Craigslist Tips #1 – Tags

I love Craigslist. I’ve bought everything from iPhones to printer paper on it. A lot of people ask me to help them look for/sell things on Craigslist. I decided to start this article series to help people use craigslist more efficiently.

Craigslist Tip #1: When selling an item, it is important to optimize your ad for maximum search exposure. Marketers do this all the time to get their websites on the first page of any related Google query. This practice of optimizing a pages’ ranking in a search engine is creatively dubbed: Search Engine Optimization (or SEO for short). An important part of SEO is making sure your page, or ad on Craigslist, contains the right terms so that when people are searching for your item they can actually find it.

A good way of ensuring people are able to find your posting is by adding ‘tags’ at the bottom of your posting. Tags are essentially just a list of words that are related to your item so that anybody who may be interested in your item can actually find it.

Ex. For a posting to sell an iPhone 4, some of the tags I would list would be: iPhone 2 3g 3gs 16gb 32gb 16 32 apple jailbreak jailbroken 4.0 4.0.1 5.0 5.0.1

Notice a few things about the tags I listed:

  1. I have included names of different models of the product
  2. Words that may be written in a different way are accounted for (’16gb’ vs ’16 gb’ & ‘jailbreak’ vs ‘jailbroken’). [More on this in a future posting…]
  3. Common software versions of the phone are also included in the posting. In general, some details about the product that may be of interest to a buyer are also listed
While I only listen a few tags, it is important to be thorough with the tags you list. At the same time, do not go overboard with tagging and add terms that are not at all related to your posting. This is simply annoying to Craigslist users who have a pretty good idea of what they want to buy and is just stupid.
Hint: To hide these keywords or make them invisible in your posting, change the font color to ‘Alice Blue’.

Insert this before the text to hide:

Insert after text:

 

EDIT (9/19/13): Aliceblue font color has been blocked from Craigslist. You will receive an error if you try to post with Aliceblue on Craigslist now. Updated post to use ‘Mintcream’ instead.

9 comments Write a comment

  2. Fantastic idea! I just tried it and it works like a charm. Thanks for the help. David

  6. Does Mintcream still work? Could i also use the hex code instead? I’m slightly confused as to which format i should do the ad

    Approachable

    Your Text Here 

    sample text 4s

    Forward-Thinking

    Which one do you think will work?

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