Blog of an Internet Marketer

Following steps may help you to get maximum response from craigslist posting:

1) Put all necessary details in description but keep it as short as possible. Use short description with phone number, if applicable. But don’t use your personal email address. Use anonymous email feature if you need to receive email queries from the visitors. 

2) Use image whenever possible. In the categories where you can’t use external image and need to upload the images, image size is restricted to 300×300 pixels. If you upload images more than this size, craigslist will downsize. So it’s better to use image not larger than 300×300 pixels.
3) Use attractive titles which clearly describe what you are offering. Avoid using excessive symbols and capitals. Lenght of title is limited to 70 characters only. If you title is more than 70 characters, craigslist will discard the extra characters which may make your title meaningless. Be careful not to use titles longer than 70 characters.
4) Use your webpage URL in description, if you need traffic to your webpage. Use multiple domains if required. Free URL forwarding services like tinyURL.com will not work. So you must register your own domain to redirect visitors to your webpage.
5) Post the ads on appropriate time. Proper posting time varies depending on service or product.
6) Post the ads under the appropriate category and appropriate locations. Posting ads under wrong category or location may compel the visitors to flag your ads.

Both Bookmarking and Directory submission are acceptable way of getting one-way backlinks that helps in getting high PR and better position on SERP. Several years ago directory submission was the prime source of backlinks. Now it the social bookmarking sites are playing vital role in getting backlinks. So the question arises which one is now more effective : bookmarking or directory submission? The answer of this question is undecided.

Directory submission still works nice for increasing link popularity of an website. But it has some limitations over bookmarking. Bookmarking is more versatile.  For example: if you have a blog on blogspot.com or wordpress.com you can’t submit it on most of the web directories. There are only few blog directories which may accept your free blog. Still you can easily promote your blog or blog posts on bookmarking sites. Similarly most of the directories accepts only homepage. Inner pages aren’t accepted by most of the free web directories. If you have an important inner page you can easily promote it on social bookmarking sites.

I like social bookmarking over directory submission for another reason: it is getting traffic. Free web directories rarely send traffic to the sites submitted. On the other hand popular social bookmarking sites like digg, stumbleUpon can send thousands of traffic.