Hi Everyone,

I came here for advise. As my post title says, my ads are getting ghosted, don't know exactly why. I would appreciate any help or advise from CL experts here to keep me going, or else, I will be leaving more money on the table! sigh~

What do you mean by "Ghosted"?

Craigslist software tracking system is pretty amazing and you can't really keep up with them because they spend so much money on new system. Try to stay away from craigslist and go to Kijiji.com and backpage.com instead.

Ghosting occurs when you don't rotate your IP addresses and post too many times to the same account. What you need to do is not post more than 5 ads per IP address. You may have been soft blocked and might end up being banned soon with that account.

Make sure to vary your ads and rotate those IPs. I would stay away from free proxys unless you aren't doing many postings. Easiest way for most people is to unplug their modem to reset it.

Edit: For those who don't know what ghosting is what happens is you make a post and it looks like it went through but it's not showing up. Craigslist essentially pulled it before it went live.

This post has been edited by Jericho34: Feb 7 2010, 08:27 AM

There are more scary updates going on with Craigslist. A lot of people lost their accounts in the lasts 2 months. But as always there are also solutions. Take a look at what is going on:

http://designedbylucas.com/blog/2010/03/wh...y-pva-password/

This post has been edited by designedbylucas: Mar 20 2010, 08:17 PM

As an internet marketer I have never really taken CL seriously for my business. I happen to consider it a Garage or Yard sale online. This is where people usually go to get rid of the junk they have lying around the house in order to make room for bigger and better things. I think is time for you to move your advertising efforts elsewhere my friend.

Well, I couldn't t agree more with you; CL is a bottom fish pound. But it's free and in my case I can't afford $7.00 per click on Google times a minimum of 1400 clicks per month which is equal to $9800.00. But you know I will so much appreciate any suggestion you may have. I have been trying to move on for a long time but with out any luck.



This post has been edited by designedbylucas: Mar 22 2010, 12:29 PM

Yea I have given up on craigslist. You will get flagged for pretty much anything trying to make money.

CL is a headache for sure! I've found them to be a very misleading advertising platform and a recipe for time waste and frustration. Why say an ad is posted but then when you look for it you can't even find it? This makes no sense whatsoever. I personally don't even fool with CL anymore because of this and have shiftly my energy to more rewarding and straight-forward marketing platforms.

P.S. If you want a similar alternative to Craigslist, you might try backpage.com. They don't have all the hoops to jump thru like CL and in many ways are a much better advertising platform all around.

Craigslist is strict because they do not want spammers taking over the site.

They are not a freedom of speech place. It is privately owned so we have to abide by Craig's rules, no matter how difficult it gets.

The fact is that the site is heavily trafficked and highly ranked. I think it's #10 so it is definitely a place where we all should want to be.

However, there are rules.

The fact is that everyone gets ghosted and flagged. Don't take it personally.

Make sure your ad is placed in the proper category.

Do not place the same ad in multiple categories and multiple cities.

(Craigslist wants you to stay in your immediate locale.)

Try not to put up too many ads at once.

Change your titles.

I was ghosted yesterday and decided that I will wait a few days before trying again.

Ghosting and flagging is just something we have to deal with if we want to be on the busiest online classifieds in the US.

Thanks for the very clear explanation about ghosting. However, I think what 'imaginealice' posted will help pretty much eliminate the problem if you are working in earnest to post on CL. But I have to agree with some of the posters here in saying that Craigslist does remind me of a "yard sale". I've never used it, to be honest, but from the sounds of it, am not missing too much!

If you post to multiple cities and states you will get ghosted. Also, if they suspect that you are promoting affiliate links you will get ghosted. The only way around it is to have multiple accounts, they all need to have separate phone numbers attached and different email addresses.

After each post you make, be sure to clear your history and delete cookies. If you use the same computer you will also need to change your IP address. (google it if you don't knw hw to do it already) make sure each post is different wording from each other , also make sure your email addresses used to create accounts are not similar.

If this still doesn't work for you, there are companies that you can pay to post ads for you. You can find some that charge anywhere from $.02 - $.10 per post.

Hope this helps.

Good luck!

So what company can we use to post some ads for us? I would love go this route!

Well you should try using CL I use it in my business and I have gotten more sales from cl than anywhere else! I know people making a full-time income using just CL.

it just seems that when posting about opportunities you should be able to post in multiple cities. Especially when their online.