I was debating on whether to release this to you guys or not...but I figured what the hey...i'll give back to the forum....This will benefit you guys on here that are a new guy all the way to the veteran….without giving away every little thing I have in my bag of tricks….And also leaving enough room for more in depth things in the future....
This is an e-book that I am releasing [Unedited]....so if anyone reproduces this or any part of this e-book or distributes this without my permission you are violating copyright laws and prepare to have a lawyer....
These are all methods I use and continue to use...so if anyone disagrees with them thats fine, just take it up with me personally and don't be a flame troll!
With that in mind let’s get started with an Overview of Craigslist and its benefits……
The Background
First of all last quote I heard stated that Craigslist gets somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 million unique viewers every single day….I know this makes most marketers see dollar signs…BUT unless you know how to harness these 20 million viewers…Craigslist will just be a huge waste of time for you….
Let me give you the basics then I will get to some tips and tricks I learned along the way from starting at 0$ a month and going to between $4-6k per month in short order and keeping steady at that income…
First of All most of all the sections on CL are going to need Phone Verified Accts (PVA’s)….You can purchase these or make them yourself…if you do purchase them I would recommend The Account Super-Store(see below for address)…. But not for the obvious reasons that it’s my site…
The main reason is because CL FREQUENTLY changes things up and I know the quality of the accounts that are made….there have been numerous companies out there trying to sell their CL account’s to customers and these accounts were created wrong leaving “trails” to each account (such as IP address being the same, similar phone numbers and many other things). These “trails” left on these accounts have caused many a marketer to be frustrated when all 100 of their CL PVA’s were shut down in short order by CL…and this left them without a way to make income and without the money they paid for their accounts!….Don’t skimp on your account creator you get what you pay for!
If you post in a section that does not need CL PVA’s your still gonna need emails…I recommend gmails because of the ease of forwarding…(IE You can forward 1,000 gmails so that any messages that all those 1,000 receive will get forwarded to one central email. Simple eh?)
As far as posting in concerned these are the guidelines I would observe BUT test for yourself and find out what works for you…
I keep it only 5 posts per IP address…No More…Otherwise You’ll run into ghosting problems (the ad shows up and looks like its live but when you look for it in the actual list under the category it’s not there.) I have not been ghosted in MONTHS literally!
I only do 2 posts max per day per email….and or same for CL PVA’s 2 posts max per account, per day. Otherwise You’ll get ghosted posts, banned emails and shut down PVA’s. Don’t throw you money down the drain…be wise and not overzealous in your posting…
As Far as IP Addresses go…Your gonna have to get DSL or Dialup….These forms of connecting to the web are one of the few ways left that will give you a new IP address every time you login…which is what you will want (every 5 posts)…
Cable Internet for the most part does not do this…also Aircards (Sprint, Verizon etc) do change the IP address.....THOUGH they will not do you much good….I had to switch back to DSL when my Aircards stopped working on CL without an account.
What happened was that CL obtained a list of the IP addresses that Sprint and Verizon used for their Aircards and when I tried to post on CL with an Aircard it was asking me for A CL PVA account….yet I would go that same city and section with my DSL connected…No account needed or asked for…yeah it sucks….I had to sink $300 in getting rid of those Aircards….I would recommend against this….
Also people can go the proxies route of changing their IP address…I have not though it is a viable option that many use…but its gonna cost you for good exclusive proxies…you’ll learn very quickly why free proxies do not work if you try and go that route…don’t skimp!
Though you do not need it I would recommend a good posting software…..this will allow you to post hundred of posts per day…if you know what your doing…I personally use AdsonCraigs poster and I would recommend it to anyone….though there are a lot of folks that use Admaster as well…I like Adsoncraigs because they have a captcha bypass system where I do not need to enter a captcha image anymore! Others you hire out help to enter the captcha’s for you…which is a pain and costs you more $$….
The Method
There are a lot of different ways you can skin a cat….(though I haven’t tried)….CL is no different…
There are text ads, picture ads, and clickable picture ads…
I has been my experience that with each one of these.... the more sophisticated of an ad type you use, the quicker the ad gets flagged by CL or other users.....Though the double edged sword is the more sophisticated the ad is the quicker the hits come in….
The main two methods I use in the picture ad and the text ad…though not in the way most would think….
