzAd Poster and Craygo that will assist you in posting several ads at a time. Although they are helpful, they are also having to put out new updates to their software frequently to stay ahead of the CL software.
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