Frequently, I see new IM’ers asking questions about Craigslist and how they can use it. I suspect that some of these questions arise due to the claims or reports they’ve read where someone has been successful directing this traffic to CPA offers. My experiences are a little different than this, but I’m that there might be some who can take from my experiences and build on it.

Craigslist can be a decent source of traffic. However, it is very hand-on, and even with the best system, has a serious potential of dropping to zero with no warning. It can be instant-on traffic, but it can also be instant-off. Building your entire business on this traffic is like building on top of a house of cards. Regardless, done right, it can be a good shot of traffic to get your business rolling.

With that said, this is my take on using Craigslist:

The Ugly

Many people advocate posting tons of messages on the Craigslist relationship or erotic sections trolling for lonely men who they then direct to CPA offers. This same tactic is being done in different flavors all across Craigslist, unfortunately.

This blatant spamming has caused Craig to continually make changes to combat it, and it weakens the community. It’s also made it much more difficult for people to use Craigslist for more legitimate purposes.

While my use of Craigslist might not be squeaky clean, I wholeheartedly disagree with misleading people in this manner. Please don’t go down this road.

The Bad

Shortly after I started IM, I began using this technique. I was able to quickly reach $2k per month, but in order to pass that I would have had to turn what I was doing into a serious operation – all of which would have been built on a very fragile foundation.

Again, this really isn’t the way to build a business, but in the right circumstances, it might be able to provide a bit of brief income or shot of cash over a couple of months. I call it “the bad” because it is squarely against the ToS of the affiliate program I would have to use today to duplicate it.

Starting last Fall, I built a BANS site (Build a Niche Store – software designed to quickly build eBay affiliate stores) selling Hannah Montana concert tickets. I drove traffic to this site with ads on Craigslist for tickets in each of her venues’ cities. Granted, there were a lot of ads. However, I only ran an ad in a specific city every three days, and I ran LOTS of variations, so my ads rarely got flagged. That got my feet wet, so I started spreading into other markets doing the same thing.

Somewhere along the way I found myself posting ads for 10+ hours a day. I invested in some auto-posting software, just to free up my time. If I’d been willing to heavily pursue this, I could have bought multiple computers, and kept adding stores/ads/cities to expand the concept. However, it was a questionable practice with Commission Junction, so I did not expand the idea.

In June, eBay took over the affiliate program internally. At this point, their ToS clearly states that Craigslist advertisements are not allowed. I know that there are those who would be willing to jump into this for a short time following a hot trend, but the risk is significant.

Perhaps there are affiliate programs where this method would work well and wouldn’t be against their ToS, but with the constant changes Craigslist is making to combat spammers, it’s a hands-on operation.

The key is very similar to all other marketing – find a hungry market, then put something in front of them that they’re ready to buy. Craigslist has a lot of traffic. The trick is getting a human-sounding ad in front of the right eyes.

The Good

Starting around the beginning of June, I began running ads on Craigslist giving away a free book. I only run an ad in a specific city once each 10 days, and again, I have a very large pool of ads which I use (a great use of article spinners).

Again, I have to deal with all of the anti-spammer changes at Craigslist, but since my ads look real and since I’m actually giving the readers what I offer (in this case, a free “book” — a PLR report), my ads never get flagged as spam.

I’ve found that there is no benefit in running ads more frequently than every 9-11 days. If I run an ad every day, I’ll get 1-2 visitors a day from that city. If I run one every 10 days, I get 10-20 in a day.

Using this method, I’ve been able to add over 1000 newsletter subscribers in 30 days. I didn’t have an upsell when I started, but if I did, I could have used the proceeds from that to buy articles to start more traditional traffic methods. I’m launching my own product to the list tomorrow, and the pre-launch buzz is pretty high. My intention is to use the proceeds from the launch to buy articles and concurrently offer the product as an upsell to the freebie-seekers.

Once my traffic levels via articles reach the point they’re at today from Craigslist, I’ll stop posting ads for that niche and start them back up for niche #2 (related, so I can use the same product with a different sales page).

I’m pretty sure that if I’d using this plan back last Fall, I’d be doing very well by now from a network of sites.

Nuts and Bolts

This should show that this isn’t a push-button traffic solution. It’s just another option.

With Craigslist, each ad has to be somewhat unique. If you attempt to post an ad that’s too similar to something that was posted within the past few days, it will be blocked as a duplicate ad.

If you use the same unique text in too many ads which are flagged as spam by the Craigslist community, at some point, any ads which contain that information (URL, email of poster, IP address, etc) will be “ghosted.” Ghosted ads look like they’ve been successfully posted, but they never show up on the site. Due to this, you have to have and use LOTS of different email addresses (gmail or yahoo are good choices), domain names, and you have to change your IP after every 5-6 ads.

Finally, ads which are flagged by a certain number of community members as spam are taken down immediately. This is why any ads should be written in such a way to appear as if it was written by “some guy” instead of sounding like a sales letter.

Craigslist keeps upgrading the captcha they use, and today it’s pretty tough to crack. I’m still using some Craigslist autoposting software, but it’s getting harder and harder to use. My desktop computer runs ads for a few hours every day beginning early in the morning. It sounds easy, but I have to check on the process throughout the day.

The Take-away

Craigslist can be useful for short-term traffic, either to build a list or directed to a product for immediate revenue. However, due to its extreme volatility, it’s not a good foundation to build a business upon.

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