Over the last year, two things happened, that changed the way I do business. First, Craigslist changed many of their rules regarding posting ads, flagging & ghosting became a constant problem for users, the end result being that posting ads was no longer easy and simple, but instead difficult and sometimes impossible. The second thing that happened is, I began to practice ‘email marketing’.
I recently realized that they are connected.
Like most of the people who place ads in the services section of CL, I get a big chunk of my business from these ads. I trusted craigslist with the marketing of my business, trusted that they would continue to allow me to reach potential customers with simple, free ads.
But when the rules changed, and I went from posting 3 ads per account, to just one, I had to figure out ways to compensate for the lost ad revenue. The first thing I did was, I created 3 times the number of CL accounts, learned how to change the ads from text to images, learned how to change my IP address, learned how to use phone-verified accounts (probably the most expensive, time-consuming, and commonly resented rule so far) all in order to maintain the same number of ads I used to place with ease.
I began to worry about craigslist having so much control over my business… What if they make another crazy rule tomorrow? One that I can’t easily get around?
When I thought about marketing directly to prospects, I naturally found myself wondering about spam, a topic I knew almost nothing about. As I learned more, I discovered that most of the techniques for spam are the same ones we use now for CL, to post more than the permitted 1 account per user, 1 ad per account, per 48 hours.
Of course spam is not nearly as effective as CL, but shouldn’t I learn how to market effectively without CL, in case they change another policy, that stops me from doing business ads there?
We all place huge amounts of trust in other companies, we have to in order to do business. Perhaps my business would never even have started, if not for the ease of placing ads on CL. But does that make them my business partner? Am I forever dependent on them, hoping that they will continue to ‘let’ me do business in the future?
Many of us trust gmail, AOL, yahoo, and hotmail with our BUSINESS email accounts. These accounts are free, and we have put these email addresses on all our business cards, letterhead, forms, and contracts. What if they started to charge us a fee, for each email received? Nothing says they can’t do that. Or, what if they stop the amount of bandwidth we get now, so that it takes hours to download our email, unless we sign up for their ‘premium’ account? You can see that happening already, right?
So, while I don’t like the idea of becoming a spammer, nor do I consider myself one, I believe that CL is to blame for increases in unwanted emails, because if we can’t reach prospects through craigslist ads, we will simply find some other way to reach them, like spamming, telemarketing, junk mail (it’s never junk to the guy who created it!), and going door-to-door, leaving ‘important’ flyers on your doorstep.
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