Making a Great Craigslist Ad (Part 2)

Now that we have discussed some of the keys to making your ads more visible on Craigslist ( frequency of posting and relevancy of information) we should talk a little bit more about what kind of keywords you should be using in your postsd. These are the kind of rules that we at EZ Posting follow when creating and posting ads.

First of all, what is the purpose of keywords? Generally we like to add keywords into Craigslist posts because of the way Craigslist’s search engine works. If you want more info on how it performs searches, please refer back to Part 1 of this series. What are good types of keywords to use in an ad? Things that identify your property, like location features. Make sure you have any nearby freeways, highways,  major streets or landmarks listed somewhere in your ad.  Also, to get your ad to show up on different searches, you can include some words that may or may not be applicable to your property. Using these keywords will broaden the ways that your post may be seen. However, it is important to recognize that there is a good way and a bad way to put these kind of keywords in your ad.

A tasteless way of doing it is to place a list of keywords at the end of your property description. Don’t do it.  For example, if you are advertising a 3/2 house with a large backyard in Gilbert, don’t put a list of words at the end of your property description like (pool, sport court, tempe, mesa, apache junction…etc.) It looks unprofessional, as if you’re getting paid by the number of times someone clicks on your post. This type of  “keyword overload”  is extremely popular with spammers, and you DON”T want your ads being associated with spammers.

There is a way to get that same list of words worked into your ad in a clean and professional way. Take the example of the 3/2 in Gilbert. Instead of a plain list, you can work the keywords into your ad in appealing way. “Large backyard gives opportunity for adding a sport court or pool. House is near Tempe border and is close to US 60 for easy access to both Apache Junction and Mesa“. See how that gives your reader a better feel for the property and gives you the same keywords in your post? Subtlety of kewords is the newest addition to our list of keys in the “Good Craigslist Ad” series. In the next blog we will be talking more about the image that your ad projects and how to improve it!

Making a Great Craigslist Ad (part 1)

I would like to explain what I think makes a great ad on Criagslist so you have a better idea of how to improve your use of Craigslist and Backpage.

A great ad is going to be one that gets viewed for the right reasons and frequently. To understand what I mean by right reasons you need to know a little bit about how Craigslist works as a search engine.

There are two main ways to find an ad on Craigslist. The first is by clicking on a link in the main screen like “Real Estate for sale”. Clicking on this will bring up all of the listings Craigslist has in its Real Estate section, in chronological order. That means you will see every post, regardless of geographic area or property type, from most recently posted to last posted. People who search this way are most likely browsing the titles that pop up, just looking to see if anything interesting is out there. Notice that because it is in chronological order, the ads most recently posted will show up the highest on searches. This is why you need to keep deleting and reposting you ad on Craigslist; you want it as high on these searches as possible to get the most visibility. So one important aspect of a great Craigslist ad is frequency of posting. The more frequently you post an ad, the more chance you have of getting viewed. www.ezposting.net is the service that offers to do this for you.

The second way of searching on Craigslist is by refining a search and using keywords. For example, after you click on “real estate for sale”, you can type keywords into the “search for” bar at the top of the screen to refine the search more. You can also select the price (min/max) and # of Bedrooms to refine further. So instead of plodding through 100s of ads, you could type in “Tempe house” with a max price of 200,000 and 3 bedrooms. This refines a search significantly and is used by more serious viewers who are looking for specific properties to fit their budget and needs.

So the second key to a great ad is relevancy of information. Be sure to include a price with your post, as well as specific information about the property you are listing. Next time I will elaborate on some techniques that can improve the number of views you can get on Craigslista and Backpage.

Why use Craigslist?

A lot of agents question whether or not they should be posting their properties to websites like Craigslist or backpage. It seems like a lot of work to do for such a small ad. But the truth of the matter is that Craigslist is searched MILLIONS of times every day. The latest stats indicate that Craigslist gets about 20 BILLION pageviews per month. Now, that number is the sum of all hits in 500+ local Craigslist sites, but still, that’s a lot of hits!

So it isn’t so much a question of whether or not you need to be posting on Craigslist; it’s how much time can you dedicate to making it a strong marketing tool. For example, if you post a property ad to Craigslist and let it sit, guess what? Your ad is practically invisible to most of the Cragslist viewers. Why? Well, on an average day, the Phoenix portion of Craigslist receives about 800 posts to residential real estate for sale. That means that after you post an ad, it’s off the first page of listings within a matter of hours.

That’s why I created my service for agents. You want to be reposting your ads as much as possible to have the best chance that someone will view your listing. That means that every 2 days, you need to be reposting your ads to get back to the top of the list. EZ Posting does this for you at a low fee, giving you the most possible exposure with a minimal amount of work.

In my next post, I will be explaining how to get the most out of a post to Craigslist through keywords, HTML text ads, and timing.

My First Blog Post!

Hello! My name is Kyle. I am a college student at WP Carey School of Business and Barrett, the Honors College at ASU. I have started this blog as a result of a service that I am offering to real estate agents. My goal is to get to know agents while I am in school so that by the time I graduate I will have some contacts in the industry. If you want to see details about my service, please visit www.ezposting.net for info!

Basically my service involves Internet marketing for agents in a couple of different forms. One way that I help agents is by listing their properties on Craigslist and Backpage for them, just like a personal assistant would. The difference is that I create a professional ad for them and post it to theses sites for less than 39 cents a day. If you don’t understand why this is important or a good deal, visit my website to find out!

I also write up blog posts for agents. Most agents would like to increase their internet exposure through blogging, but they often don’t have the time to do it. I take care of this for them by writing quality blog posts about anything Real Estate related and letting them put it on their blogs! This gives them an edge over competitor’s websites by increasing the number of keywords they use in their site and providing relavent information for their clients on a regular basis.

So I just wanted to take the chance to introduce myself and my service. I’m continually learning about different marketing techniques online and I am excited to start getting to know some people out there!

I’m also going to use this as a test page for the websites http://alphainventions.com as well as condron.us or www.condron.com