ARE YOU USING CRAIG’S LIST?

ARE YOU USING CRAIG’S LIST?KL Nichols

If you aren’t aware of www.CraigsList.com , you are in for a treat. Craig’s List Is a huge network of things for sale covering most of the US, if not the world?

Craig’s List was started by an aging hippie in San Francisco approximately 7-10 years ago as a place to give stuff away. When the word got around, and it did quickly as the Internet was just exploding and America was looking for just such a website! It exploded so fast it out grew the San Francisco website and users were clamoring for their own city home page! So CL did just that and never looked back! So almost every major and a few minor cities have their own city page.

Now, after all of these years, you can still advertise FR*EE on CL! Not that it will always be that way? About a year or so ago, the Mother of all Websites, eBay bought 25% of Craig’s List. The investment turned out to be another snafu for eBay, Craig’s List has resisted charging for their ads, and now there is a Law Suite between CL & eBay trying for a change in whatever agreement that they originally entered into, what ever that was.

Any observer of eBay knows that they paid Kruse Auctions $250 million for their auction business a few years ago and then a couple of years later sold it back to Kruse for $50 million. Even a dummy can see that wasn’t a good business deal!

Enough about business, let’s get down to how you can use of Craig’s List to sell cars and parts.

First (this is for the beginners) you surf on over to www.CraigsList.com and then find your city or a city near you that you would like to advertise you merchandise in. This brings up a big complaint and something that you will have to work around, when you advertise on, let’s say the Kansas City Missouri page, the only people who will see your ad are the people who actually visit the KCMO page, and here’s another glitch, Craig’s list would let you list the same thing in more than one city…. A real big pain, but if you work with it, changing your wording and rename your pictures, etc, etc, you may be able to list on another city page. One good item is that you can post up to 4 pictures with your ad and for pete’s sake do post as many pictures an you can. Collectors are a visual group and will think you are hiding something if you don’t.
Okay, there are some other irritations with CL, the main one after the above problems is that if you post on a big city site, such as Kansas City Mo, your ad will disappear in a day or two because every ad is listed at the top of the page and if there is a lot of ads posted, pretty soon your ad is three or four pages down and CL only lists the 100 most recent ads first and then they post the link to the last 100 ads on a link at the bottom of the page, and so on…
My advice and you have to do it this way, is to cancel your ad if it hasn’t expired and repost it at the top of the list every 3 or 4 days or so. When you first register with CL, you will be sent to your back office where you can control your ads, there are no limits to the ads you post just as long as they are different. I suggest that you bookmark your back office so that you can go right to it when you want to. Another little detail I probably should mention, the ad posting times run from 7 days in major markets to 45 days in smaller markets. That’s just the way it is, deal with it!
CL doesn’t like links away from their website. Sometimes they will let you do it, sometimes not. Also, remember I told you this was a aging hippies website? There is a rating system on each page, and if the visitor thinks your ad or if CL thinks your ad is inappropriate, miscategorized, prohibited, or spam/overpost (this means posted more than once) , the reader can flag your ad and if CL agrees with them your ad is outathere! There is no court of recourse! If you run into a antagonistic local, post on another city page.

This is just a little info and if you have any questions, email me at route66er@cox.net and I will try to answer your question.

Copyright 2008 KL Nichols