When it comes to posting ads on Craigslist, more is NOT better.  Realtors think that if they pepper Craigslist with lots of ads that they’ll get more leads.  Most of them I’ve talked to have the universal fear that their ads get “buried” by other ads and won’t get seen.  I set out to experiment and see where the truth of this lies.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area… home of Craigslist and have been using it for 15 years or so for lead generation.  There are so many agents here doing this that my ads are dumped off page one of Craigslist very shortly after posting.  I typically post or renew only about 4-8 ads a day and have no trouble getting plenty of leads.  Your market likely won’t have more ads than we do here and will probably have fewer.

The Craigslist Experiment

To test out my theory that it doesn’t matter if you are on page one of Craigslist, I posted a few ads on Saturday.  That day I received two registrations on my Keller Williams eEdge website.  On Sunday, after not posting for at least 24 hours, I received 3 new registrations.  Today, Monday, it’s not even noon yet and so far today I have received 4 new leads from ads that were posted on Saturday.  So I have done zero postings in San Francisco in the past 48 hours and have received 9 leads since my last postings.  This is very typical.  I’m getting even more registrations today than when the ads were “fresh!”

My conclusion, that I’ve held for years, remains that people do use the search feature of Craigslist to look for homes and that people WILL easily find ads that are not on page one.  Consumers  know that they really do need to use the search feature to make some sense of the chaos of just looking at the raw listings.  Kowing this, you can use that information now to help you write compelling headlines that people might be searching for…. a certain neighborhood…. homes with a pool… 4 bedroom homes… etc.  Use  those keywords in your headline and in your body that will show up when a home buyer searches on Craigslist and you’ll be in their search results even if your ad is two days old and down on page 39.

The only other thing to know in order to have your old ads be opened by home buyers is to have a fun & compelling headline.  If it’s a b o r i n g headline, as so many ad headlines are, it will be glossed over.  Make it FUN… make it CALL TO SOMETHING THEY WANT that will bring the consumer into your ad where you now finally have a chance to have them click through to your eEdge website and capture them as a prospect.  Writing those compelling headlines is not difficult at all and that’s what I teach in my eBook; Craigslist Lead Generation for Real Estate in Your Pajamas.

Let go of the Fear & Stress of Craigslist

Okay, so let’s all save ourselves a ton of extra work and not sit around writing Craigslist ads all day long in dreaded fear that they wont be seen.  They will be seen so give up your fear around that already!