First of all you need a product to market…I would recommend searching thru Clickbank or a CPA company(azoogle.com, Copeac.com, clickbooth.com among others) for a good product/offer…Though I will say I have made all my money thru Clickbank….(Better Networker's Product also!)
Go to a webdomain site (such as Godaddy.com, or any place that offers URL forwarding) and what I did was buy a .info domain from Godaddy.com for $0.99 and then use their URL forwarding function so that I can transpose a copy of my product’s hoplink (specifically given to me for a particular product by Clickbank or a CPA company....it is in other words the landing page)…..and turn on masking and use it!
This allows a person to go to say http://www.fluffybunny.info and see a the exact same thing as if they clicked my hoplink directly….the only difference it makes it harder to steal sales(which happens a lot on Clickbank if you don’t properly cloak your links) and also it gives a lot of credibility to your product cause it appears that you own the product because you own the domain…
Once you create a domain with a product you want to market you need to make an ad and save it as a picture file… I use Microsoft Office Publisher and I make a nice looking ad with a picture as its center-piece and add couple bullet points and then in big letters I put my domain at the bottom and the top…
Person comes to you CL ad, sees the picture ad and it creates interest or curiosity(don’t give too much info you’ll shoot yourself in the foot) and they see you web address at the bottom of the picture ad and then enter it into their browser and off they go!
If you are unfamiliar with HTML you gonna need to research image hosting using HTML…
Here’s a trick….Go to your now saved picture ad(in its own folder) and click copy and then re-paste it 100 times so you now have 100 copies of the same picture……Here a sneaky trick….In order to make your ad’s harder to track take a batch of 5-10 ads and highlight them and rename them to all numeric names (546545314351453…etc) and keep doing this till all the pictures are renamed….
Here’s another trick....create a new Photobucket account every few days and rename these pics again in the same fashion whenever you change Photobucket accounts….But here’s a key, when you make a Photobucket account make it all numeric also…
There a method to this madness…If you have picture ad’s posted on CL and they are words and say hypothetically “fluffybunny1” as the picture name.... that makes it very easy to track when a person or a bot within Craigslist tracks down and staff deletes your posts….but imagine how much more of a chore it is for a person to track your posts down when every batch of ten ads has a different numeric name AND your Photobucket ad URL looks like this….
See how difficult it would be for a person or a bot to isolate the parts of that URL to pin it down and then find other posts of yours that are just like it…cause it’s hard to tell which part of the URL is a account part and which is the picture part…unless they look closely....it’s all numeric….Make Sense?
If not re-read it again till it does…
May seem complicated but it has practically eliminated me from being staff deleted and getting that horrific site(which is all too familiar to too many CL marketers) where all 200 of your posts you spent all morning posting being deleted within 10 minutes…Makes you wanna pull your hair out!
The trick of using a Text ad over and over and over again without being ghosted or getting a similar post error.
Here’s a trick not many people know about…and even fewer implement. I learned this and it took my text advertising to a new level…
I got tired of using picture ads and wanted to change it up…so I went back to text ad’s.
Problem is that with text ad’s you have to change each text body up significantly to avoid being ghosted or getting a similar posting error…
Here’s how I overcame this problem…
There are certain text encoding types out there (they will remain unnamed and I let you figure it out) that when you post them into the Craigslist text body section all they appear as is gibberish and
sequences of letters and numbers that make no sense what so ever to the human eye(do some research and experimentation)…BUT when they are inputted into the CL ad body section where you put the main bulk of your ad body….and click post…GUESS WHAT?!.....CL converts it for you! So it appears in English…but all the bots and humans operation Craigslist see is the encoding…
So copy this encoded text (there are sites that do conversion of text to encoded text for you!) Then go to Wikipedia and copy some random stuff and slap some random unrelated text at the bottom of your ad and VIOLA! Your ad goes live and it can be reposted over and over again..just change the Wikipedia text at the bottom with every post if you post manually or if you have a posting program that does it automatically then don’t worry about this step…Or just change the "file" that your posting program pulls from for it's random text..usually its a .txt file so you can put anything you want in there!
Realize the method behind this is that bots looks for similarities and similar words in posts to connect them…but there is NO method or similarities to a bunch of gibberish encoding….hence a lot harder to track….AND it does not seem that the bots catch on to this encoded text in terms of similarities...
