Giving Back: a Craigslist posting guide
For some time now, I've been posting on Craigslist.
I've been through many trials and tribulations, but thanks to the very helpful members of this amazing forum, I finally started figuring things out for my own.
Now, I'm posting 200+ ads/day consistently, and making a steady living.
So why this post?
I want to give back to the community that helped raise me up.
I believe in paying it forward. That's an important value to me. Call it karma, or whatever, but the many blessed dividends I've had in my life are really do to helping others.
I hope this guide will cut your learning curve in half. All of my advice stems from posting firsthand.
IP solution
- An IP address is the way that computers identify each other on the internet. I needed a good way for these IP addresses to be different in Craigslist's eyes. I've noticed there's a *LOT* of speculation about this on WarriorForum. People will recommend different things without ever trying what they recommend.
What didn't work:
I tried HideMyAss and free proxies found online (they are everywhere). Out of about 260 posts, about 248 of these were flagged and deleted immediately. That's a 95% flagging rate.
- Some Craigslist posting experts on this forum have talked in length about WHY this approach fails. The idea is that Craigslist has already found and blacklisted a lot of these IPs.
- Public proxies run into the same issue. Go ahead and try and you'll see what I mean.
What did work:
- using residential DSL lines (RDSL).
- This worked better than VPNs and public proxies but after about 1-2 weeks of posting (~55% success rate), they were blacklisted too (~10% success rate)
- I'm fairly certain that Craigslist is able to track these residential DSL lines across accounts.
Renting VPSes and mounting personal proxy there also works.
- Since I could never be sure that other people weren't sharing the proxies, I purchased a cheap VPS for $5/mo and setup a Squid Proxy with help from one of the members here. I am not technical by any means, but it was pretty easy to do.
Resetting your router for a new IP
- If you force your router to use a different MAC address, you will get a new IP address. So it's pretty simple to post, then go into your router and change the IP address, then post again. As you setup more computers, you will be able to post faster simultaneously!
Phone Verification
- Almost all sections of Craigslist require phone verification at one point or another. It's one of the hardest part about posting on Craigslist.
- VoIP numbers like Twilio/Google Voice/Callfire all don't work.
- Craigslist can detect whether a phone number is VoIP or not. They just never send you the phone verification code.
- Asking friends does work. This one is pretty obvious but you can ask any of your friends in US or Canada to help you phone verify. Leveraging my Facebook network, I phone-verified about 80 or so accounts. You should always start off with this.
- Some carriers (but not all) will lease you a line with refundable fees. I have friends now opening lines, phone verifying and then refunding.
- Purchasing prepaid SIM cards
- I started purchasing SIM cards and plugged them into old phones to phone verify. It worked great and is still working to this day. the troublesome part of it is that most online prepaid SIM cards don't actually work... you have to find ones that Craigslist has not already blacklisted already. Private message me if you want more tips here as I'm reluctant to post this information publicly.
Content
- Adding the same URL to the posts caused a LOT of deletions. Craigslist can track your URLs across posts.
- Automated spinners would work for a little bit and then start flagging hard. I recommend AGAINST automated spinners like WordAI as they tend to cycle through the same permutations.
- Scraping is pulling content from another site. This almost always resulted in a bad live rate for me. Craigslist can track content on other sites. A lot of times Craigslist has deals with popular websites to "share" their content so they know if you are simply scraping off another site.
- Other users are scraping content too, so Craigslist starts to see the same content over and over, resulting in flagging or banning your account.
- Hiring content writers and manual spinners to create content at scale.
- You can find good ones on Upwork to write your content.
Do manual Craigslist posting teams work? -
You can find a ton of Craigslist posters on Upwork and internet marketing forums. The truth is that 90% of them claim to know how to post, until your ads get flagged after a few hours.
- There are too many horror stories about outsourcing Craigslist posting to Upwork freelancers outside of the US. Buyer beware.
- My experience: poor communication, hard-to-track live ads, high risk of being scammed
Do Craigslist posting services work?
- Difference between a "Craigslist posting service" and a "Craigslist posting team": these services generally have a website that show you all the live ads being posted in *real-time* instead of handing you a spreadsheet. You can usually specify that a live ad only counts after it's been live for 3 hours. Everything is automated and no risk of being scammed.
- As mentioned by many other Craigslist expert posters here, the best posting services are usually "private" Craigslist posting services and not on "Google". They usually require a minimum amount to post. These guys usually handle everything for you and work with you to formulate the best content.
- I've had good success with Craigslist posting services when I wanted to scale up for certain niches.
Do Craigslist bots work?
- Do-it-yourself bots like CLADGenius and other bots don't work.
- My experience: I have used almost all of them, and I can tell you from firsthand experience that all of them gave me terrible results. CLADGenius was the best of the worst but crashed so often and got my accounts banned. Not worth the $3000 price tag.
So after all this work, why post on Craigslist? After all, it seems like a mountain to climb.
Well, fellow Warrior members, the effort is certainly worth it - the payouts on Craigslist are amazing as there is high barrier to entry to post. It might seem hard at first, but if you can find your niche and find a way to post, you'll be making steady, monthly income for days.
Never give up.
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