How To Dominate With Free Ad Posting On Craigslist
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
I’m going to show you the easiest way that I know of to start getting leads and sales for your opportunity. This works especially well with online businesses, MLM’s, launches, Clickbank products, e-books, anything you can think of.
All you need to know how to do is point, click, and type. So stay with me.
I am going to step you through my own style of free ad posting on Craigslist. Learning this method of free ad posting will generate leads and sales while you sleep. You will be able to track the ads and test out many of your own styles and strategies to figure out what works best. Free ad posting is awesome because once you figure out what works, you can then buy paid ads knowing full well that your ad is as good as it can be.
Free Ad Posting 101
The first step in creating a reliable free ad posting adventure is to learn how to track your own advertisements. By tracking your ads, you will be able to see how many impressions (views) it gets, how many of those people clicked through to your site, and then you can see how many people opted in for your email list or bought your product.
To track my own ads, I use Craigslist Ad Tracker
You can sign up for a free trial here: 14-day Free Trial
Keep in mind, when your trial runs out, you DON’T have to buy this if you don’t want to. Remember, this is free ad posting. You can create another free trial account in about 2 minutes and continue with your free ad posting adventure. I typically use Mailinator to create new email accounts on the fly. For example, in the email field you can just type in “craigslistbob1@mailinator.com” and Mailinator will automatically create that email address for you on the fly.
Also note that Craigslist itself does not accept Mailinator accounts. However, you can probably find a similar touch-and-go email service that will work for Craigslist. If you do find one, please let me know in the comments below.
Free Ad Posting 101 – Understanding Craigslist
When dealing with free ad posting, its important to understand how Craigslist works. You must keep in mind what Craigslist was originally designed to do. Keep these points in mind to ensure that your ad will stay up as long as possible and get the most views and clicks.
1. Craigslist is a place where people go to find REAL ads for REAL job positions. This is absolutely crucial. You don’t want your ad to look like spam or crap! If you want to generate good traffic and click-thru rate you need to make your ad look real. If your ad doesn’t look like a real job offer, you can kiss your free ad posting adventure goodbye.
2. Craigslist is LOCAL. This means that you are only allowed to post ads within the state your current IP address is located. So, if you live in Los Angeles, post your ad in Los Angeles or San Diego. If your IP address is in California, do not post your ad in Colorado or New York. Craigslist will see this and you will get banned.
3. You also don’t want your ad to stand out. Don’t use any special characters like *#@!*&$^%! Don’t post your ad in all caps. Make your ad look nice, appealing to the eye. When doing free ad posting, blending in will allow you to create the best possible ad that won’t get flagged as spam or taken down. This is especially important when you get into paid ads. You gotta keep it real.
4. Make your ad as AMBIGUOUS as possible. The more ambiguous your ad is, the more mysterious it is, and therefore the more clicks you will get. Short ads also tend to get more clicks because people will actually read all of it. If you get too specific and describe every aspect of your business, you are literally flushing your free ad posting adventure down the toilet.
5. Post ONE ad per day, per account, per IP address. I can’t stress this enough. Take it SLOW. If you try to go crazy and post 2 or 3 ads per day in different places with different accounts you will quickly find yourself overwhelmed and banned. Focus more on following up with all of your leads rather than trying to get a million visitors. Just because its free ad posting doesn’t mean you have license to spam.
Creating Your Ad
Now you are actually going to create your ad.
The first thing you need to do is create a folder on your desktop called “Craigslist Lead Farming” or “Craigslist Free Ad Posting” or something along those lines. You will be storing your different ads and images in this folder. This helps you to stay organized so you don’t go crazy and lose track of everything.
Follow these simple steps to create the best ad:
1. I like to find an ad that looks good to me. Then, I copy the text to a simple word document. I reword the ad a little bit, change it up here and there, and improve it if I can. At the end of your ad, you need to have a call to action like “Click here to watch our free presentation!” You will want to change the color of this text to light blue (hyperlink color). Also be sure to save the text document as “Advert 1” or something like that.
2. Make sure your cursor and the blinking text insertion indicator is out way of the text. Now press PrintScrn. Print Screen is usually located above your arrow keys on your keyboard to the right of the F1-F12 keys. What this does is it takes a picture of your screen and adds it to the clipboard. Open up ms paint or Photoshop or any program that you can use to crop an image. Paste in your image (Edit > Paste or Ctrl + v).
