10/18/08 Update – Craigslist now requires you to have a phone verified account to be able to post in most cities for most categories. That means you have to have an account that has been verified with the right area code or you cannot post. You can read more about this at How To Bypass Craigslist Phone Verification System.
Most anyone who has ever listed on Craigslist has had to deal with getting their ads deleted. I know someone who listed a used car for sale and a day later the ad was gone! The Craigslist users are the most trigger-happy bunch I have ever seen. They are making it very hard to make money from home with classifieds.
Craigslist is one of the most basic sites you will ever find. It hardly even has a logo! But if you have used Craigslist to promote your business and get traffic to your website, you probably also know that your ads do get seen and do get results.
How then, do you list ads in multiple cities? I know this is frowned upon but many people do it and do it successfully. How do you at least keep the deletions to a minimum?
I have about 10 different emails that I use for Craigslist. Early on I thought that would do the trick to make it look like different people were posting. With 10 different emails you can also post the same exact ad to 10 different cities. Well, that worked fine until one day I got too enthusiastic and made a lot of posts. I made in total about 75 posts spread out amongst the 10 emails. After finishing, I went downstairs to get a bite to eat. When I came back a half an hour later I was in for a big shock! My computer screen was bathed in a sea of pink!
Not only had every ad I posted that day under every email been flagged and deleted, but every ad I had placed for the prior two days as well! I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that all that work was gone in a blink of an eye. What’s worse was I didn’t know whether I had been suspended or banned from Craigslist and my posting career over! Welcome to the world of reality.
With all those ads being instantly deleted by someone at Craigslist it was now evident that they tracked by IP address and not email accounts. That is the only way they could have tied all my ads together. They did leave all my other ads intact that were placed prior to the ones being deleted so I must not have been banned.
I now faced a decision. How would I go about continuing to list without this happening again? I stopped listing to Craigslist for about a week to let things die down a bit as I figured there was no need to take the chance of ringing the alarm bells so soon again. I then gingerly posted an ad or two here and there just to see what happened. They all stuck and so I gradually increased the number of ads.
I knew that the different email accounts didn’t help me that one time but I still didn’t want to abandon them either. I have now settled on listing a maximum of 3 ads per each email account and using about 7 of my different email addresses per day. That makes a total of around 20 posts per day, which is definitely a number I can live with.
I am very carful not to post more than this – very, very careful. I have learned my lessson that I need to be patient and not get too greedy. I do get the occasional ad deleted now and then, but then so does everyone else. Getting a random ad deleted is something everyone on Craigslist has to endure. It’s just part of the Craigslist game!
Using Graigslist is a great way to get free traffic but it is temporary and only works as long as your ad is up. Once it expires or gets flagged, you are faced with the difficulty of trying to get more ads up which is why you are reading this in the first place. There are other ways to get targeted traffic that are also free and even better than using Craigslist. The Tireless Traffic Technique is the best way to get targeted traffic to come to your website and it is much more permanent than the ads. With this technique, you can get a steady stream of free targeted traffic that comes to your site day after day. And that is FREE traffic just like Craigslist.
The Tireless Traffic Technique is a real cheap $7.00 ebook that you can download immediately and after reading it you may not need to post on Craigslist anymore. I know that my posting is way down as it is just too much trouble and I am getting targeted traffic all the time anyway from what I learned in this ebook.
Technorati Tags: How to post on Craigslist, flagged and removed, Craigslist tips, Craigslist hints, post multiple ads, post multiple cities, post multiple cities on Craigslist, post multiple ads on Craigslist, multiple cities on Craigslist, multiple posts on Craigslist
Being too greedy may end up backfiring >_
I had a car for sale on craigslist and my experience is very different. I had more then 10 ads going in one hour and what I did was I totally reworded the ad content and that seemed to do the trick. Hope this helps.
I have also been successful using many copy variations. I have found that by changing the title and the first paragraph, you generally get by the dup filter. I did this for the last company I worked for and it worked very well.
The problem was that new content is getting added so much that it’s hardly an hour or so before yours is off the front page.
There has to be a program out there which automates this. If anyone has any suggestions let me know. I don’t have an immediate use for it, but I might in the future.
BTW I’m sure using a program to automate posting with the intention to bypass the dup filter is looked down on because it could be simply abused for spam but there are legit uses for it other than spam.
There is indeed a program to automate this – craigslist poster software
[...] in all of the bigger cities and a few more of the smaller ones -probably 15 cities in all (click here to read about my experiences with posting in multiple cities). I only got between 10 and 20 hits [...]
You have given me a lot of information today. I will continue to read this articel through out the week. Thanks
Dawn W.
reading this article wasted precious moments of my life ,,,,a big winded article to say craigslist tracks u listings by ip address limit what u post!!!!!!!!! holy crap u must have alot of time on your hand and like to type ,,,, u r the definition of a knuckle head
I see and hear so many different opinions on craigslist. Some say it works, others talk like the sky is falling. Course guess thats with anything, like myspcae, works for some, not for others.
When it comes to banning, the first thing CL bans is a portion of text common to your posting. A domain name or phone number is the first thing. They know no one else will use that. So even if you change IP’s and emails, this will get you. Just another tip….
Found your site in google, and it has a lot of usefull information. Thanx.?
Craigslist tracks:
email address
ip address
direct links
words used in the advertizment
Is pretty much all you had to say..
it needs phone vertification too??
Some listings do indeed need phone verication. They are making it increasingly hard to post on Craiglist.
You can post your ad on craigslist one city at a time or try my site YurAdz.com. It allows you to post for FREE. You can post in multiple cities, locally in your city, or throughout the YurAdz.com website. You can also post in MULTIPLE categories if you like. YurAdz.com is about FREEDOM and being free for anyone who wants to use our services. Another feature is having multiple videos on your ad. Lastly we give you an account where you can control ALL your ads. You can even repost the same ad with a click of a button. So give it a try and let your friends and family know about the site. It is very new so we need as much content as possible.
Thanks
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