Cracking the Craigslist Code: Going from $0-$6000/month!

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turbopugsleylx

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Oct 21, 2008
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THIS IS A MULTIPLE POST THREAD!​

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. :violin:

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.

Firstly most all of the sections on CL are going to need either Phone Verified Account (PVA’s) or Bulk Gmail accounts to be able to post to….The former if you have cable, wireless(clearwire, wifi etc) or most aircards or you may be posting in some sections that require PVA's (Erotics and Services) and the latter if you have DSL where you can change your IP by disconnecting the
modem for 30 seconds.

Regardless of which one you need you can purchase these or make them yourself(although its VERY time consuming and depends on how much money you want to make)…if you do purchase either of them I would recommend a company I have a long track record with called The Account Superstore.


The main reason is because CL FREQUENTLY changes things up and I know the quality of the accounts that The Account Superstore makes….there have been numerous companies out there trying to sell their CL account’s to customers and these accounts were created all wrong. (although there are some other good ones out there if you dig for them....)


Leaving “trails” to each account (such as IP address being the same; similar or sequential 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 Gmails…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 e-mail address. Pretty simple eh?)

Some IP address ranges have a soft-block on them which means you will need PVA's, this happened several months back with aircards(wireless laptop cards); all the IP address ranges that were connected with aircards were soft-blocked...and now needed PVA's.

The way to tell if your IP address range is softblocked and you need to use PVA's is to try and post in say the for sale section...if they always ask you for an account without being logged in..then your IP address range is softblocked.....and you need PVA's. If not you can use regular Gmails, unless your posting in certain PVA only sections (Erotics, Services etc)


What happened a few months back 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….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 using Gmails with no PVA's or 1 post per 24 hours per acct on PVA's(these are subject to change, you may need to experiment). If you do not follow these guidelines 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 e-mail….and or same for CL PVA’s 1 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 using Gmails)…

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.

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 would recommend having a custom posting software made for you by a programmer....or another option is to just pay for some one to post for you...this is much easier and you can get away with someone posting for you for around 80 cents per post or so....

I have personally used The Account Superstore in this respect as well....they do a good job with posting and are always available for questions or customer service and very frequently get back to customers within 8 hours max...regardless of it being the weekend or not...


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(hyper-linked pics)…
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 among others) for a good product/offer…Though I will say I have made all my money thru Clickbank….

Go to a webdomain site (such as Godaddy) and what I did was buy a .info domain from Godaddy for about 2 dollars or a .com domain for 10 dollars or so.....I think either will work but a .com is gonna look more professional and "authentic".
 
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Two Roads Diverged into a Yellow Wood​


Route 1: Heres a trick...pay attention.....On Godaddy I would 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 URL that tracks my sales)…..and turn on masking and use it! Masking makes it so that if my hoplink address is www.78748574trfhj.clickbank.com but my domain address is Used Cars - New Cars - Search New & Used Cars For Sale - carsales.com.au then they will see the domain(Used Cars - New Cars - Search New & Used Cars For Sale - carsales.com.au) not the hoplink(www.78748574trfhj.clickbank.com).

This allows a person to go to Used Cars - New Cars - Search New & Used Cars For Sale - carsales.com.au 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…

Route 2:

This is a killer route to take if you have internet marketing experience.....instead of going the forwarding route and just depending on the products landing page to sell the product; you make a type of landing page known as a "squeeze page".

This page is basically a page that separates the non-lookers from the lookers when it comes to prospects interested in your product/offer.....meaning they click your link or domain and they get taken to a page which has a "call to arms" (ie ACT now and get your "statement of benefit goes here"!) and below this call to arms it has a opt-in section where a prospect puts their first name and e-mail and hits "enter" to be taken to your domain(which is the product landing page provided by the affiliate network....(which you have cloaked like above using your own domain forwarded to the hoplink and masked)

This is the bomb! Because it does soo many things that make you money....

#1-----It increases your products conversion and stops non-lookers from entering your product landing page and only people who are serious about getting what your product offers will enter their info in this opt-in section.

#2-----It increases product conversion because of the psychology of marketing and selling involved....Firstly people want what they can't have and anything that is hard to obtain automatically creates more value in the prospects eyes...Secondly it creates a psychological phenomenon which says this....If you get a person to say a whole bunch of little "yes's" then when the time comes to make the big "yes" (ie buying your product or signing up for your offer) they are more likely to make the big "yes"....Like in selling if you ask a person several small rhetorical questions which the obvious answer is yes...then the big yes of buying your product is much more likely to happen.

#3-----This is the cash cow of the benefits.....They signed up for your call to arms and went to your offers landing page and now you have their opted in e-mail....Guess what! ....You can now market to them with other products and offers on an auto-responder OVER and OVER and OVER and OVER again! This is HUGE! It creates income years down the road for work you do today!

A good auto-responder to use is GetResponse ...it gives you the opt-in bar to put on your site and allows you to collect as many as emails as you want...all the way up to 10k...and even above that its only an extra $5.00, not to mention you can send up 10k messages at once to people who are on
your opt-in list...it even automatically self purges your list of unsubscribers, bad emails, emails that bounce among many other situations. It's an awesome product for very little cost. They also make a Hyper-link tracker that allows u to pinpoint your traffic and where its coming from and
which campaigns has the best conversions.
 
