If you take a look at compete.com you can see a rough estimate of how many visitors craigslist.org receives every month. On an average month craigslist receives approximately 30 million visitors directly to their home page. This means that there are at least 30 million visitors looking to either post ads or respond to ads on craigslist every single month.
Now since craigslist has a subdomain for nearly every major city and every state in the United States they may receive much more than 30 million visitors. It hasn’t been long since Craigslist went international and they now have dedicated subdomains for cities all over the globe. If your business is local you can geotarget your customers or even expand your operations international.
So lets get down to the basics of advertising on craigslist. In every subdomain for your desired city or state there are a bunch of categories that are the same nationwide. These categories included everything from for sale, housing, jobs and more. In addition each main category is divided in to sub categories. For example, for sale has subcategories such as computers, electronics, cars and more. These sub categories make it easy to target your customer.
Once you’ve selected your city, state, and category you can then post your ad. In order to post your ad you need only to enter your email address and you can hide this as well to avoid getting spammed. Each visitor will see your email as [email protected] and Craigslist forwards their email to you automatically.
Every ad you place can be viewed by anyone browsing that section in that city or state on Craigslist. This means that you may receive hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your ad every single day. Of course if you post more than one ad you’ll receive even more visitors.
There are a few ways to help you post more than one ad per day. You can either hire someone to post your ads for you or you can purchase some Craigslist auto poster software. This isn’t to spam Craigslist with hundreds of ads every day but rather to make it less time consuming for you to post every day. You can create your ad once and then have it reposted every day by either paying someone else or with just a click of a button.
From my experience it’s best to use software or a dedicated online posting service to do this for you. Hiring people tends to be expensive and unless you have other tasks for them to do it’s probably not worth it. I have a buddy of mine that has his wife do all his posting for him.. that’s probably the best way to do it!