Craigslist has become the go to place for people applying for jobs. They get an extremely high amount of traffic to their site each month and everyone knows what Craigslist is. Now, if you’re a small business owner or especially a home-based business owner who needs to place ads online for your business-whether you’re looking for more home workers or just want to advertise your services, your ads can get ghosted.
What does ghosted mean? Well, you classified free ads can place ads and get confirmation from Craigslist that your ad was posted. However, have you ever thought of actually checking on their site to see if your ad was really posted? If you haven’t, then you should have been checking. Craigslist has gotten so big that they are now utilizing an automated computer system which checks through all the ads which are posted.
This program has certain criteria for which ads will get ghosted. If you know how to avoid being ghosted, then obviously, your ad will stick. Although, you should keep in mind that even if you follow all the rules that I’m going to share with you, expect to have a small percentage of your ads ghosted-there is no way to completely avoid getting ghosted on Craigslist, but you can maximize your chances for success if you apply the following strategy.
So, basically, if you want to post a good amount of free ads on Craigslist, you’ll need to open multiple accounts-with different email addresses, passwords, phone numbers and internet IP addresses for each account. If you don’t follow these rules, you may get notified by Craigslist that your ads were posted, but they’ll really be ghosted. That’s why you need to play by the rules and always check about fifteen minutes after you post your ads to make sure they actually did get posted. Now, even when you play by the rules, sometimes not every ad will stick, but it will be a much higher percentage rate that do, provided you play by the rules.
That could pose a problem since that means you can only post from one account at your home IP address. Although, if you have smart phones with internet access, each phone will have its own IP address and you can post from the phones. We actually purchased four pre-paid phones and use them with each account and we go to four local libraries on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays (same time each day) to post ads. We’ve seen success with our ads sticking. The reason you need a phone number for each account is because when you post (not every day), but sometimes you’ll need to request an access code from Craigslist to be sent to your phone. Also, you need to have a phone through a major service provider. Phones through Vonage and other VOIP services are not accepted.
Another thing to consider with posting the ads-don’t put the link to your capture page or blog site as hyperlinked. Make sure you write out the link and direct interested parties to copy and paste the link into the web browser to go watch the informational video. If you list a phone number, make it different in each add like: 215-352-3028 and add “/” or “:” or “\” etc. in between the numbers to give variety.
Joanne Troppello is an author of romantic suspense novels http://joannetroppello.weebly.com/blog.html. She is married and loves spending time with her husband and family. Joanne and her husband, John own and operate Mustard Seed Marketing Group, LLC [http://www.mustardseedmarketinggroup.com] and they are Empower Network affiliate members. They are network marketing coaches who teach that You don’t have to be an SEO guru or a social media specialist to make their system work for you. That’s the beauty of it. Just blog daily and the results will speak for themselves. Follow the three simple, basic principles of blogging daily, sharing with others and daily educating yourself and you’ll be linked with one of the most trafficked blogs, with the highest conversion rate of leads to sales to money.