Have you ever felt that Craigslist is a great system but a little difficult to manage in regards to keeping track of photos and content – especially when it doesn’t sell right away?
It’s easy when you price something dirt cheap but sometimes you are trying to sell something that you want to get a little more money for or there aren’t so many buyers for.
For this reason I have come up with the following method for doing “Craigs Blitzes’ Here’s what I do and hopefully it will help you sell more quickly and with more ease.
- Create a new folder on your computer called ‘Craigslist’
- Create a folder within that folder for each one of the items you are trying to sell
- Put all photos related to that item in its named folder. There are a few ways to do this:
a) download directly from photo device into the folder via usb, b) use some kind of cloud synching system, c) email it to yourself, etc. However I use Craigslist itself to do it which I will expand on in a bit - Create a spreadsheet similar to mine (I’m not good at making mine) for managing the ad content. See following screen shot:
- Download and install a Craigslist app like ‘Craigslist Pro’ on your smartphone for listing a quick version of the ad.
Now let me expand on the flow and you can adapt to your situation a bit:
First, I create the spreadsheet content with all the selling information I need. I also use very specific guidelines for the buyer so that I’m not wasting my time with people who can’t meet me when I’m available, who think they are going to jam my price down further, etc. So, all my ad content is first created in the spreadsheet. I like this because a) I have a nice big computer to do it very quickly and b) I can think about the content more and c) I can do very quick copying and pasting which is always more cumbersome on a mobile device.
Next, I use my smartphone craigslist app to take a picture of the items, to quickly give it a listing title, and a few words in the body like ‘nice chair for sale’. Then I upload it. I repeat this step for all my items until I’m done my ‘blitz’. The app and camera are an awesome easy way to get the skeleton listing up and active. Who knows – you might even sell the item before you can get upstairs to doctor it up because at this point your add is officially ‘live’ albeit not in good selling form.
Once I’ve got the photos and the skeleton uploaded, I then go up to my big, nice computer with the normal keyboard, open up that spreadsheet I made, log into Craigslist from my browser and go into my account. There I should see a list of everything I just uploaded from my mobile sitting there with ‘active’ at the top of the list. Now, I just click ‘edit’ and copy and paste the ‘real’ ad content from my spreadsheet into the craigslist add via the browser. This is very fast and easy.
NOTE: While I am in here at this point editing the ad and fixing up the text content, I always right click and download all the photos from the craigslist ad into the folder I created on my computer. The reason why I do this is twofold:
1. Craigslist has already optimized the photo (reduced the size and quality) to their limit so why not just save that version on your computer instead of uploading a bigger one later if you need?
2. Once I do so, it’s right there on my nice big computer so I don’t have to mess around with transferring the photo from my mobile to my computer.
The main reason why I do all this is because it’s likely that one or more of the items will not sell on the first listing. What I do now is I just fully delete the listing, rethink the content in my spreadsheet, repost it which brings it back up to the top of the list – ultimately giving it a higher chance of selling. If you delete and repost and don’t have a system like this in place it’s pretty annoying and hard I find.
Enjoy your posting.