Doing these methods outlined above will allow you to troubleshoot much easier as well….Because you know unless CL changed something dramatically then it’s either your email address, your IP address or the fact that CL figured out your Photobucket account number that is causing your ad’s to be ghosted or deleted all of a sudden in rapid order...
Winding Down
This is certainly not the extent of my CL knowledge and I could not have covered every one of the CL bases with this short, but very specific and to the point E-book.
There may be another free e-book in the future if this one generates enough interest…
BUT the key to all of this is to test, test, test and when in doubt…TEST MORE!
These methods will not carry any old, dumb, and lazy marketer to online marketing nirvana! But if You use these methods and apply a good work habit to find the right product and the right category to market it within CL...You will be Golden!
I will tell you if you dig in and test your products on CL and within a week you are not getting a good conversion for untargeted traffic (I get 1:100-300) conversion average depending on the product….If your product does not produce conversions with at least these types of numbers..then MOVE on! Stop trying to have a firm grip on an empty sack by holding onto a poorly converting product or offering that you won’t let go of because of your lack mentality…thinking in your own mind that there might not be many other products/offers out there that will convert…
THEY ARE THERE TRUST ME! You have to TEST, TEST, TEST……and find the ones that produce…think outside the box….search the entire Clickbank or CPA database for 10 hours and write down all the offers products and landing pages that catch your eye…Because chances are, if those products caught your eye and attention they will for others as well….and if in reading that product’s landing page it makes you wanna buy it…DON’T….BUT try marketing that offer, because chances are others who see that page will want to purchase it as well after seeing the landing page!
I came up with about 20 product/offer ideas within a few short hours of surfing the databases…so do this and brainstorm!
I have found that the things that I have pursued the heaviest in the past in my marketing efforts were ideas that I myself had came up with/products I had found….NOT handouts and ideas others had given me….
This is the reason I gave a lot of meat in this e-book but with some things left unsaid for you to pioneer these new uncharted areas yourself….
Closing Words
Lastly the best way to go from $0-$6000/month in income on CL is to keep pioneering new products….all you need is 2-3 converting products to bring in $200 a day total and bingo you are there….and considering I get over 1000 hits some days on my CL ad’s......reaching $200 a day is about as easy as lacing up your shoes!
Wanna give yourself a raise? Just add another product to your ************** that converts well and brings in another $100 a day and BINGO!....You just gave yourself a 30k a year raise!
This is an e-book that I am releasing [Unedited]....so if anyone reproduces this or any part of this e-book or distributes this without my permission you are violating copyright laws and prepare to have a lawyer....
These are all methods I use and continue to use...so if anyone disagrees with them thats fine, just take it up with me personally and don't be a flame troll!
With that in mind let’s get started with an Overview of Craigslist and its benefits……
The Background
First of all last quote I heard stated that Craigslist gets somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 million unique viewers every single day….I know this makes most marketers see dollar signs…BUT unless you know how to harness these 20 million viewers…Craigslist will just be a huge waste of time for you….
Let me give you the basics then I will get to some tips and tricks I learned along the way from starting at 0$ a month and going to between $4-6k per month in short order and keeping steady at that income…
First of All most of all the sections on CL are going to need Phone Verified Accts (PVA’s)….You can purchase these or make them yourself…if you do purchase them I would recommend The Account Super-Store(see below for address)…. But not for the obvious reasons that it’s my site…
The main reason is because CL FREQUENTLY changes things up and I know the quality of the accounts that are made….there have been numerous companies out there trying to sell their CL account’s to customers and these accounts were created wrong leaving “trails” to each account (such as IP address being the same, similar phone numbers and many other things). These “trails” left on these accounts have caused many a marketer to be frustrated when all 100 of their CL PVA’s were shut down in short order by CL…and this left them without a way to make income and without the money they paid for their accounts!….Don’t skimp on your account creator you get what you pay for!
If you post in a section that does not need CL PVA’s your still gonna need emails…I recommend gmails because of the ease of forwarding…(IE You can forward 1,000 gmails so that any messages that all those 1,000 receive will get forwarded to one central email. Simple eh?)
As far as posting in concerned these are the guidelines I would observe BUT test for yourself and find out what works for you…
I keep it only 5 posts per IP address…No More…Otherwise You’ll run into ghosting problems (the ad shows up and looks like its live but when you look for it in the actual list under the category it’s not there.) I have not been ghosted in MONTHS literally!
