Most anyone who has ever listed on Craigslist has had to deal with getting his or her ad deleted. I know someone who listed a used car for sale and a day later the ad was gone! The Craigslist users are the most trigger-happy bunch I have ever seen.
If you use Craigslist to promote your business or service you probably would like to list your ads in multiple cities. I know this is frowned upon but many people do it and do it successfully. How then, do you at least keep the deletions to a minimum?
I have about 10 different emails that I use for Craigslist. Early on I thought that would do the trick to make it look like different people were posting. With 10 different emails you can also post the same exact ad to 10 different cities. Well, that worked fine until one day I got too enthusiastic and made a lot of posts. I made in total about 75 posts spread out amongst the 10 emails. After finishing, I went downstairs to get a bite to eat. When I came back a half an hour later I was in for a big shock! My computer screen was bathed in a sea of pink!
Not only had every ad I posted that day under every email been flagged and deleted, but every ad I had placed for the prior two days as well! I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that all that work was gone in a blink of an eye. What’s worse was I didn’t know whether I had been suspended or banned from Craigslist and my posting career over! Welcome to the world of reality.
With all those ads being instantly deleted by someone at Craigslist it was now evident that they tracked by IP address and not email accounts. That is the only way they could have tied all my ads together. They did leave all my other ads intact that were place prior to the ones being deleted so I must not have been banned.
I now faced a decision. How would I go about continuing to list without this happeniing again? I stopped posting to Craigslist for about a week to let things die down a bit as I figured there was no need to take the chance of ringing the alarm bells so soon again. I then gingerly posted an ad or two here and there just to see what happened. They all stuck and so I gradually increased the number of ads.
I knew that the different email accounts didn’t help me that one time but I still didn’t want to abandon them either. I have now settled on posting a maximum of 3 ads per each email account and using about 7 of my different email addresses per day. That makes a total of around 20 posts per day, which is definitely a number I can live with.
I am very carful not to post more than this – very, very careful. I have learned my lessson that I need to patient and not get too greedy. I do get the occasional ad deleted now and then, but then so does everyone else. Getting a random ad deleted is something everyone on Craigslist has to endure. It’s just part of the Craigslist game!
