Another Craigslist Secret

I was scrolling through some articles online and came across an idea to streamline your Craigslist Postings that I don't think I ever shared before.

Its an email organization idea found here.

Basically it involves creating a master email account to which all of your other email accounts will be forwarded. (You use different email accounts to post similar ads to improve your chances of not being flagged as spam)

That way the only thing you need to do is log into one email account to confirm your new ad postings.

Its a quick idea but it saves a ton of time and eliminates the hassle of constantly trying to remember every password for every email account.

Craigslist Marketing Refinement

I'll admit that I use Craigslist sporadically to help increase my web traffic. It doesn't always bring in the tons of traffic I had expected when I first got started but it is a steady trickle and its easy to use. Sign up for an account and you can keep track of all of your listings and automatically relist them when they expire.

That being said I came up with an interesting idea today while playing with Google Trends. I put in several search terms for one of my websites to compare the amount of searches for each one. It returns a handy graph with Search Volumes for each of your keywords as well as pages of interest (good for comments if its a blog) and where the searches come from.

That last part is what got me thinking. They narrow it down to not just countries but states and cities in the United States.

What good is that?

Well now I know that two cities with the highest search volume by far are from an area easily covered by Craigslist. All I have to do is work my link into the appropriate category.

No more randomly targeting cities or competing against the flood of posts in NYC, LA and SF for a little extra traffic.

Mashup Websites

A quick way to easily compile an auto updating website is to use the developer API's from the leading websites online such as YouTube, AMazon, Ebay and others.

Thankfully there are people out there working on this and publishing their work with a creative commons liscence. People like Chris Sampson over at http://www.c-online.co.uk/

His latest version of the EbayYouTube Amazon Mashup works great. To see a sample test that I did this morning look at my Traditional Archery Equipment website. Of course you have to sign up as a developer at Ebay and Amazon but thats free.

The rest is mostly cutting and pasting your code into the stufftochange file and your product list into the products file.

Click Here to Download Chris's Version of the Mashup Script

Or if you want to know a little more about it try checking this out at 45n5.com

Let me know if you have any luck implementing this script. I would love to see the variations people come up with.