I only do 2 posts max per day per email….and or same for CL PVA’s 2 posts max per account, per day. Otherwise You’ll get ghosted posts, banned emails and shut down PVA’s. Don’t throw you money down the drain…be wise and not overzealous in your posting…
As Far as IP Addresses go…Your gonna have to get DSL or Dialup….These forms of connecting to the web are one of the few ways left that will give you a new IP address every time you login…which is what you will want (every 5 posts)…
Cable Internet for the most part does not do this…also Aircards (Sprint, Verizon etc) do change the IP address.....THOUGH they will not do you much good….I had to switch back to DSL when my Aircards stopped working on CL without an account.
What happened was that CL obtained a list of the IP addresses that Sprint and Verizon used for their Aircards and when I tried to post on CL with an Aircard it was asking me for A CL PVA account….yet I would go that same city and section with my DSL connected…No account needed or asked for…yeah it sucks….I had to sink $300 in getting rid of those Aircards….I would recommend against this….
Also people can go the proxies route of changing their IP address…I have not though it is a viable option that many use…but its gonna cost you for good exclusive proxies…you’ll learn very quickly why free proxies do not work if you try and go that route…don’t skimp!
Though you do not need it I would recommend a good posting software…..this will allow you to post hundred of posts per day…if you know what your doing…I personally use AdsonCraigs poster and I would recommend it to anyone….though there are a lot of folks that use Admaster as well…I like Adsoncraigs because they have a captcha bypass system where I do not need to enter a captcha image anymore! Others you hire out help to enter the captcha’s for you…which is a pain and costs you more $$….
The Method
There are a lot of different ways you can skin a cat….(though I haven’t tried)….CL is no different…
There are text ads, picture ads, and clickable picture ads…
I has been my experience that with each one of these.... the more sophisticated of an ad type you use, the quicker the ad gets flagged by CL or other users.....Though the double edged sword is the more sophisticated the ad is the quicker the hits come in….
The main two methods I use in the picture ad and the text ad…though not in the way most would think….
First of all you need a product to market…I would recommend searching thru Clickbank or a CPA company(azoogle.com, Copeac.com, clickbooth.com among others) for a good product/offer…Though I will say I have made all my money thru Clickbank….(Better Networker's Product also!)
Go to a webdomain site (such as Godaddy.com, or any place that offers URL forwarding) and what I did was buy a .info domain from Godaddy.com for $0.99 and then use their URL forwarding function so that I can transpose a copy of my product’s hoplink (specifically given to me for a particular product by Clickbank or a CPA company....it is in other words the landing page)…..and turn on masking and use it!
This allows a person to go to say http://www.fluffybunny.info and see a the exact same thing as if they clicked my hoplink directly….the only difference it makes it harder to steal sales(which happens a lot on Clickbank if you don’t properly cloak your links) and also it gives a lot of credibility to your product cause it appears that you own the product because you own the domain…
Once you create a domain with a product you want to market you need to make an ad and save it as a picture file… I use Microsoft Office Publisher and I make a nice looking ad with a picture as its center-piece and add couple bullet points and then in big letters I put my domain at the bottom and the top…
Person comes to you CL ad, sees the picture ad and it creates interest or curiosity(don’t give too much info you’ll shoot yourself in the foot) and they see you web address at the bottom of the picture ad and then enter it into their browser and off they go!
If you are unfamiliar with HTML you gonna need to research image hosting using HTML…
Here’s a trick….Go to your now saved picture ad(in its own folder) and click copy and then re-paste it 100 times so you now have 100 copies of the same picture……Here a sneaky trick….In order to make your ad’s harder to track take a batch of 5-10 ads and highlight them and rename them to all numeric names (546545314351453…etc) and keep doing this till all the pictures are renamed….
Here’s another trick....create a new Photobucket account every few days and rename these pics again in the same fashion whenever you change Photobucket accounts….But here’s a key, when you make a Photobucket account make it all numeric also…
There a method to this madness…If you have picture ad’s posted on CL and they are words and say hypothetically “fluffybunny1” as the picture name.... that makes it very easy to track when a person or a bot within Craigslist tracks down and staff deletes your posts….but imagine how much more of a chore it is for a person to track your posts down when every batch of ten ads has a different numeric name AND your Photobucket ad URL looks like this….
