Promote Your Business with Craigslist

[Richard Johnson]

The phenomenally successful community bulletin board known as Craigslist is a marvelous advertising resource. It serves over thirty million online users in a single month, and the price is right: Except for modest fees in designated cities for certain classes of ads, all its services are without charge.

 

I have no connection with Craigslist outside of my free ads on its site. But Craigslist has done very well by me and my business, so I'm eager to help others use it to its best advantage. Craigslist's own documentation is sparse in the extreme, and my hope is that the information below will fill that void.

 

Posting

 

Posting is straightforward. You just find the prominent "post to classifieds" link (it's at the upper-left corner of the main page), drill down to the appropriate category, and fill out the simple form.

 

The first page to which you're directed when posting will invite you to create an account. You don't really need an account, but it'll take only a minute or so to set up, and can make things a lot easier. So do get that account.

 

Required fields. In general, the only required posting fields are Title and Description. If you omit Price, for example, users will simply see no reference to price on your post, unless you include price information in the body text.

 

Should the need for which you posted be met right away, that's the end of it. In most cases, however, you'll want to re-post. Without re-posting, your post will stay up (in Los Angeles) for between 7 and 30 days, depending on the category, but you don't want to wait nearly that long. Posts appear in chronological order (last submitted on top), and users who browse will typically stop perusing after two or three days' worth of posts.

 

Other users, who search by keyword, may retrieve older messages.

 

(You can always edit your post, but editing won't move it up as will re-posting.)

 

Another way to improve your response rate is to post in more than one category. But don't do that before reading about Craigslist's...

 

Restrictions

 

Craigslist is replete with rules and regulations. Trouble is, they're not particularly easy to find, they're not all in one place, and, worst of all, some of the most crucial ones are not in print at all!

 

Whether the rule is in print or not, if you're found in violation you'll be penalized, and the penalty can range from a rejection of the current submission to a continuing block. You may be invited to register your protest but in my experience such protests will be ignored.

 

If you want to see what rules are written down, find the Craigslist Terms of Use, Frequently Asked Questions, and General Posting Guidelines. I've enumerated here the most important (stated and unstated) Craigslist rules. Bear in mind that enforcement varies (sometimes will be immediate and other times may take weeks or more).

1. You may not post "essentially the same item" before deleting the old item. This applies even when posting in a different city or category. So if your post lends itself to more than one category, you need to alternate the categories. 
   
   Workaround: You may be able to overcome this restriction by setting up an additional account with a different email address.
   
   
2. You may not post the same item more than once in 48 hours. Until February of 2006, this rule wasn't strictly enforced. Now you will not be permitted to re-post until fully 1,440 minutes have elapsed. 
   
   Hint: Bringing up your post as submitted, by clicking on its heading on your account page, will disclose the date and exact time posted, two lines below the head.
   
   Note that it may take about 15 minutes before a new post is accessible to users.
   
   
3. Your post may not contain a link "to a commercial website or auction." This is an example of a rule I haven't been able to find anywhere, until I was blocked for violating it! You may have to guess whether Craigslist will consider the linked site "commercial." Craigslist's current enforcement of this restriction seems to be minimal.
   
   You'll be entirely safe if you don't link to any website, but instead invite the reader to email you for more information (very easily done--see below). This option however involves the risk that your reply may be blocked by a spam filter (even though your message isn't spam). You may always give a Web address as non-linking text, or link to a webpage without any links on it.
   
   
4. You may not exceed your "volume limit." As I write this, Craigslist doesn't define the volume limit in any way, but will reject a post for this reason. Try the workaround for restriction 1, above. Or just re-try ten minutes later.

Posting Tips

• Craigslist makes it easy as pie for its users to respond to your posts. If you want phone calls, simply include your phone number in the writeup. If you want emails, Craigslist will "anonymize" your email address, never to be seen by responders. These folks will click on a link to respond, and that response will go to Craigslist, and then to you.
  
  Each anonymized email response will refer to the unique number for that particular post. So you can easily track your responses to see which posts are most effective.
  
  (You can still track responses if your post refers the user to a webpage instead of eliciting an emailed reply. Just set up a free account at StatCounter.)
  
  
• The body of your post can be in either plain text or HTML. If you choose plain text, Craigslist will automatically convert any Web addresses starting with http:// to links (but exercise care when including a Web address--see Restrictions, above). Craigslist allows you to add HTML tags to a plain-text submission.
  
