Ad Posting Tips and Tricks Review
October 12, 2008 by LBB Admin
Filed under Internet Marketing
After a brief hiatus, I am back to working my blogs and posting again. I took a little break to dive back into learning about the world of Craigslist (CL) posting and spent the past two weeks, many times up until 1am, learning all there is to know about changes made in posting internet marketing ads on CL successfully. CL is constantly making changes to how they filter ads so you have to stay on top of the latest and greatest techniques. All of this information is for informative purposes only and I do not advocate violating the TOS of any website or service you use.
This article is meant to inform and educate you as to what information I have learned through research and in no way is meant to be used as a guide to what to do. Do not use this to post with posting software or services.
People have used CL for years to sell personal things as well as find renters for properties and have pursued posting ads for internet marketing, primarily because they find CL to be a great source of leads (although some haven’t found a ton of categories to be that responsive for their niches and many posts to categories such as jobs automatically get flagged).
There are some CL cities where it seems flaggers live to flag internet marketing ads they deem inappropriate or out of category and some marketers will go back and flag other ads (even legitimate ones) if theirs get flagged. The reality is the best candidates for a home based business are those people who are unhappy with their current jobs and looking for something better – so sources say the best section to post about any business opportunity is the jobs section but keep in mind that this is against the TOS
There are various ways of trying to get ads to stick – tweaking the html of the ads, using the right kinds of subjects, random characters and text and many have managed to get ads to stick for a few days to a few weeks. The key is volume so if approached from that perspective, having ads up for only a day or two is fine as the ads will generate good free traffic easily.
Some cities there are so many ads posting daily it’s easy for ads to get quickly buried at the bottom of the list (many post as late in the day or evening as possible so the ad has a better chance of displaying near the top of the page longer). There is even a variety of posting software available to accomplish this easily.
Most of the posting software costs anywhere between $197 to $397 – and the free stuff is almost always loaded with malware, spyware and oftentimes viruses. Again, using posting automated posting software or agents to post is against the TOS. However, if you ‘un-automate’ the posting software, I have heard that this little change keeps you within the TOS.
You are prohibited from posting the same ad over and over and the definition of ’same’ is open for debate. Technically, changing one character or one pixel or one address or one word makes the ad no longer the same.
CL Posting Tips
For many posters, the goal with CL isn’t to avoid flagging (there’s too many people on CL just waiting to flag ads) but to get a high volume of he ads past the CL filters and posted (and thus keeping from being ghosted – this means the ad appears published but does not appear in CL listings). Having enough of a variety of the below items creates some level of randomness. Plus a high enough volume means even those over zealous flaggers only manage to catch a small percentage of ads.
Titles - a variety of titles for posts related to the opportunity/service/item. It’s perfectly acceptable to say ‘looking for sales professionals’ or ‘marketing experience’ if the goal is to attract people with experience in these areas.
Ad Type – there are two schools of thought here, each defended vigorously by those who use them: Text or image based ads. It’s up to preference and for many they prefer image ads as they are easy to create and randomize which means less coding to worry about and they get good results with image ads. Split testing is used with or without URL links embedded to gauge responses.
Ad Content – Keeping the ads simple and normal – CL bots can pick up words that would relate to MLM or home based businesses – It’s interesting to review some of the other ads and find some that are about home based or online marketing and see what works for them. Viewing the source of an ad is simple using the View Source menu of a browser. Posters like to save the html of good ads that stick to stay on top of what works best. Split testing. here is also used heavily by posters. They use these tests to fine tune and tweak their ads so they have some reliable ones to use.
Images - The primary repository for posters is Photobucket, another FREE online tool which is great for uploading the same groups of images multiple times in order to generate unique URLs (posters have found that another CL filter is repetitive URLs both in the images and in the links they use except they have not banned Photobucket since millions of CL posters use it and it would probably be bad for CL if they cracked down on photo hosting services).
For easily croping and resizing images, picnik.com is a tool used by many ad posters. The free service only allows an upload of 5 images but by deleting them after saving, 5 more images can be uploaded to resize and crop. No registration is required.
Links - domains are so cheap these days that the best practice here is to buy them as needed. But it is not necessary to buy a ton in order to generate unique links. The top ad posters use promediacode.com and while they have a free version, their is a better discount by going with the paid annual option.
This service is so simple to use – enter the ftp username and pwd (create ftp user accounts in the domain Cpanel to use if there is concern in using the main ftp account info), the domain name of the site, the path on the server (/public_html/domainname), the domain for the URLs to forward to and then use the random generator to obtain random domain folder names. By entering this text into the tool, it spits out up to 20 URLs at a time, pre-configured for forwarding, ready to use and if more are needed, just rinse and repeat. That’s it. This creates a batch of URLs to use without spending HOURS in a hosting account Cpanel creating them one by one to point to affiliate programs. It takes about 2 minutes to make 100 URLs.
Email addresses/CL Accounts – Posters here differ on this too. CL accounts make it easier and faster to post ads. There are people who use CL accounts and want to post high volumes of ads, so they keep an inventory of multiple CL accounts. This of course is not condoned by CL (also against the TOS) and I am only telling you this to inform you of what’s out there. Same thing goes for email accounts. CL filters will pick up if many ads are posted using the same email account so posters randomize the email addresses used.
IP addresses – this is another tricky one but easy to manage. CL can tell when a large number of ads are being posted from the same IP address and these will get ghosted as well as IP banned meaning inability to post from that IP again. If using DSL for the connection and it’s fairly simple to power cycle the modem after posting 4-5 ads. Then obtain a new IP address and post another 4 ads, power cycle, then do it again and that’s the process.
That is it for now.
In a future post I will cover 16 awesome and FREE tools you can use to free up some time in your internet marketing efforts.
Until next time!
PS. Here is an awesome video I just had to dig up from a couple of years ago. Talk about tricks.
http://www.dailymotion.com/videoxnbym
