Craigslist Gurus - Text or clickable graphics ad?

Thanks to Dan aka gettingon for some great craigslsit advice sent to my inbox.

Is there any other suggestions or advice out there on whether you find text or image ads more effective.

Thanks
Adrian

Where are you wanting to place ads on CL?

I would do txt ads and clickable ads together. Texts ads are less likely to be flagged than clickable ads. As well as txt ads have more keywords. By using both you get everything

Thanks for the tips everyone...

Just trying to put together a plan of attack on this venture...without detracting to much from my other.

Time to put together some sales copy...well...time to learn to put together sales copy...

dodging your question... but I shared with a student a while back about selling leads instead of selling services if your having a hard time with the "selling part"

He came back and said the he started posting CL ads with the tracking phone numbers and is having a lot of luck. You might try that as an addon?

I haven't tried it yet myself so it could all be smoke and mirrors but I don't see why it wouldn't work.

I've had impressive results using normal text ads, with graphic thumbnails of videos that link to youtube. Then my youtube videos squeeze them to my website.

The basic gist is I educate them first, then provide a compelling offer. However, the compelling offer isn't to make a sell or even get a lead. Its to get them to my youtube video. Once they make that click, I know they're interested. So the video does the job of more educating, then ends with my real offer.

Also, make it a habit of dropping tags in the bottom of your ads. Just hit the spacebar 5 times and put them all the way at the bottom. This will give your ads a longer life span.

For instance, I have people still going to ads that I must have posted over 2 months ago, thanks to having the right tags in my ad. This is something very few people mention when it comes to CL. Obviously its smart to have your keywords in the copy, but its smarter to consider that many people won't be typing those exact keywords.
Not to mention that its down right difficult to get all your needed keywords in 1 ad.

Just focus on a unique ad, that delivers great value by giving people information, that can help them immediately. Compell them to go to a video. Then use the video to close them. Thats the way I've been doing it for a while now. You can also use compelling thumbnails too. Like in one of my ads for black mold, the thumbnail of my video is a medical picture of a persons lungs. You can barely make out arrows pointing to particles inside the lungs. But you can't make out what the labels on the arrows say.

I did that on purpose. The mystery and fear compells people to immediately click on the thumbnail. Then I use various medical literature as a credibility anchor to compell people more. I do NOT try to scare people directly. As I present highly credible sources, I am careful to say things like "very few people have actually died from mold" etc etc. "But mold has been shown to cause attention deficit disorders, learning disorders, etc etc". This helps build trust and fear, while positioning me from a neutral standpoint. Its all about how you contrast things. Then at the end I position my offer.

-Red