I came across this posting tonight and had to share it.  If you are going to post an obnoxious Craigslist title (that gets more eyes), make sure you are spelling all your words correctly – or it makes you look like a MORON (and people will be afraid of you):  (what is “MOST SELL” anyway? – Oh, MUST SELL)  Now I am not perfect and I have got my spelling wrong at times, but never on Craigslist, and especially on my titles.  Double check them titles and you will have more people giving your listing a serious look.

Mistakes to avoid when using Craigslist

How Not To Sell on Craigslist

Over the weekend I purchased some patio furniture from Craigslist.  It was a nice 7-piece set that sells in the stores for over 1k (I paid 1/4 of that).  I found a couple that was moving because of a job, and they were getting rid of a lot of their stuff – patio furniture included (no pool where they were going I guess).  The set was not even a year old and is in perfect condition.  This is one of the many reasons I love Craigslist, but at the same time while looking through ALL of the ads I was also reminded me of reasons why I hate it sometimes.  This experience is the reasons for this post – I want to teach you how to never sell anything on Craigslist.  To do that, I will give some specific examples of what not to do.  Hopefully, we can get a little reverse psychology going here and by learning what not to do on Craigslist you will actually pick up on everything you NEED to do to get your products to sell.

The reason I headed over to Craigslist in the first place:

Patio Furniture I Got From Craigslist

My wife and I were looking at patio furniture from Home Depot, Lowes, Target, Pool Stores, Outdoor furniture stores etc. and the average price of anything we liked was starting at $1800.00.  In am not going to spend that kind of money for furniture that is going to be sitting in the Arizona sun.

Here we go:

How to never sell on Craigslist method #1: Don’t include any pictures of the products you are selling.  Not including any photos of your products is going to be quickest way to get me to move on.  If you are looking for patio furniture and come across an ad like this (see picture below) are you gonna call them, or keep moving on?  I promise you I will move on everytime, especially when they are asking 2k for patio furniture without even sharing pictures.

How To Never Sell Anything On Craigslist

How to never sell on Craigslist method #2: If you look at the above screenshot you will see they offered pictures upon request.  WTF?  I have to request pictures??? I am lazy and don’t want another step to see if your patio furniture is what I am looking for.  Making me request for pictures?  HUGE FAIL idiots.  I will move right onto the next one with pictures thank you very much!  Check out the screen shot below and you wil see on the main listings page how to never get me to look at your listing – it says right on it if there is a picture or not “pic”.  I always skip the ones that don’t include pictures.  One arrow is pointing at at listing with pictures, and one is listed without.  Again, a great way to keep people moving right on by is to not include pictures.

Not including pictures on your Craigslist listing

How to never sell on Craigslist method #3: List your products in the wrong category.  If you check out the picture below you will see a listing for a 22″ LCD Monitor listed with patio furniture.  Hello?  Need I say more – stupid spammers.  It’s not even related.

Listing in the wrong categories

How to never sell on Craigslist method #4: This one is a personal pet peeve of mine.  If you do double or triple listings in a row of your products – I will always skip because its just flat out annoying (besides spamming)

Multiple Craigslist Listings In A Row

How to never sell on Craigslist method #5: This is another pet peeve – if you ARE going to include images, make sure you are not including images that look like they were taken from my kids play digital camera.  This is a huge fail and you still can’t even get a good idea what the furniture looks like!

Pictures on Craigslist

Finally

There are other methods that annoy me such as crappy descriptions that look like they were written from someone who you would noramally talk to in another country to get your computer fixed.  ( I will always move on).  I also hate when a company is listing items and they TRY to make it look like a personal listing until you get to the actual posting (again, moving on).  These are just a few of many of the obvious things that will never get your products sold on Craigslist.  if you can figure out what I am getting at with this post, you will understand what you need to do to sell your products faster and easier on Craigslist.  Do you guys have any other methods that annoy you?  If so, feel free to let us all know about them so we can make Craigslist a much better place for buying and selling.

Within 3 hours of listing it I had received 24 phone calls and 9 emails and 3 people had scheduled to come see it that same night, although I only made it to appointment #2 because that looker bought it so I had to cancel on #3. Looker #2 actually gave me $500 to hold it for them while they went to look at just one more Focus, but then called me about 10 min. later and said, “I have decided I’m buying it for sure without looking at the other one and I’m on the way to my bank right now to get a cashier’s check.” The best part is I got my listing price for it and the price was the blue book price I found for the car on www.kbb.com. And we are talking about a Ford Focus; this isn’t a highly in demand vehicle. I know this because there were over 200 of them listed on ksl.com for sale in years between 00′-07′, and ranging in price from about 1k-14k. Many of the listings had been on there for over 3 weeks and have had 1000 plus page views. I honestly didn’t think I would sell this car and would end up trading it in.

So here’s how I did it.

First of all, I cleaned the car really well inside and out and cleaned the heck out of the engine. The engine honestly looked new it was so clean. Then I photographed it with my $140 digital camera (more to come below), and then I listed it on both sites and linked the Craigslist add to the more robust add at ksl.com (more to come on that later too).

Here are a few images of my Craigslist listings. Obviously I provided a thorough description of the car and it’s features and provided great details on the premium audio system in it a well as I knew that was a hook for many potential buyers. However instead of just using a title such as:

2001 Ford Focus

I used this title to set it apart and “focus” on the better features of the vehicle:

****2001 Ford Focus SE/ZTS****35 MPG, Premium Stereo System

You can see from the picture below that in the listings, mine stood out because I used the **** in my title, it’s real easy to see, even in the picture, because it’s really the only one that stands out. All others are just plain text strands, although some use ALL CAPS, which is a great way to get your add flagged…idiots.

Now, once the looker clicked into the add, I provided more details on the vehicle including features, mileage, etc., but more importantly I provided the looker a chance to visit my other add on ksl.com (see image below for how I set up the link on Craigslist) which allowed for more and larger images along with a free CARFAX report and many other specific details.

Once the visitor found my add on Craigslist they could go over to my ad on ksl.com and basically be re-sold on buying my car and see a ton of more pictures that are larger and more quality. You can see what I’m talking about here as I show an image of the many offered pictures, and take this tip away from this read if this is all you take away, when taking photos of whatever you are selling…take a ton from all angles and show as many pictures as you can. Pictures sell! When on ksl.com the pictures of course would become large for viewing.

Now just so you can see I’m not misleading you, I took a screenshot off of ksl.com the night of the 18th before changing the add over to being marked as sold, along with deleting my Craigslist add, and you can see there were 95 page views at that time on my ad…about 20 of them were me viewing the add to make sure it looked right while I was making adjustments etc. Point being…it didn’t take long to sell it and didn’t take that many visitors at all.

To prove my point again, go search ksl.com and you’ll find hundreds of Ford Focus’s listed right now. At the time I’m writing this post there are 291 listed with the first one showing at a price almost half the price of mine.

Hopefully you can see that doing a few small things can improve your sell rate and speed in drastic ways and I hope that these tips help, for those of you out there that are rocking sells on Craigslist and other classified sites.

And that is how you get 24 phone calls and 9 emails and sell your car on Craigslist in 3 hours!