  
• Depending on the posting category you may be invited to add a picture from your hard disk. (For more details, go to www.craigslist.org/about/help/pic.) Otherwise, you can add graphics in HTML with the <img> tag, if your picture has been posted to the Web.
  
  
• As of this writing Craigslist pages often don't properly display. For example, a deleted post may still appear green (denoting an active post), or you may be given the option to delete a post that you've already deleted. If you should encounter this issue, just refresh the page. (You may have to refresh more than once.)
  
  
• It's wise to vary the posting time of an ongoing post, so that a different set of users will see your post close to the top. Two good posting times are early morning and early evening, and you may want to switch from one to the other every few weeks.
  
  
• A "flagged & removed" message, should you get one, is not as formidable as it might seem. Whatever "flagging" is applied does not seem to have much permanency. I've often been able without a problem to re-post with no change immediately. (This leniency unfortunately does not extend to posts that are "blocked." But even blocks are not usually permanent.)

How Best To Post 

 

Even if you have multiple postings suitable for several categories, these steps will reduce the re-posting process to about a minute a day, while giving you maximum exposure.

1. Compose your posts. You may want to create an entirely different post for each category. If sufficiently different, posts promoting the same transaction may display simultaneously without a problem. Alternatively, use the workaround described above under Restrictions.
2. Create your account, by using the link on the "post to classifieds" page.
3. Create three bookmarks for your browser. One will be your account page, another will be the Craigslist post page, and the third will be the browse page (the Craigslist main page for your locality), for reviewing others' posts.
4. Submit your posts.
5. Wait 48 hours or more.
6. Open your account page.
7. Pick a post you'll want to re-run. Click on that post.
8. You'll be given two choices, Edit and Delete. If you want to re-run the post in the same category, choose Delete. Then go back to your account page, click on the deleted post, and you'll be able easily to re-run it.
9. If you want to re-run the post in a different category, click on the Edit button, to bring up your "raw" post. Then using Ctrl-A and Ctrl-C [in Mac, Cmnd-A and Cmnd-C], copy that raw post to the system clipboard. Go back to your account page and delete the post. Finally, open the post page that you've bookmarked [step 3 above], and post in the appropriate new category [using  Ctrl-V or Cmnd-V].
10. If you have another post to re-run, repeat steps 6 through 10.
11. Wait a day, and repeat steps 6 through 11. (But don't attempt to delete/re-run any post until 48 hours from its last posting.)

If you're promoting the same transaction in several different categories, it may be to your benefit to stagger the posts. To this end you'll want to keep one or more initial posts for a longer interval than the others.

 

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This information was originally made available to members of BEYOND BARTER, The Los Angeles Skills Pool. Regular advisories sent to members provide similarly useful information. Please feel free to look over the various links on the BEYOND BARTER website (and join if you're so inclined--we're not limited to L.A and have members as far-flung as Malaysia!). 

[Teddy Towncrier]

Thanks for sending me this, Lindy.

Now I know what needs to be added to this weeks list.

Teddy.

[Dove Chocolate Discoveries "Chocolatier"6248]

The only thing I have seen with Craig's list, is people them selves can ban a listing, I believe if 5 people hit ban listing it is also removed,so if you have any competitors they can do that to you.

[Lindy Asimus]

Now that's something I would never have thought of! ;-)

[Richard Johnson]

Chocolatier's comment is not really correct. What she's referring to is probably the "flagged & removed" action covered in my writeup. Craigslist users cannot "ban" a post, although multiple flags can temporarily remove it. You can ordinarily resubmit successfully a post that's been "flagged & removed," at once. In practice this means that your post will be unavailable to users for a matter of minutes, depending on how quickly you act.

I have to respectfully suggest that it's a disservice to readers to assert without sufficient foundation what a writer may "believe" about a resource, when readers may take that belief seriously (as did Lindy). My piece above is carefully researched. If anyone has a question about it, I invite that person to write me.

[Lindy Asimus]

Thanks for clarifying.

Richard, do you have any feedback on what kinds of ads work best - or worst, for attracting responses?

[Richard Johnson]

Not really, Lindy. My advice would be to run as many posts as possible. So if your product/service can fit into more than one category, re-word it to run in the additional category (and stagger the posts). And to maximize responses, re-run after exactly 24 hours.

[Richard Johnson]

Sorry, 48 hours (not 24).

[Alba Henderson]

Thanks Richard, this is very helpful.

Best,
Alba