See how difficult it would be for a person or a bot to isolate the parts of that URL to pin it down and then find other posts of yours that are just like it…cause it’s hard to tell which part of the URL is a account part and which is the picture part…unless they look closely....it’s all numeric….Make Sense?
If not re-read it again till it does…
May seem complicated but it has practically eliminated me from being staff deleted and getting that horrific site(which is all too familiar to too many CL marketers) where all 200 of your posts you spent all morning posting being deleted within 10 minutes…Makes you wanna pull your hair out!
The trick of using a Text ad over and over and over again without being ghosted or getting a similar post error.
Here’s a trick not many people know about…and even fewer implement. I learned this and it took my text advertising to a new level…
I got tired of using picture ads and wanted to change it up…so I went back to text ad’s.
Problem is that with text ad’s you have to change each text body up significantly to avoid being ghosted or getting a similar posting error…
Here’s how I overcame this problem…
There are certain text encoding types out there (they will remain unnamed and I let you figure it out) that when you post them into the Craigslist text body section all they appear as is gibberish and
sequences of letters and numbers that make no sense what so ever to the human eye(do some research and experimentation)…BUT when they are inputted into the CL ad body section where you put the main bulk of your ad body….and click post…GUESS WHAT?!.....CL converts it for you! So it appears in English…but all the bots and humans operation Craigslist see is the encoding…
So copy this encoded text (there are sites that do conversion of text to encoded text for you!) Then go to Wikipedia and copy some random stuff and slap some random unrelated text at the bottom of your ad and VIOLA! Your ad goes live and it can be reposted over and over again..just change the Wikipedia text at the bottom with every post if you post manually or if you have a posting program that does it automatically then don’t worry about this step…Or just change the "file" that your posting program pulls from for it's random text..usually its a .txt file so you can put anything you want in there!
Realize the method behind this is that bots looks for similarities and similar words in posts to connect them…but there is NO method or similarities to a bunch of gibberish encoding….hence a lot harder to track….AND it does not seem that the bots catch on to this encoded text in terms of similarities...
Doing these methods outlined above will allow you to troubleshoot much easier as well….Because you know unless CL changed something dramatically then it’s either your email address, your IP address or the fact that CL figured out your Photobucket account number that is causing your ad’s to be ghosted or deleted all of a sudden in rapid order...
Winding Down
This is certainly not the extent of my CL knowledge and I could not have covered every one of the CL bases with this short, but very specific and to the point E-book.
There may be another free e-book in the future if this one generates enough interest…
BUT the key to all of this is to test, test, test and when in doubt…TEST MORE!
These methods will not carry any old, dumb, and lazy marketer to online marketing nirvana! But if You use these methods and apply a good work habit to find the right product and the right category to market it within CL...You will be Golden!
I will tell you if you dig in and test your products on CL and within a week you are not getting a good conversion for untargeted traffic (I get 1:100-300) conversion average depending on the product….If your product does not produce conversions with at least these types of numbers..then MOVE on! Stop trying to have a firm grip on an empty sack by holding onto a poorly converting product or offering that you won’t let go of because of your lack mentality…thinking in your own mind that there might not be many other products/offers out there that will convert…
THEY ARE THERE TRUST ME! You have to TEST, TEST, TEST……and find the ones that produce…think outside the box….search the entire Clickbank or CPA database for 10 hours and write down all the offers products and landing pages that catch your eye…Because chances are, if those products caught your eye and attention they will for others as well….and if in reading that product’s landing page it makes you wanna buy it…DON’T….BUT try marketing that offer, because chances are others who see that page will want to purchase it as well after seeing the landing page!
I came up with about 20 product/offer ideas within a few short hours of surfing the databases…so do this and brainstorm!
I have found that the things that I have pursued the heaviest in the past in my marketing efforts were ideas that I myself had came up with/products I had found….NOT handouts and ideas others had given me….
This is the reason I gave a lot of meat in this e-book but with some things left unsaid for you to pioneer these new uncharted areas yourself….
Closing Words
Lastly the best way to go from $0-$6000/month in income on CL is to keep pioneering new products….all you need is 2-3 converting products to bring in $200 a day total and bingo you are there….and considering I get over 1000 hits some days on my CL ad’s......reaching $200 a day is about as easy as lacing up your shoes!
Wanna give yourself a raise? Just add another product to your ************** that converts well and brings in another $100 a day and BINGO!....You just gave yourself a 30k a year raise!
