Internet Marketing Training

A recent post on the craigslist forum gives an indication of the direction that Craigslist is taking to deal with spam and duplicate ads,  they intend to strip out all html codes except the very basic elements.

 Personally, this will be a big pain in the tuckus for me, as all of my html posts contain <div>   tags, which will be stripped from the code under the proposed changes.

It is not a new phenomenon that Craigslist modifies the code, they have been appending “nofollow” tags to all links posted for some time now.  What is new is the extent to which that Craigslist is taking this, by stripping almost all except bare-bones functionality out of the code.  They are taking an aggressive stance against craigslist software that promises to allow the person using it to post countless copies of a single ad.

One major issue driving Craigslist to filter the html ads is related to what is referred to as html “comment” code.    Because Craigslist spam and duplicate filtering appears to rely heavily on comparison with already posted code.  Craigslist seems to perform scans recent posts, and if they find a pattern in the posting that is similar to another ad,  it will block that ad from being posted.   They can also hypothetically use this method to weed out undesirable posts from their listings.

In order to get around the Craigslist duplicate ad filters,  the auto-posters and spammers use the HTML comment tag to insert large portions of randomized text into the html code of the  the posting.  By inserting text into a hidden comment tag, that cannot be seen by web browsers,  the spammers were able to successfully, albeit temporarily, defeat the methods that Craiglist uses to block duplicate post.  Apparently, this comment tag technique throws a monkey wrench in their duplicate checking system.

Craigslist is taking a direct shot at the spammers, who post thousands of duplicate ads per day using this technique, and others.  Expect this move to make a major impact on craigslist ad content.  In addition, this development will render obsolete an entire cottage industry of craigslist auto-posting software companies.

IS HTML Banned From Craigslist?

No, but it is significantly restricted.  Take a look at the actual proposed changes

Forget, classes, styles, css, div tags, notably all alt text and title tags are stripped,  This is apparently to prevent garbage code from being inserted in these text fields.

I have been using <Div> tags to crate a nice border around my html ads.  Apparently the only border allowed is attached to the <table> tag.

 The Complete Comment On the Craigslist site is below:

HTML in craigslist ad postings   

WE ARE NOT BANNING HTML.

Please click here to read the actual proposal before commenting.

Discussion of the flagging system is off-topic in this forum.

This forum is for feedback regarding the possibility of limiting the HTML allowed in craigslist classified ad postings.

Unfortunately, much of the HTML in postings these days is used by spammers for harmful purposes, such as cloaking spam links, embedding false keywords, and overriding the flagging system.

Given the relatively limited value of complex HTML in the context of a classified ad (many users are annoyed by it even when well-intentioned), we are considering limiting HTML in postings to a few basic tags.

If you’re interested, please have a look and let us know what you think. We’ll review all postings here before making any decisions on implementation.

Thanks!

One line I thought was interesting is how they declare:  “many users are annoyed by it even when well-intentioned”

I wonder who are these many users that are annoyed by well intentioned HTML content ads?

I’ll be spending the next several days converting all the <div> tags in my ads to tables.  Does anyone know of an easy way to do this?

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Chris

Another Valuable Lesson In Craigslist Advertising. Enjoy!
Chris
http://epicycledigital.com/my-freebie-page.php

By Tom Jacobson

Are you looking for a quality, free source of advertising to explode your online or conventional business? Look no further than Craigslist . This advertising medium was started in 1995 by Craig Newmark. The business has grown and now employs 24 people.

Most of the advertising is free, except for job ads that are paid for in selected cities in the US. The classified ads placed on this nearly free medium range from goods and services, to forums, community announcements, and even personal ads.

The Craigslist website isn’t flashy, but it sure does work for the people advertising there. The one thing you need to know about Craigslist.org is that they have software in place to keep you from over posting your ad. There are hundreds of clever marketers who have beat the system and post hundreds or maybe more ads per day. From information that I have read, your ad can just disappear from its classification unless you use stealth techniques.

One stealth technique that the mass marketers use is to get some “Hide my IP” software. You see, each computer has its’ own unique IP and Craigslist software uses this to track your computers IP address for over posting. There is however, “hide my IP” software available for a reasonable price on the internet to do the job. Good “hide my IP” software can be programmed to change at intervals that you choose.

Another thing that the Craigslist software does is monitor your email address when posting. Post over 2 to 3 ads from the same address and your ad may not appear. The Craigslist advertisers in the know, will get up to 100 free email addresses from Gmail.com, then rotate these addresses when posting. After using the email addresses for a week or two, they cancel their email accounts and get different ones.

