Tips in Advertising on Craigslist

Define Craigslist

• It is a centralized network of online urban communities, featuring free classified advertisements (with jobs, internships, housing, personals, for sale/barter/wanted, services, community, gigs and resumes categories) and forums sorted by various topics.


• With over 10 million new classified ads each month, Craigslist is the leading classifieds service in any medium.


• The classified advertisements in Craigslist range from traditional buy/sell ads and community announcements, to personal ads and even "erotic services".


• It is found at the top 50 sites in Alexa Traffic Rankings.

Because of its popularity, Craigslist.org is one of the most target sites of spammers. Craigslist has been upgrading its system continuously to fight against the spammers. When you post the same ads on different locations or multiple ads on a particular location, your post will be marked as flag and will be removed from the list. This makes the ad posting in Craigslist difficult... Anyhow, here are some tips in advertising on Craigslist:

1. Unique Email address - Use a different email address for each ad post.


2. Different Ad Descriptions - Make the ad unique every time you post to avoid "similar posting" error and staff deletion.


3. IP Address - Change your IP as frequently as possible. If a lot of ads are posted using a single IP, it will be blocked for a few hours to a few days, even permanently if abused persistently. Some post with the use of foreign IPs can be detected and are auto-deleted by Craigslist software.


4. Ad Titles - Titles should match the category. And make sure you are using a lot of different titles. This reduces the possibility of the post to be flagged.


5. Don't post more than 10-20 ads at a time. Give some time interval between each batch of postings.


6. Select your posting category appropriately. Postings on wrong categories are flagged and deleted hastily. Make sure you do some research to determine the appropriate category for your business.


7. Don't post many ads frequently. Over exposure is not a good idea.


8. Make sure your ads doesn't look spammy and is just like any simple ads on the net. There are times that too much commercial looking ads can be flagged unless you are posting under the "services offered" category.


9. Avoid using keywords in your titles or ad descriptions. A company name, phone number or email address, etc… will do.

Additional Tips in Advertising on Craigslist:

1. The title may compose up to 70 characters.


2. The ad description is up to 30kb.


3. Javascript and CSS is not allowed.


4. You cannot use a flash image in your ads. But a non-moving image or an animated GIF image will do.


5. After making an ad post, it will take about 15 minutes for your ad to go live on the listing.


6. If you cannot receive any email with the publishing link from Craigslist, check first your bulk/spam folder.


7. Do not format your text to appear in colored white. Or else, you will get a message that you are blocked. Also, making your text look white, like this: <p style="color: white;">, will convert your text to color black.


8. Frame and iFrame are not allowed also.