Craigslist advertising

Craigslist advertising. Nov 9, 09'
2012 Advertising
(303) 525-0437
Legitimate Craigslist advertising for Small Business Owners
I represent a Craigslist advertising service. We are not affiliated with Craigslist. We have been posting ads on Craigslist for small business owners for a few years now, and have a lot of helpful information to share with you. If you would rather skip all this "do it yourself" stuff we would be happy to handle your advertising campaign for you, with high quality interactive ads, video email auto responders, slideshows, interactive portfolios and animation all within your Craigslist advertising campaign ads. (http://craigslist2012advertising.com)
We will discuss the pros, cons, dos, don'ts and the "how to's" of Craigslist posting methods. There are many ways of getting your name and information out there for prospective clients to see. There are many timesavers and posting services out there just waiting for you to crack your wallet. Within this article I will share with you my experiences and insights with the hopes that you will gain very useful knowledge.
Starting with the basics here. In order to simply post an ad on Craigslist, you will need an email address and a phone. When you go to craigslist to post an ad, Craigslist will require you to create an account with them if you don't already have one. Craigslist will ask you for your email address in order to send you an activation link. Type in your email address and the Captcha code. These Captcha codes are everywhere. Once you receive this activation link in an email from Craigslist and click it you will be taken to a Craigslist page that asks you to assign a password for your Craigslist account. After you type in a password of your choosing you will be logged in to the Craigslist system. Your account is not quite active yet. You are almost ready to get your information out to the world (well your community at least). If you don't do anything further at this point and shut off you computer or just decide to come back later, when you do come back you will need to log into Craigslist. In order to log into Craigslist you will need to go to http://craigslist.org in the upper left corner you will see a link that says "my account" when you click that link you will need to enter the email address you used earlier and enter the password that you assigned earlier.
Side note: Craigslist has evolved quite a bit over the years, yet it has stayed true to the founding principles and mission. Craigslist is more than just another website Craigslist is a wonderful tool, I would actually like to stress that a little more. The world is not what it was, anymore. In fact the world, our communities, our towns have become too big for us. People generally don't know every shop around or even the shopkeepers name in the store at the end of their block. Craigslist is the tool that helps us find the service providers in our communities. Craigslist is the concierge that introduces us to the shopkeeper at the end of the block. Unfortunately Craigslist has been forced to find ways to keep scam artists away, stop people from abusing and manipulating this tool. Craigslist has changed its practices in how someone is allowed to post ads and even put into place several hoops to jump through, in order to simply get an account with them activated and verified.
Earlier I mentioned that you will need an email address and a phone number to post on Craigslist. After you have created an account with Craigslist you can log in and start the posting process. Once you have decided what you want to post and where want to post it, you can go to the main page of Craigslist and in the upper left corner click "Post to classifieds". If you are logged in you will be taken a page that asks you for your phone number. Once you enter your phone number you will be taken to a page that asks you to enter the code. Craigslist asks you for your phone number so that they can have a computer call you. You will hear an automated voice read a code to you over the phone line. You will need to write this code down or type it into craigslist as you hear it read to you.
Phone verification is one of the many ways that attempt to keep scam artists away, stop people from abusing and manipulating Craigslist. For a while before phone verified accounts people would manipulate craigslist by creating a lot of accounts and posting the same ad over and over. Since email accounts are basically free from many providers, people had no problem creating a lot of email accounts and then in turn creating many Craigslist accounts to post over and over on Craigslist. Posting over and over on Craigslist is the most popular tactic for manipulating Craigslist.
Now that you have an activated and verified Craigslist account you are ready to post your ads, or focus on deciding what kind of ad you are going to begin posting. There are several considerations for your upcoming advertising campaign. First, all the trouble you just went through to create your Craigslist account only gives you the ability to post three ads every seventy two hours.
I would recommend HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) ads, these are the best for small business owners. HTML ads are not the only kind of ad you can post on Craigslist. You could go with the plain text ads, plain text ads with a couple of photos, photocopied flyers, or photocopied flyers with plain text. There is a lot to be said for HTML Craigslist ads, these are by far the best for many reasons. Craigslist HTML ads give you the ability to produce very dynamic ads that really stand out, that really look and function like a regular website would! Craigslist HTML advertising ads are by far the hardest to produce and post. It takes quite a bit of knowledge to write the HTML computer code that makes up the HTML ads.
HTML Craigslist ads give you the ability to actually have your entire portfolio in each of your ads. Your entire portfolio can also be interactive and have slideshows and animation. Imagine having your entire portfolio displayed in your ad, as a prospective clients browses threw, clicks on one of the jobsite pictures and that picture opens up into a larger view really showing your quality of work, when they click it again it zooms in even more giving them a moment to really appreciate the detail that you can bring to their project. Have a look at our website for a show and tell video of this. http://craigslist2012advertising.com
