“Really, that’s actually a job?”
This is most people’s reaction when they find out that we have someone on staff whose primary duty is creating postings on Craigslist.
Craigslist is in the Top 10 Most Visited sites in the US. It is estimated that the site receives over 7 billion page views per month. In other words, there is an enormous amount of people shopping on Craigslist every day.
“But,” most people say, “I’ve posted on Craigslist and it isn’t very hard at all – why do you have someone on staff just to do that?”
Craigslist is dedicated to making it easy to post a single advertisement. But the catch is that they are ALSO dedicated to making it very hard to post multiple advertisements. So if you have a car or TV to sell locally then you’ll have no problem posting your single ad. But if you have own a auto dealership and want to post hundreds of ads for the cars on your lot, or if you have an electronics company and want to advertise your TVs for sale in 100 cities across the county, it is a very different story.
Account Limits: Craigslist will not allow you to post more than 3 ads per account in 48 hours. And if you continually post up to that limit, the Craigslist system starts tracking you very carefully. So you ideally don’t want to post more than once per 24 hours per account. This means that for a campaign of any significant size you need to have many accounts.
Phone Verification: For the more desireable categories, Craigslist requires that a phone number be used to verify that the account is being used by a specific individual. In other words, each of those many accounts that you now need will require their own email address AND their own unique phone number.
Duplicate Content: If Craigslist sees the same title, content, or links being used in multiple ads, it will remove those posts. Therefore you need to use a unique title and unique content for each ad you post. The best way to do this (and to still have a memorable ad) is to create an image for your ad and upload multiple copies of that single image to a photo sharing website. Then you can insert some unique text into each ad (which doesn’t even need to be related to your product) and then embed a unique copy of that one image (which has your actual advertisement).
Location is Key: Craigslist checks your IP address – the unique location of your computer – and looks to see if too many ads are being posted from this one location. If they are, Craigslist will consider you a spammer and remove the ads. Consequently, you need to regularly change the IP address that you are posting from.
So for a campaign of any significant size, posting on Craigslist becomes quickly becomes complicated. Hence, Dustin, our staff’s fabulous Craigslist guru.
