Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Craigslist Posting Solution -"Craigslist Ghosting" "Craigslist Flagging"

Craigslist used to be a Happy Land for small business owner and online marketers! By posting on it, you can drive huge traffic to your website and make big BUCK from it! Of course it is still a Gold Mine but it is getting harder and harder for most marketors to enjoy posting on it!

Lots of people comment it is a Frustration Land with full of disappointment and sadness. And there are many many marketers decided to quit posting, why??

They are facing a huge problem which you may be facing now too. - Ghosting!
What is Ghosting?
A phenomenon after you post and publish your ads, your ads will not show on main section and only be seen by you is called Ghosting! Why will craigslist ghost your ads and how does this system work?

It is very simple. Craigslist is trying their best to avoid marketers to “spam” on its site and it wants to make sure all ads are unique and from genuine different people to create a fair community with “democracy”. They can ghost ads by using Spam Filter which is automatic software or feature built in web 2.0 system to verify the uniqueness of Four Major Elements:
1.IP –
It is the most important thing for Ghosting: Each computer supposes having one Unique IP so according to Craigslist’s Terms and Policy, the ads posted by this particular IP will only be allowed to post once in one section one city! If they detect this IP again within certain amount of the time, this ad will be ghosted!
2. Email or account –
This is the essential element to post. Same to the IP! Same email will only allow to use limited times in posting within 48 hours! If it is used again too soon, the post will be ghosted!
3. Title and Content –
This is essence of the ad. Craigslist has software to automatically cross match the contents to make sure they all unique! If they find out something wrong with it, either it will generate a Posted Already error code or be ghosted!
4. Common Sense –
There are some small factors which Craigslist will look at to make sure these ads are unique and worthwhile to show on main section. This will include Location, Image, and Keywords in Content, Compensation and many more. What common sense will apply here? For example, the difference between a local small business owner and a national marketer or spammer to post is different. The local small business owners will very likely fill up the LOCATION filed to attract local people to his business and leave a local phone number in there but the national marketer will not write anything in the LOCATION filed and it will leave a website link there! Craigslist uses human psychology to identify whether this post is from a local business owner or a spammer!

How will you know your ads having been ghosted or not?
I am going to teach you a secret here! After you successfully publish the ads, please DON”T wait 15 minutes to see if your ads will show or not! Just simply click VIEW and SOURCE in your IE menu bar and open it! You will be able to see the HTML scripts of your ad! If you see there is a paragraph called

“(<)table Summary =Craigslist Hosted Image(>) …… (<) - (/)table(>),



it means your ads will show up on main section no matter what but if this sentence is not there, please don’t even bother to wait! Just delete this ads because it is trash now!

How to make your ads unghosted?
The answer is very simple! Make the post as unique as possible!

Sometimes the things you should change are not the IP, Email or Content but the way you are thinking!! Marketer has his own characteristics and its way to thinking! If craigslist can use this psychological approach to catch posters’ thoughts then program these to their software, your ads will be blocked for ever! And you can’t solve it by yourself! You should look for professional to help – a third party view point.

Are your ads flagged? How to solve it?
Flagging is another frustrated thing for lots of advertisers! People flag each other’s ads to maintain their ads position on craigslist. Many of them even use software to flag other people’s ads! Even some software can completely block one person to post! This will further frustrate people to post on craigslist! As frequent posters and loyal audience, many people lost confidence to post on craigslist because they are facing hard time from both Craigslist auto spam filters and competitors’ flagging machines! How flagging system works? It relates two elements:
1. Your IP address
2. Key words in your content
How to solve it?
It is very easy and simple
– Make Your Ads More Unique!

I know you will say this is B.S but indeed it is the truth! As professional Craigslist Ghosting and Flagging Trouble Shooting Expert, this is the best solution I use to solve many many cases!

Craigslist ad not showing up? It’s called ad ghosting.

If you have posted a Craigslist ad and it’s not showing up, even though the status is ‘published’, your ad has been “ghosted”.
Craigslist does this if its system labels you a spammer. This makes spammers think their ads have been posted but really they’re not. Most big-time spammers won’t take the time to actually look to see if their ad is listed.
I’ve seen several explanations for the algorithm used to determine someone is a spammer from the amount of html code used to the number of ad posted.
Now all of your ads are being ghosted. So how do you get your account out of this status? It’s not easy. There are a few things you need to do.
• go to your account and delete as many of your currently published ads as possible, particularly any posted within 48 hours of each other
• clear your browser cache, cookies, etc. - and do this each time or two you post ads from here on out
• wait at least 48 hours before posting again
I found that changing your ip address helps too. There are several ways to do this, one way is to unplug your modem for a while…the amount of time varies with your provider. Or you can do a release/renew of your ip address through the command box.
If you have run into this problem, then you’re probably posting a lot of ads or posting fairly frequently. My suggestion is to purchase Craigslist Marketing/Advertising Software. It’s totally worth the investment to keep your Craigslist ad campaigns running smoothly and to avoid trying to undo ghosted accounts.