Further Down the Rabbit Hole​

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(If you don't have them you can get a good deal on them here for Mac or PC) 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…

Look at other picture ads on CL to get ideas! This is key! A person comes to your CL ad, sees the picture ad and it creates interest or curiosity(don’t give
too much info or you’ll shoot yourself in the foot) and they see your web address at the bottom of the picture ad and then enter it into their browser and off they go! (This is a filter as well separating the lookers from the non-lookers)

If you are unfamiliar with HTML your 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's 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's 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 if a person or a bot within Craigslist tracks down and staff deletes ALL 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….

<img src="http://i469.photobucket.com/albums/rr51/454646486595154255456545295463220251256/564156486465468923111474111654874461.jpg"></A>|



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 up each text body 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'll 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(I like using a foreign language cause its harder to spot duplicates if you don't understand the language) 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 e-mail 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....This means its easier to
troubleshoot, fix the issue causing your ads to not go live and keep doing what you do best...MAKE $$$!
 
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.

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 if your product does not produce conversions with at least decent numbers..then MOVE on! (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 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 then 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! It's not rocket science guys.

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.

What's the Matta? CIA Got You Pushin Too
Many Pencils?​


I tested clickable pic ads, pic ads and text ads w/link...and tested conversions on them all.... In nearly every one of them the pic ads and clickable pic ads worked best had the most traffic and highest sales....Though there seemed to be an inverse relationship between the ads longevity and its conversions. (i.e. the clickable pic ads convert the best but get flagged very quickly....and then in order the reg pic ads and then the text ads......).

So you have a trade off...you can have a better converting ad that gets flagged quicker or take the middle ground using a reg pic ad....or you can have a slow converting text ad that lasts alot longer...even days.

All in all its your choice...you need to test each product with each one of these...because in alot of times just cause a clickable pic works best for this product and offer doesn't mean that its gonna be king for another product or offer....

Test and track your conversions then use the best offer/product...
The biggest and most annoying thing that stops people from making money in our industry is just plain laziness of not wanting to step out and test test test till they find what works.....

Instead people wanna have all their ducks in a row before they step off the
boat.... The reason for this is because people THINK that the opposite of success is failure....but it isn't....

The opposite of success is quitting....you can look and read up on person after person in our history who accomplished something great and EVERY stinking one of them had setbacks and failures...and every one of them had they not had those failures wouldn't have learned the things they needed to know at the time of their great accomplishments!

Failure is a brother to success....without failure it means you never tried and
without ever trying you never succeed.....think about it.

The most successful professional baseball players in the world are the ones that get up to the plate and don't get a hit 6 out of 10 times! They don't get a hit 6 out of 10 times at bat...and they are the highest paid players in baseball history...think about it.

--Wayne Gretsky said "I miss 100% of the shots I never take"

--Thomas Edison failed over 1,000 times developing the incandescent light bulb trying different designs and filaments......When people stop associating failure with "bad" they will get alot further in their marketing efforts...when you embrace failure knowing that if I don't have failures I will never have success.

The key is to try and test and test until you find what works...though the only way failure is a benefit is if you actually reflect upon what it was that caused the failure...what needs to be changed and then fix it and try again.

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!


Hope this helps and clears up some of the foggy minds out there about CL marketing.....

Turbo:D

(Some Picture ad examples will be posted below!)
 

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nice skirt, i mean.. scarf
 
turbopugsleylx said:
HMMM do I smell trolls?
Click to expand...
Just tell us what you're trying to sell. And hey, there's a buy-and-sell section in this forum!

Anyway, I suggest you try it at DP and WaFo. This is your target demographic!

Good luck bro!



PS: I don't think one can make $6k a month in the internets! They're all lying!
 
Does it look like im trying to sell something man....how about posting something of content to earn rep points.....considering I spent hours typing this up...
 
While I did find that to be quite interesting reading, I'm not sure why the hell you posted it? Do you own this "ebook"? If not, why the fuck are you posting it you useless n00b and if so, why the fuck are you giving away valuable info you useless n00b.
 
Yes I do own it Crisis...for your information....MY GOD.....

I give good information for the betterment of the forum and all I get is a bunch of shit....My god there some trolls on this forum....Heck of a way to treat people who offer good info on a forum "just because"
 
Wickedfire Rules of Engagement:

#17
Paying it forward -- This is a brand new rule to increase reputation levels to people who give back to the community (normal posts with meaning and value), and to start elimination those who just sit around leeching and doing nothing productive. It's fine to join WF and sit in the Shoot the Shit area if that's all you want to do, but if you are negative with your posts and annoying, your ass is going to be banned until you learn how to give back to the community. Instead of just banning you for life, you'll be issued a sort of "community service" probation. Depending on the degree of the punishment or probation, you will be required to post a minimum amount of original posts/articles in the sections that have more value. If you still feel like being an asshole, we'll ban you and you can continue your crap on some other forum where you'll be appreciated as an idiot.
 
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