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Advertising Q & A
Hosted by: Tresie Smith, RSD
Topic: Craigslist Part 2
Part 1
For the first part of this call we will be going over some more step by step instructions on how to post an ad on Craigslist.org. So what is this big uproar about Craigslist.org. Craigslist is ranked 33 on Alexa, ranked #10 in the USA, and is the largest online classified site in the world. Most people go to SanFransico's, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Washington DC Craigslist pages, however just about every city in each state has a page on there. Craigslist receives approximately 20 billion page views each month. Craigslist is free except in the largest cities where they charge a small fee for the job category and a few real estate renting. Where else can you get free exposure to your business, service or products? You have the potential to have millions of people look at your ad daily.
Now, I bet some of you are wondering why there are different instructions. Well, for Craigslist.org and many similarly formatted job posting sites have different posting requirements than most of the free online classified sites you may come across. There is a technique to posting on Craigslist.org and other sites like Kijiji.com and Backpage.com. This is why I decided to have separate calls just for these types of sites.
So how do you post on craigslist? I am going to reinforce the basic instructions and add a few more tips.
- The first thing to do is to consider how many phone numbers you have access to. The current account creation process requires a valid phone number to be entered. Once you work through the sign up process you will receive a phone call or text message with a validation code.
*Important Tip: You do not want to draw attention to yourself or your IP address, so do not set up multiple accounts with different phone numbers right away. Let some time go by before setting up another account. Yes, this requires patience, but it is very worth it in the end. The “set-up” is always time consuming. If you jump the gun and start posting and creating the accounts one behind the other, you will risk having your ads immediately flagged and removed or having your account being placed on hold. When your account is hold, that means its 2 months, 3 months later and you’re still waiting for your account to be active. - If you have access to 10 different phone numbers than you will need to set up 10 different emails. Go to http://www.gmail.com and setting up your free 10 email accounts there. Or you can use hotmail. I even highly recommend mail.com because you can choose your own extension after the “@” sign. Once you have 10 different email accounts that you use everyday to post from, You are essentially set up for 5-10 days or 2 weeks or longer.
- Once you have set up your email accounts, go to Craigslist and create 10 accounts with Craigslist. Go to http://www.craigslist.org/. Click on my account on the left hand side. You will see a place where you can log in. Underneath that, it says don't have an account - Click on that. Follow the instructions. Once you get to a certain point, it will ask you to put a phone number in. Once you put that phone number in, you will receive either a phone call or text with the code you will need to enter into Craigslist in order to have a valid Craigslist account.
- Fourth, you need to set up your ads. Never post the exact same ad twice - this includes your headline. Duplicate posts are NOT permitted on Craigslist. Try writing 10 ads and then sit down and try and get 10 different variations out of your original ads. This gets you 100 different ads to work with! A common variation on the headline is to place a bunch of letters and numbers at the end. This is something that a lot of marketers do. For example if your headline reads "Best Online Job" alter it like so, "Best Online Job______7r4f6FDe" & "Best Online Job______Hw84HpF8" Now that was not a good title, but you get the picture. You can even make it a “reference” number by putting a pound sign in front of the letters and numbers at the end.
Now I don’t want to sound contradicting. Some other experienced posters have found that 10-12 ads per account is the limit. As you’ve seen or heard, I won’t post that many ads because I don’t want to draw the slightest attention. However, the ones that have been successful get about 20-24 ads on the days they post because they will use 2 accts and post 10-12 ads of course using different cities, categories, and ads.
Now here are some ideas if you don’t have access to a lot of phone numbers:
1. Use your work number.
2. Use your home number
3. Use your cell number
4. Use your significant other’s cell number
5. Use your significant other’s work number
6. Go to a payphone that accepts incoming calls and use that phone number.
You may need someone at your computer to put the number in but then you can stand there and wait for the phone to ring and get the phone number.
7. Ask a few close friends if you can use their number.
8. Partner up with someone in your industry and brainstorm other idea's. Perhaps one is willing go to a local train station of somewhere there's a heap of public phones, while the other does the online work. This might sound like a 'desperate' step, however it could turn out to be a very profitable partnership. Use your network and close business contacts.
9. There are some websites that give you a number to use for advertising some used to be free but others are as low as $6.99/month.
Repeat the process 10 times. Remember, you will need to go to each email account that you have set up and click on the link that Craigslist sends to each email account to activate each individual Craigslist account.
Any questions on those instructions before I move on to the next section? Press 5* on your keypad to raise your hand.
Part 2
Now some of the tips I am going over may be more for intermediate and advanced marketers. However, it is still information you need to know. So just remember, if you feel its going over your head, you’ll have this call recorded to listen over and over to later. The following tips will help you post on Craigslist more effectively and minimize being flagged or having your account blocked or ghosted. For those who don’t know terminology….Flagged is when someone goes to your ad and clicks on the link to the far right to “flag” your ad for it being inappropriate, a scam, or whatever other reasons they have. This is done by the community. So visitors to your ad can flag your ad. Ghosted is when you go to put an ad on craigslist, it shows up in your account like its active, but when you go to search for it on the site its not there. That means that Craigslist has ghosted your account.
