A few facts about CraigsList and if this doesn't get your promotional thoughts going nothing will! CraigsList serves over 5-billion page view per month (according to Wikipedia). And yet is only staffed by 24 people! This site receives over 10 million unique visitors.
Best of all CraigsList is free, unless you are posting job listings (Their only form of revenue), you pay nothing to post your ad.
According to CraigsList Facts there have been a few controversies surrounding this wildly popular classifieds site though. One of the more recent ones on the news was a lady that had her house ransacked because someone had advertised on CraigsList that everything at her address was free people only needed to come and take it. Of course there were some stupid enough to break into her house and tear it up stealing everything because of this ad. However, any sane person would blame the people who believed the ad, not CraigsList.
If you would like more history, how it was created, by who, and so on, I have found two great resources on the subject. First of course is Wikipedia. The second is CraigsList Facts.
Check out these Craigs List Tips!
Format your Craigslist Ads
Simply create your ad in a decent web page editor. Go to the html view of the editor and copy everything between the body tags, and paste this into the box where you would normally type the ad into Craigslist. Craigslist will render the html when it shows your ad.
One caution is you will likely not want to use MS Word or FrontPage as your editor to create the ad. Both of these editors have a tendency to put a huge amount of extra code in with the html, which will slow down the speed that your page will be delivered. This could cause people to give up before they get to see your page.
Craigslist allows most common HTML tags including tables, images (with alt tags), anchor tags and of course css to help you style the page. It takes a little more time but it is well worth the effort!
Craigs List Referances
Craigs List Profits Blueprint
Amazon Price: $0.99 (as of 07/11/2009) 
The Bucket List
Amazon Price: $11.49 (as of 07/11/2009)
Making the list: interview: Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster of craigslist.(INTERVIEW)(Interview): An article from: Computer User
Amazon Price: $5.95 (as of 07/11/2009)
Craigs List Vids
New Guestbook
rydigga wrote...
Hi,
Nice lens. Thanks for sharing these Craigslist tips!
Ryan
Posted January 10, 2009
Promoting Your web site using CraigsList
One of the biggest mistakes I see when people try to promote a website using Craigs list is that they are too obvious that is what they are trying to do. Remember that the reason most people are on CraigsList is to get bargains, typically something that is used, not retail items. They also don't want to go to another site to see what you have to sell.
Here are the steps to follow that will get you the best results.
- Have something to sell
- Sorry if you don't have an item to sell Craigs list doesn't work real well. There is a services area but I normally get very little traffic from that.
- Find an appropriate category
- In most areas if you submit to the wrong category you will be flagged in minutes, and if you have sent in many of these you will be banned within an hour.
- Write a good descriptive ad
- Include a picture
- Give them a good deal
- Give them the information on how to buy it
- And THEN in a less obvious location add a link to your website.
- Adding a link is against the TOS in all but the services category. Don't make this the focal point of your ad.
Also, remember CraigsList is policed by the users or viewers. In some areas the rules are strictly enforced in others the viewers are a little more relaxed and are not as quick to flag you.
Liven up your Craigslist ads with CSS
I've discussed the advantages of using HTML in your Craigslist and eBay ads to add more appeal to your items. While you can do a lot with HTML to greatly increase the quality of your ad, HTML still has many limitations.
Which brings me to my next topic CSS. With CSS you can do all of the formatting possible on the web which includes various things you can do to allow you to add a link to your ad with out getting flagged (Craigslist only, links are not recommended for eBay except where they allow them).
The main thing to note is that Craigslist does not allow for the more efficient external linking of CSS code, therefore you need to do all your CSS inline. That means adding the code to every html tag instead of putting it once on an external page and linking to the page.
The actual code used for inline CSS is exactly the same as when you do an external page, for example
Most ads include one or more images, often you want to have text on one side of the image. One way to do this is to add a style to the image alt tag for example.
style=”float: left; margin: 10px;” would allow text to be displayed on the right side of the picture and would add a margin around the image so that the text would not touch it. Simply cut and paste this code after the “alt”
So far so good, what about text? Here is a bunch of things you can do. Leave off any of the font changes that you don't want.
style=”font-weight: bold; font-size: larger; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: small-caps; text-decoration: underline;”
Put a div around the text you wish to have this affect. Right after the "div" in the div tag add the style div style="%u2026."
Pretty easy. Now I've added a font weight which makes the text in the div bold,
I've made the font size larger than normal, the style is italic the letters will be small-caps and the text will be underlined.
In a future post I will discuss how you can use this to "hide" links in your ad.
Link Hiding with CSS
First thing to note is, if you are planning to use this on your websites, this is likely to be considered "Black hat" by the search engines. While at this time they are unlikely to be able to detect it, as with most black hat techniques it is rarely worth it in the long run.
However I have used it at times to help promote a site using CraigsList. The "Flagging Police" are often a little more active in certain cities, so sometimes this technique is helpful.
Normally the best way to be able to include a link to your site in an ad is to create a high quality ad with all the information in the ad that a reader might want, and then as an after thought add the link to your site for more information. In most cases we really do want people to find the link and use it to get to your site, so hiding it is counter productive.
At times though, you might want to add links to pages of your site to encourage the search engines to index a page. Yes, I know that CraigsList adds the NoFollow attribute, however it is difficult to really tell how much that means to Google, and no reason to believe that the other search engines pay any attention to it.
To understand how to hide a link, you first need to know that link text is just regular text that has a default style attached to it. Therefore you just need to override any style properties that you don't want. In most cases the default link style is blue text with an underscore. To over ride these two style properties you add something like this after the “a” of the link style=”text-decoration:none; color:Black”. The text-decoration is what controls the underline and of course the "color" affects the color of the text.
In addition to this, there is also the issue of the persons cursor turning to the hand and your link url being added to the footer of the browser. To change this requires you use the OnMouseOver event on the anchor tag "a". But, that would be discussed in another post if I notice that the commentors of this post seem to be interested.