Photocopied flyers are just that, you need to create or have a print shop create you a flyer highlighting your services. After your flyer is created you can of course have a thousand printed and pay someone to go around dropping them on windshields and doors. You can also place the flyer into a computer scanner and save it to your computer as a picture. Once you have the flyer digitized into a digital picture you can upload it to Craigslist when you go through your posting process. Unfortunately Craigslist only provides people with the option to upload a photo when you are posting to the "for sale" sections. That doesn't help small business that wish to include a picture/flyer into an ad in the "services" section of Craigslist.
In order to get pictures or flyers into an ad in the "services" section of Craigslist, you need to have the picture hosted by one of the companies out there that host pictures. Having a picture hosted is not that difficult. With the way the internet works, when you view a webpage the pictures are actually called/pulled from a hosting server somewhere and brought to your computer screen. There are several companies that will do this for you for free, but you will have to put up with them placing their logo onto the lower right or left corner of your picture or flyer. There is also two more options, purchase your own server and bandwidth or hire an advertising company that will place your pictures or flyer on their servers. ( At 2012 Advertising we never place our logo on your pictures or flyers http://craigslist2012advertising.com )
The down side to using photocopied flyers is you won't have any interactivity, animation, slideshows or multiple links to different pages on your website for the different pages prospective clients may wish to view. All you really get is a large static image. A photocopied flyer can be just a large picture ad on craigslist or a clickable large picture ad on craigslist. Unfortunately, you can only make the whole thing clickable as one giant link to your website. Unless you hire an advertising agency with some skills that can cut up the flyer into different sections and assign a different link to each section, and have the ad look good, professional and not look chopped up. Not a lot of companies out there can do this, but we can.
The up side to using photocopied flyers for your advertising campaign on Craigslist is that it makes it fairly easy to get past Craigslist filters that stop similar ads from being posted. This is because the digitized picture/flyer file can easily be saved under different names even though it is just the same picture saved under different names. To Craigslist's point of view each differently named file is a different file, thus it is allowed past there filters.
Abusing Craigslist by using photocopied flyers won't get you very far! So don't waste your time. Craigslist put into place another tactic to stop people from abusing Craigslist, that is the flagging system. This is a truly brilliant tool to employ. Every ad on craigslist is subject to the flagging system. This is the four links seen it the upper right corner of every ad on Craigslist. The flagging system consists of "miscategorized", "prohibited", "spam/over post" and "best of craigslist". The flagging system is based on the founding principles and mission of Craigslist, Craigslist is for the people and by the people of every community. With the flagging system links placed in the upper right corner of every ad for the public to use, the public will flag your photocopied flyers and get them removed if you are abusing Craigslist.
The flagging system is no joke. If you are trying to get away with doing something that you shouldn't be doing on Craigslist you will be at the mercy of the Craigslist flagging system. Just one person can't get you flagged for removal. The flagging system logs each person's IP address that clicks on any one of the flagging systems links. This way if one person keeps clicking the flagging links over and over, it will only register as one flagging click because only one IP address was used. This is another ingenious tactic that Craigslist came up with to allow the community decide what is acceptable and what isn't. This also stops that one person out there that wants to go after your ads and flag them repeatedly for removal. Many people have to flag an ad to get it removed or voted in to the "Best of Craigslist" archive. This flagging system works very well, even in smaller communities.
There is only one way to beat the flagging system. Play fair :) ! Don't post anything that others will find offensive. Don't post ads in the wrong categories. Don't post ads that are questionable. DON'T OVERPOST to Craigslist. Abide by the Craigslist rules and you won't have to worry about being flagged, ghosted, blacklisted or banned.
When the general public comes to Craigslist to find, say a landscaper, they will type in what they are looking for into the search box. Even if you last posted a week ago you will still show up in the search results. You will have to look at the activity in the category you wish to post your advertising campaign in to decide how often you need to post. If the category is in a large city you might have to post every day or every other day. The Goal is show up in at least the first two pages of the search results.
Playing fair doesn't mean you have to do as everyone else does with their ads on Craigslist. You really want to stand out and get noticed in a good way, you really want Craigslist to work for you. The very best way to get Craigslist to work for you is to use cutting edge tactics and technology, you want to be an innovator, a beacon the outshines the rest.
Sounds nice right, but how simple can that be?
But wait there is more... (R.I.P. Billy Mayes).
The answer is simply, QUALITY.
Here at 2012 Advertising (http://craigslist2012advertising.com) it is all done for you. We go the extra mile in everything that we setup for you. We put together high quality ads that function on a level of interactivity with the viewer unmatched by any other type of ad or even advertising service provider that we have seen thus far. We set you up with slideshows, animated and dynamic backgrounds in your ads on Craigslist. We set you up with a video email auto responder that will send out a video email staring you or a showing of your work to impress prospective clients that first sent you an email. We basically set everything up in such a way that really shows prospective clients, that you are the best possible choice when it comes to quality, promptness of responses and wow factor. You will be hard to forget if we run your advertising campaign on Craigslist. We create the ads, we post the ads, all you have to do is answer the phone.. Article Source: http://arsharing.com

Article title: Craigslist advertising By: Jeffrey Black

Written by: Jeffrey Black 2012 Advertising attempting (303) 525-0437 craigslist2012advertising.com