Stopping Your Craigslist Ads From Ghosting
Test, test and then TEST again. Post 3 ads in 3 different cities then stop. It takes anywhere from 15 - 20 minutes for you ads to go live. If you go to the specific city and category and can see you ad live on the site, then you know what you did worked & you can run with that for a while.
If your ads are not visible, you simply start the process again.
How To Test for Specific Flagging Aspects
If you think it may be your link that is causing the problem, post an ad with a different link and see if it goes live. Perhaps try an image ad instead or test running your ad without the link at all. We will be going over image ads in another advertising/marketing class.
Tips to help you avoid being flagged or ghosted….
1. Post 1 position at a time. Do not advertise more than one of our positions in an ad. So advertise the recruiting side and membership side separately. Plus this will give you more variety of ads to post.
2. Do not post multiple ads within 45 minutes of each other. This will draw attention to you and will get your ad flagged. Suggestion: Post one ad, in one city, in one category with one email address. Then go post on some other sites for a few minutes like 30-45 min. then come back to Craigslist and post a completely different ad, in another city (if you can), in a different category, using a different email address. I highly recommend consistently posting only 2 ads a day on Craigslist. Some say you can do 3 ads per account per day, but I rather fly under the radar so to speak. At least this way you can have 10 ads if you’re posting 5 days a week. You have many other sites to go post ads on!
3. Do not post ads every day. If you are going to post more frequently, delete your active ads in that account prior to posting. I recommend getting a rhythm, like you post 2 ads on Monday, on Wednesday you post 2 different ads in a different account. The following weekend on Sunday, you log in and delete Monday’s ads. On Monday you post 2 new ads in that account you used the prior Monday. Something to that nature. This way you’re giving ample amount of time for that ad to be deleted. Some pros even delete all of their active ads before they close down their computers for the day.
4. Do not repost until your responses have slowed down. Wait until your responses have slowed down before you repost an ad. And make sure you delete the ad first before reposting it.
5. Create your OWN ads. You can use the FAHT ads as a foundation, but PLEASE write your own or edit them to make it your own. If all 3,000 plus FAHT members used the same ads and posted on Craigslist, it looks like we’re spamming! How would like to be an opportunity seeker and see 20 or more of the same ad in each city you looked in? It takes the quality away from the opportunity. So, just use those ads as your foundation to make your own. I urge you to do the ACTIVITY sheet and listen to the training call I did on writing ads. It is REALLY an effective way to get you writing your own ads. That activity and recorded call is available on the link I mentioned earlier in the newsletter. So don’t be afraid to be creative!
The least amount of information the better. Remember the K.I.S.S. rule- Keep It Short and Simple. Ads are meant to be teasers to generate a response. You will not hold the prospect’s curiosity by posting a super long ad. So the shorter the better. There are ways for you to put enough information but keeping it short. The key contents to have in the ad is: 1. Creative headline, 2. Who we are 3. Who we want 4. What they’ll be doing 5. How much will they get paid 6. How do they get more information. Now when I say who we are, I am not saying put AmeriPlan’s or the FAHT’s name in the ad. Here is an example of an ad with all of those key components: Customer Sales Associate
Self-Motivated Independent Sales Reps to work in healthcare industry with National Corporation. Reps will assist customers according to their needs and direct them to correct services. Home office set-up is required. FT/PT avail. Great pay with Family Benefits. Interviewing immediately. Reply for more info and to apply.
So do not feel that you are misleading anyone. Advertisements are meant to be short and sweet. You want to grab and keep their attention. When they reply to the ad is when you will give them more information.
6. Write a creative headline or title. The headline and the title are extremely important. They grab the prospect’s attention and make them click on your ad to look at it. So you do not want to use the ones like Admin/Office, or Cust. Serv etc. Instead you want to use Consumer Account Associate, Client Sales Associate, Client Representative, Consumer Account Manager, Customer Rep Assistant, you get what I am saying? Just a different way to say those things. You can use a Thesaurus to help find other words to use.
7. Include contact information IN your ad such as your email address and/or phone number. Do not put your ameriplan.net, iboplus.com, mybenefitsplus.com email accounts in the ad or even to open the accounts with craigslist. You don’t have to provide this information; you can simply use the craigslist system to get the responses to your inbox. We’ll go over what to do when someone responds to your ad in just a few.
8. Never use the same ad in the same week. Never use the same ad on the same day regardless what city you are posting in or account you are using.
9. Always CLEAR your COOKIES before you post another ad on Craigslist.org. For those who don’t know what COOKIES are…. In regards to computers, a cookie (also tracking cookie, browser cookie, and HTTP cookie) is a small piece of text stored on a user's computer by a web browser. A simplified definition of a cookie is that they read, record, and track data while you are browsing the web. You should clear your cookies, browsing history, temporary password and temporary internet files after you use each craigslist account.
Each operating system will be slightly different, so use these as a guide. Open you computer's control panel. Go to network & internet. Internet options, then delete browsing history. Within that menu option you can select to delete your history and you want to check the box and clear all.
Sometimes the browser you are using is not the default for your computer. If this is the case try the following steps;
Instructions For Firefox
Menu option - tools, then clear private data (again you need to check all the box's to clear them all.
Instructions For IE
Menu option - tools, then internet options (clear everything!)