I hope that you visit Craigslist.org to find out what it is all about. I know you will be very surprised to find that a free advertising medium like this exists.

Here is an Informative Craigslist Advertising Article That Is Worth Sharing.
Chris
http://epicycledigital.com/my-freebie-page.php
By Ian Hollander

It’s never a huge surprise that when a new and innovative way comes around to make money online, eventually there will be a glut of unscrupulous people abusing the privilege. Essentially, this is what has happened on Craigslist, where having offered the vehicle by which people like you and I could advertise our offers to HUGE numbers of eyeballs for free…a huge influx of spammers has ruined the proverbial party by posting so often their fingers are probably bleeding from the effort.

And of course, to combat this, Craigslist has come up with a somewhat unique and annoyingly inconsistent way of reigning in the rotten apples. It is called “ghosting”, and is the process by which your ad appears to have been accepted by the system, looks “live” within your admin account..yet, is nowhere to be found in the real time results. Can be a very frustrating experience without any question, and has led many craigslist posting fanatics to jump ship and find greener pastures to pick.

Here is a very easy way for you to avoid the “ghost” if you are getting it..:-) Now, I’ve written extensively about this in other places, and do only have limited space here, but the simplest thing you can do if your ads are being ghosted is this: Simply host your images somewhere that you see lots of other ads using for theirs. Not your own domain obviously…a public image repository is good for example. Link your CL ad to that image rather than pointing to your own domain. Then..using your image editing software, simply overlay your URL text into the image itself, thus negating the need for a live link, one of the prime triggers for Casper and friends to come by and say Boo!

Then…and this is a very well tested strategy by both myself and others, simply use a dial up connection when making your posts. One very well accepted cause of ghosting is multiple posts from the same IP – and simply logging in with a dial up modem, off and then on again for each set of new posts is a very simple, and effective way of negating that issue for me, and many others as well.

Of course there is more – but if you do the above, you WILL see your ghosting rates dropping fast, meaning more live ads, and more commissions for you! Good luck..:-)

Introduction

You just created your Website or Blog. Now What? Your site needs to be spidered and indexed in the search engines. One of the fast ways to accomplish this is via Social Bookmarks. Follow the action Plan below and your site will be indexed and have an initial backlinks to jump up in the Search Engine Rankings. Also in order to have a successful and profitable Blog or Website you need traffic. There are many sources of information regarding ways to bring traffic to your site, but Social Bookmarking is one of the easiest ways with multiple benefits. These methods are perfectly ethical and you shouldn’t have any concerns doing them.

What is Social Bookmarking?

Definition from Wiki:

On a Social Bookmarking system or network, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists can be accessible to the public by users of a specific network or website. Other users with similar interests can view the links by topic, category, tags, or even randomly. Other than web page bookmarks, services specialized to a specific subject or format – feeds, books, videos, music, shopping items, map locations, wineries, etc. – can be found In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are both accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis. They also categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user- defined keywords or tags. Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given “tags”, and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another. Its increasing popularity and competition have extended the services to offer more than just sharing bookmarks, such as rating, commenting, the ability to import and export, add notes, reviews, email links, automatic notification, feed subscription, web annotation, create groups and social networks.

Benefits of Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking can bring immediate traffic to your website, as web 2.0 community websites such as Technorati, Digg, Reddit and Tailrank provide almost immediate information on various topics. These type of Bookmarking sites index and categorize content usually faster than the major search engines. People looking for the latest information on certain topics usually refer to these types of services. The benefit is two fold. They provide immediate traffic from like-minded targeted viewers but also powerful backlinks to your sites that bring positive SEO and Search Engine results.

Bookmarking Accounts You Should Utilize – Digg.com

http://digg.com Digg is a user driven social content website. Ok, so what the heck does that mean? Well, everything on Digg is submitted by our community (that would be you). After you submit content, other people read your submission and Digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of visitors to see. What can you do as a Digg user? Lots. Every person can digg (help promote), bury (help remove spam), and comment on stories… you can even Digg and bury comments you like or dislike. Digg also allows you to track your friends’ activity throughout the site — want to share a video or news story with a friend? Digg it! Digg offers many tool to include the Digg buttons right to your sites so that others can Digg you as well. It is recommended however that you Digg a few of your post every once in awhile to get the ball rolling and traffic coming.

