Craigslist conversion

It's pretty easy to spam craigslist regardless of their spamming tactics. But what's the real use if conversion is terrible. After a few months I really don't contribute much to conversion over the use of CL. In fact it's disappointing but then I never thought of it as a real traffic driver but more of an experiment. People seem to have the same behavior over print classified ad's, very little response. Unless your giving something away for free. The interesting part overall like many popular sites is there are just too many messages/info to be consumed. You post a message in a popular city and in an hour it's buried by others, CL, or just on another page. I've seen a message posted in a tiny town that will come my way 3 weeks after I posted it. Things just moving too fast.

More Craigslist fun

I'm not big on Craigslist but I can't stand the fact that even though they banned a few domains from postings I could still get around the issue if I want. Not that I care anymore because I have better marketing ideas. But it did made me start thinking about the difficultly they have to deal with trying to stop spam 'like' messages from being posted. I don't see that abuse going away anytime soon and the hackers will just get smarter at automated posting. I've already seen it in action and thought it was pretty funny.

Adventures with Craigslists, Final thoughts

I'm not really jumping up and down about Craigslist being a marketing tool but rather more of a online garage sale. I'm sure they want it this way which is fine. From my perspective you see the potential eyeballs coming to the site and hope to exploit some of that. You don't know unless your try and I walk away some valuable information concerning classified postings. It also seems to potentially coincide with paper advertising. Not extensive testing here but I did advertise an ad in a Sunday newspaper and not one result came to the website. I'm sure some other newspapers might yield some sort of results but I'm debating that effort vs radio or tv.

I'll check back in another week or so and see if my domain is still banned, not that I really care because I can create hundreds more.

Adventures with Craigslist, day 11

So I know my domain is still banned from posting with links but I could care less. Click-throughs were less than stellar and I'm off to a different contents to see eyeballs. The more I think about Craigslist the more it makes think it's just more internet polution. I'm sure they think it serves a purpose to help people turn their garage sales online or offer some less than useful community of users who regurgitate the same old information. But from the perspective of offering services I don't people think that Craigslist is the first place on their mind to start out with. That's where Google is still king of the content IMO.

Adventures with Craigslist, day 9-10

At this point the analysis has been interesting, craigslist deletes alot of user posted messages everyday including mine. I tend to create more manual messages now which is slow and span them out throughout the day to different cities. What I do notice is that while you can kinda of beat craigslist at the posting game by mixing alot of things up with title/body/email address/IP I'm beginning to think it's not even worth it. The get a lot of viewers every day but the conversion rate is really bad vs. the effort. It's kinda of the old fashion method of advertising through all the various newspapers but online. You can post to a ton of cities and even cross categories but even with all those eyeballs it wasn't that great. Now you could argue the service being offered or whatever but my guess is that this world of classified ad's is so segmented you can't effectively manage every state/city. The direct model of ad placement on sites might seem more effective but at a much higher cost. I'm sure Sam in Alaska who's selling his sled will find some value but those who can offer services/products in a more global market will find Craigslist less than desirable.

Adventures with Craigslist, day 7-8

Once all my messages were 'staff deleted' my traffic was down. That didn't bother me as I was trying to figure out the value of Craigslist as a marketing channel. One thing that I was always curious about was IP address as a trigger so I signed up for a private proxy list. That didn't work at all because Craigslist won't even let you post a message if your using one of these IP's. But that's ok I had to try. So at this point I try an automated poster program. Now there are a few that exist out there and I'm sure they all operate the same. What I noticed is Craigslist obviously has some thresholds for how many messages can be posted and I'm assuming they were using my IP address as a trigger. Like credit card companies looking for spending patterns my guess is something similar. Sure I could post a number of messages every hour and that works but that still take time. And of course violates the terms of use policy. But i'm more interested in seeing if value from classified postings is worthwhile. I had tried a newspaper classified earlier in the week on a Sunday and got zero response. So now I have some posts still showing using both automated and manual posting while seeing just a few 'spam' deleted messages. But the incoming traffic is still poor.

Adventures with Craigslist, days 3-7

So my understanding of Craigslist deleting patters begins. I try some more messages and eventually I see them deleted by user flags or staff delete. At this point even with a few dozen messages out there I'm still not seeing much traffic. I change the message and make sure a URL link is pointing to my site. Bingo, traffic is on the rise. So I start posting more messages. Over the next few days I really start seeing staff deleted messages for my account. I create more email and craigslist accounts. That helps a little but now I think there on to me. After a few days I'm starting to see the reference of my domain as a link just being staff deleted immediately. I try different email addresses, IP addresses, different messages, no luck. Any message with my domain in it as a link is banned. What I really find out is that just my domain name in words and any link to something else will trigger a delete. I don't think they really care about about ip or email addresses, once your domain name eg. "bubba.com" is targeted your out of luck. Now you could just use 'bubba.com' without any url link, that's fine but we know user behavior is just plain lazy to cut/paste anything in. The analysis continue.

Adventures with Craigslist, day 1-2

So Craiglists gets alot of users who read and post a ton of messages everyday. So why not post a few messages to get some traffic and see if anybody is actually reading. The system really isn't built for mass postings whether that be manual or automated. So I go ahead and create an email account and Craiglist account and start my first couple of posts. No big deal, just a basic message and post. It works so let's do it to a few more cities. No big deal it seems until the readers start flagging you as SPAM. I don't think much of it and continue with a few more cities. The results are very little traffic coming my way. Natural thing to do is post to those biggest cities shown. After doing that I'm starting to see Craigslist "staff deleted" status with my messages. The fun begins.