Getting past Craigslist's spam filter
It's taken some time to get full approvals, but now I've got the green light to move forward with my campaign. My expectations were high when I first began, but now that I'm no longer direct linking, my conversions have slumped somewhat. I'm still making decent money, but there are always hurdles to over come.
My most recent hurdle is Craigslist's spam filter. I'm able to get around it 100% of the time, but it usually takes about an hour of work to get an ad to stick. After that I'm limited to about 20 posts before I need to find a new IP address. 20 posts is worth about $150 - $300 over the course of 2 weeks before they stop bringing in traffic.
The following is my current strategy to get ads to stick. This still needs quite a bit of improvement, especially if I want to start making more then 20 posts per day.
The first thing you need to do is buy some $1.00 .info domains from godaddy. I've tested runing an auto responder email campaign, and trust me it does not convert as well as placing an actual link on your ads. The problem with linking is that Craigslist will ghost your domain after about 20 posts. The solution is to link people to your .info instead, which automatically redirects to your affiliate website. These .info domains will get ghosted as well, but they more then pay for themselves. I make about $300 for each $1 spent buying a .info.
The next thing you have to do is make sure that each post is unique. Unfortunately this can take a really long time depending on what strategies you use. A lot of people place invisible text on their ads, or will encode random sections of the ad body. I'm sure those strategies work, but it's not what I do.
The way I keep my posts unique is to use the location several times through out the body of the ad. For example:
"Girl looking for nice guy in (insert city here)
You have to manually put the city there yourself, but if you are clever you can get an auto mouse recorder to cut and paste it in for you. This method is good for about 10 consecutive posts. After that your ads will start getting ghosted again. Once that happens, register a new email address will Gmail (takes about 1 minute to do). Then rewrite your ad. You should be fine just shuffling some things around. Repeat the process for another 10 ads.
Now after having the 20 done, your .info should be ghosted. Which means if you try to do yet another 10, IT WONT WORK!!! You need to use another .info.
Normally I don't do more then 20 per day, because I'm worried about getting my IP address banned. If I do decide to do more then 20, I'll drive out to a local wifi access point with my laptop and start making posts there. There's still quite a few improvements I need to make with this. Ultimately the goal is to be able to make 200+ posts from home in under 2 hours. That would take some better automated software, an IP switcher, phone verified Craigslist accounts, a good dedicated proxy list, etc.
I'm exploring other methods of pushing traffic as well. Something that has piqued my interest lately is Backpage.com's paid ad service. It's worth a look for anyone who frequently posts on craigslist.