Bookmarking Accounts You Should Utilize – Technorati.com

http://technorati.com/ Currently tracking 79.2 million blogs Technorati is the recognized authority on what’s happening on the World Live Web, right now. The Live Web is the dynamic and always-updating portion of the Web. We search, surface, and organize blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.) increasingly referred to as “citizen media.” But it all started with blogs. A blog, or weblog, is a regularly updated journal published on the web. Some blogs are intended for a small audience; others vie for readership with national newspapers. Blogs are influential, personal, or both, and they reflect as many topics and opinions as there are people writing them. Blogs are powerful because they allow millions of people to easily publish and share their ideas, and millions more to read and respond. They engage the writer and reader in an open conversation, and are shifting the Internet paradigm as we know it. On the World Live Web, bloggers frequently link to and comment on other blogs, creating the type of immediate connection one would have in a conversation. Technorati tracks these links, and thus the relative relevance of blogs, photos, videos etc. We rapidly index tens of thousands of updates every hour, and so we monitor these live communities and the conversations they foster. The World Live Web is incredibly active, and according to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second. Technorati. Who’s saying what. Right now.

Using OnlyWire To Bring your Bookmarking To The Next Level

You can put your Bookmarking efforts into overdrive, using a free submission site like OnlyWire.com to bookmark many accounts at once. When you signup for www.OnlyWire.com you can interface many bookmark accounts and with one simple procedure bookmark your blog post to all your accounts at once. OnlyWire.com interfaces with the following Bookmark accounts: Backflip Bibsonomy Blinklist Blogmemes Blue Dot de.lirio.us del.icio.us Diigo Furl Jots Linkroll Looklater ma.gnolia Markaboo Rawsugar Shadows Simpy Spurl Wink If you don’t have a Bookmark Account from the ones listed you can easily sign up. When you log into OnlyWire you will see all the accounts listed and a place to put your individual username and passwords for the preset account. Add your username and password to the lists then at the bottom of the page click Save My Logins. Next step is to “Drag these links below into your toolbar”. It is a simple drag and drop scenario, but OnlyWire does provide a very easy explanation and video sample from there help section. If you need to view this go here: http://www.onlywire.com/index?services&sec=help Note that the Bookmark will be called : Save Page (std)

Once you have created your OnlyWire account, Updated your bookmark accounts and dragged the interface into your toolbar you are ready to auto bookmark your blog posts of content pages. Simple navigate your browser to a individual blog post. Click on the Toolbar tag named Save Page (std) The Title and the URL will be filled out with the information about the post you are attempting to bookmark. Fill in the Relevant Tags that represent your post Do Not Click the Private Box Add any comments or short description of the Blog post Make sure you check which Bookmarking sites you wish to bookmark. Then click Bookmark Page. You have just bookmarked several accounts with your post.

Supercharge Your Bookmarks Once you have bookmarked your pages via the Onlywire.com interface, you can supercharge your bookmarks by pinging your individual Bookmarks accounts Like de.lirio.us, del.icio.us, blinklist, bibsonomy and any bookmark accounts that file you under a username. If you go to pingoat.com and pingomatic.com you can PING your actual book mark accounts. For example, with del.ico.us just go to your account. Copy the URL. http://del.icio.us/yourusername Open up pinggoat and pingomatic. Enter your URL and Ping several of the ping services. Now repeat the process with your other bookmark accounts. By using Social Bookmarking you are driving traffic and links to your websites. Remember, like with any solution, “Don’t Spam the Technique”.

Create a Circle of Bookmarks

Several of the Bookmarking sites are designed with individual username profiles as distinct URLs that list all your Bookmarking links. These are actual URL’s and not a Session ID when you login to the site. To create a circle of links, add your profile bookmark pages URL to other Bookmarking sites. Below is a small list of sites that have Profile Pages URLs that you can BookMark. (Replace Username with your own login site name) del.icio.us/USERNAME de.lirio.us/bookmarks/USERNAME bibsonomy.org/user/USERNAME www.blinklist.com/USERNAME You get the idea right? For example, you bookmark your Delicious profile URL on Blinklist and your Blinklist Profile URL on Delicious. When you periodically Ping some of your bookmark pages you will have a circle of links for the spiders to follow back to your sites and develop increasing value of Backlinks.

Conclusion

Applying the strategies in this report offers an easy way to get backlinks and traffic to your websites and blogs.

About The Author

Christopher Andrew is a Internet Marketing and SEO Expert who has been doing online
marketing for the last seven years. http://epicycledigital.com/store provides
Internet marketers free and low cost MRR And PLR products, as well as support to
build Internet businesses. Go ahead and give it a try – it’s free and it really does work