This was a major blow to me when it started happening to my ads since Craigslist drove a lot of quality leads to my website. Even though I wasn't a massive spammer and only posted about 10 ads per day craigslist started ghosting my ads. I ran into a similar problem back in 2005 when I was using Google adsense to promote my website. I was getting good quality click throughs, albeit paying heftily for it, when all the sudden my keywords got shut down and they stopped displaying my ads. A friend of mine had the same problem and he was able to get his ads back up running again by calling the company, but I figured it was to much of a hassle trying to struggle with keeping my ads running especially since I had to pay for it. Since than I have been committed to promoting my website for free while searching out new methods to bring quality traffic to my website.
After doing some research I found a few ways to get my craigslist ads back up running again. Here's what I found.
Here are 6 things you can do to get your craigslist ads up running again.
1) Don't post too many consecutive ads in a short period of time. If you try to post more than 20 ads in a short period of time, craigslist will automatically delete all the postings without notifying you. They than might earmark that e-mail address as a potential spammer and ghost any future postings.
2) Don't use the same e-mail address for a long period of time.
3) Switch your IP address if possible.
4) Don't copy and paste the same ad over and over again. You may have seen an error message occur if you tried doing this, but even ads with slight changes that appear to get around this filter might be subject to ghosting, or if you post several ads that carry the same title. Be creative and use different titles and descriptions for your products. Use a thesaurus.
5) If you have a serious of e-mails that you use to post to craigslist try using just one single e-mail address to post to a particular city. Posting ads in several city locations from one account can make you a subject for ghosting.
note: When my account got shut down I noticed that it still allowed me to post ads in certain cities and certain categories. Apparently it felt that any other categories were irrelevant to what I was advertising, even though I got quality click throughs from posting in these other categories.
6) Clear you cache, cookies, and browsing history before switching over to a new account.
A little better description of the problem and solutions is discussed here in my friend's blog
Some other methods that I have found to be successful in drawing QUALITY and FREE traffic to my website are explained here. You have to become a member to view the tutorials but the membership is free. They explain how to draw traffic to your website as well as how to increase referrals to your website.
I was getting frustrated because I couldn't find my craigslist ads. Now I think I know what happened. Thansk!!
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