3. Now you need to take the selection tool and select the entire ad. Make your selection around the text, be sure that you leave a small margin of white space around the text. Click on Crop and then save the image. Name the image with the same title as what you named your text file. In our case, “Advert 1” will be our title. Save the file as a .PNG file. This is important because .JPG files generally don’t look like real text. JPG files look very fuzzy and fake.
Tracking Your Free Ad Posting
Now this is the fun part!
You need to upload your Advert 1 image to an image hosting website. I use Photo Bucket. PhotoBucket is free and very easy to use. Make an account and you will have it for life. Once you have your account, log in. Click on UPLOAD at the top. Find your image and upload it. Here is my ad. If you click on it, which I suggest you do now, it will take you to my capture page.
Then you want to navigate to your image in your ‘library’ and click on the “direct link” text to copy the link to your clipboard.
Now you need to make a text file in your “Craigslist Lead Farming” folder. Name the text file Free Ad Posting Info or something else that you will recognize. This is how I organize my text file:
Paste the URL to your image into your text document. Make sure this URL works by pasting it into the Address bar and hitting enter.
Copy this text to your ad info document: <img src=”imageurl” alt=”” />
Now, take your image URL and paste it where it says “imageurl”. BE SURE NOT TO DELETE THE QUOTATION MARKS.
Your finished image code should look like this:
<img src=”http://i480.photobucket.com/albums/rr167/icemastap/advert1.png” alt=”” />
Except, it should obviously have the link to your image and not mine!
Now, a side note. I highly suggest you get the paid version of Craigslist Ad Tracker – If you are using the paid version, you can upload your images to the ‘image tracking’ section. In this section, you can copy down the image code for your link because CAT will host your images for you
CAT will also host your images on hundreds of domains! Every time you open the page your image link will go to a different domain name. This is good for security reasons and not getting ghosted on Craigslist. However, I realize that this is a ‘free ad posting’ blog post, so keep it free if you want.
Back To Craigslist Ad Tracker
Now go back to your ad tracker.
Now you need to go to the left and click on link tracking. Fill out everything like I have in the image above.
The tracker title will not be visible to others, it is just for your reference. I usually name my ads with the date followed by the name of the advert image and then the location for the ad. So for example my tracker title would be ‘3/8/13 – Advert 3 – Los Angeles.’
Paste in your completed image code into the Link text or image code section.
Destination URL: This is important. This is the page that people will be sent to if they click on your image. You want to send them to your capture page most of the time. Or possibly a video. Remember to always have your affiliate ID at the end of the URL!
For example:
Leave everything else at default and hit generate code. Copy this block of html code to your ad info text document. Now go make your free ad posting on Craigslist and PASTE this image code into the ad text area where you would normally type out your ad. Fill in the rest however you want. Remember to make your title fairly ambiguous but still realistic.
When you click to the next page it should show the image of the ad you created. Click on it. It should take you to your desired capture page. Be sure that everything is working right before you post your ad! Your free ad posting adventure is great and all, but if your ad doesn’t work you are just wasting your time!
Once you do this you may need to enter phone verification. I highly suggest getting disposable phone numbers from PVA Spot rather than risking your real phone numbers. Seeing as your ad may potentially get removed, you don’t want your real phone number getting blacklisted from Craigslist. It can take a few days to get a new number forwarded to your phone, but its worth it.
After you verify with your phone number, pay for your ad if you are in one of the cities where job ads are required to be paid for.
That’s it! I know this sounded like a lot but its really not that bad once you get in a flow. It should take about 10-20 minutes to set up an ad and get it running.
Tracking Your Free Ad Posting
Click ‘Trackers’ on the left side of your CAT dashboard. From here you can select different ways to view your ad. You can see the CTR, the overall views, as well as the hourly views.
I will be creating an advanced guide to free ad posting as well as paid ad posting in the near future, so stay frosty!
The good news is, there is a MUCH easier way to make money than what I described in this post… and I had to save it for last because I wanted you to see how problematic traditional methods are… It’s time for you to make it easier… it’s time to get started…
Click the button above to find out how I make a TON of money online ‘working‘ about 2 hours a day. If you like this post, please leave me a comment below.
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