Craigslist is killing me!

Far and away, Craigslist is my favorite traffic source right now but damn they make it hard to get and keep ads live.

I’ve learned a lot since I started Craigslist posting. Craigslist is a world unto itself. This is a marketplace and the competition can be fierce. You’ve got other Craigslist marketers who go around flagging ads of competitors.

Not only that, Craigslist doesn’t like marketer like us. I understand, their business model works a lot like Googles. Google makes their money by providing the most relevant content in searches. Craigslist makes theirs by providing relevant ads. The don’t want bizop posters posting multiple Craigslist ads in the sales jobs category with the purpose of taking someone to a site and selling them.

No doubt, this is underground and admittedly black hat. But…the opportunities are too lucrative to pass up. My first group of outsourcers were only able to get a few ads live. But…from just a few targeted ads I was getting 700-1000 hits a day. Plus, I could see in StatPress stats exactly which ads and locales they were coming from.

Do you see the value there? Not only that, every time I had a conversion, I could return to StatPress and look at the corresponding time stamp. This allowed me to easily see which ads were converting and where the most profitable markets were.

So what about conversion? I was running bizop, credit offers, and some other career related affiliate offers. Conversions were incredible compared to other media for the cost. My ROI was around $1.45 for every $1.00 spent. Needless to say I wanted more.

Here’s a few things I’ve discovered about posting multiple ads on Craigslist:

1. Hiring outsourcers from other parts of the globe doesn’t really work (unless they have sophisticated systems for getting around the filters). Why? Because nearly all posting requires phone verification now with US residential numbers.
2. Posting a click here link worked the best for me…so far but…
3. .info domains get blocked. I thought I’d be tricky and buy a bunch of .info domains for $2.00/ea and use those to redirect to my offers. I can’t get any of those live. Much better off with .com, .org, .net.
4. You need to have multiple domains redirecting to the offer domain or Craigslist will quickly block you. I’ve heard you can use blogger and redirect but I didn’t have much luck there. I forget, but I think they do phone verification too.
5. Need to create multiple new mail accounts.
6. Have tried setting up autoresponders on mail accounts with messages that say something to the effect “please reply to this email address.” Not much traction with those.
7. One thing I have not tried, but will implement in the next couple of days is sending prospects to a prerecorded message directing them to the offer. This could work.
8. Okay, here’s another biggie, you need the ability to switch IP addresses. I got some tools for this but I don’t know if it’s the tool or CL but I seem to have to switch back when CL goes to HTTPs. I also have mobile broadband and disconnecting and reconnecting will switch your IP each time, but this method is a pain and time consuming.
9. Okay, here’s the million dollar biggie - getting past Craigslist phone verification. You can only have one number associated with each account for 90 days. I thought I had a great idea. I  bought a bunch of Skype numbers only to find these will not verify either. Thought about Twilio but talked to a couple of people who said they wont work either. If you can calculate your conversion ratios good enough it may be worth it to just buy discount US residential numbers. I don’t know if DIDs would work but I’ve seen them too for a few bucks per number per mo.
10. My next strategy is to place classified ads in local newspapers and run them continually looking for people who want to make fast cash posting Craigslist ads. I think this may ultimately be an easy cost effective way of getting my ads up.

Here’s a few more tidbits. Craigslist will sometimes claim they’ve posted your ad yet when you look in the category or do a search you can’t find it. This is called ghosting and essentially it’s the same as not even having an ad posted.

Watch out for services who claim they can get your ads live. Believe me when I tell you posting multiple Craigslist ads is no easy feat.

What should you say? Depends on your market, but if you want to drive traffic to your site don’t try and sell prospects in the ad. Work instead to make your ad stand out and create a sense of mystery. These types of ads have worked much better than the more straight forward ones I initially posted.

There are of course several ways to build your list this way and you’re only limited by your imagination.

Still, despite all of the negatives the cost to advertise is minimal compared to ROI generated (for me anyway). I have found Craigslist WAY less expensive than Google PPC, Facebook Ads, PPC, CPM, etc…

Something else, I’ve tried a number of other free classifieds, Thrifty Nickel online (not bad), Backpage (depends on the offer), Adland, Kijiji, etc… and by far Craigslist can deliver way more traffic.

If you have experience posting multiple ads on Craigslist I’d love to hear from you. Let’s exchange ideas. Leave a comment below.

P.S. Stay tuned. I’ll do a review of DAP Digital Access Pass shopping cart and OptimizePress Wordpress theme for marketers. These are great products. Took me a minute to get my head around them but these really kick ass.

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