This Dirty Little Tool Will Flag Any Post You Want

Craigslist is a great way for an aggressive internet sales manager to get some decent leads. Last week, one of the dealers I service was complaining about getting flagged. He thought it was odd because he was getting flagged so fast.

Craigslist never has told us how many different people it takes to have a listing flagged, but many people feel it’s between 8 and 11. The flagging needs to come from all different IP addresses. This dealer was getting flagged in minutes, and there was no way that 8 to 11 people were sitting around waiting for him to post just so they could flag his listings.

Even with semi automatic posting tools, it still takes some time to post your listings. It can be very frustrating if you spend a better part of your morning posting your new or used inventory online only to get flagged later on.

The problem is there is now software available to have anyone flagged you wish. This software will hide behind a proxy so all of your flags will come from a different ip address, so it will look genuine to Craigslist. I blurred out the name of the software just because I think it’s garbage. If you look at the screen shot, you simply copy and paste all of the url’s you want to flag.

This is a dirty trick, and I would never endorse such a black hat method. If you see this happening toyou, lay low for a while. I post many times for many different dealers, and I don’t get flagged. Here are a couple of tips to prevent flagging:

1) Do not post a whole bunch of cars at once. This annoys people, and you will only catch the attention of the rogue dealer and the genuine people who will flag you for real.

2) Post no more than 5 vehicles a day, and do it either early in the morning or later on at night. I usually wait until after 10:00PM because the other dealers are sleeping. My best results come from posting on a Saturday night. Many people browse the car listings on a Sunday morning because they are bored. How do I know this? We use live stats, and it will tell me when somebody visited out website from a Craigslist posting.

Watch Your Traffic Come In Live. These are only the people that clicked through to our website. This doesn't count the hundreds of people who just clicked the ad.

One Craiglsist posting will stay live for 90 days, and it’s important to realize that. Craigslist has a keyword search tool, so one post will get 90 days of traffic. If you posted a 2008 Ford Mustang anyone who searches for that term will see your ad. It’s also important to remember that Craigslist posts show up in Google searches.

If you post 5 vehicles a day, that’s 150 cars a month. If you use a posting tool, be sure it includes multiple links to your website. What you really want is to get the user off of Craigslist and send them to your website. That’s what our tool is designed for, and it works.

For one of my dealers in Florida, I average about 300 visitors to their website a month from Craigslist alone. Showroom Logic also tracks impressions. You can easily do this as well if you host the image on your own server. Let’s say you post a 2007 Dodge Ram. The Ram will have it’s own image name, and you can look at your weblog to see how many hits it received.

One of my dealers has a 2007 Jeep Wrangler that received 3,000 hits so far, so that goes to show you how many people are looking. Some states like Utah don’t really use Craigslist, but Orlando Florida is one of the hottest markets in the country for Craigslist.

If your dealership doesn’t have a good Craigslist tool than I recommend you sign up for Showroom Logic. For only $300.00 a year, your live inventory can be added to our network of websites and you will have unlimited use of our Craigslist tool.

Send mike@showroomlogic.com an email to get started. We currently service any car dealership (new or used) in the United States.