Happy Freelance Friday Friends!
A valuable tool that I use as a freelancer and an entrepreneur is Craigslist.
I’m no wizard at using Craigslist, but I am learning quickly. I’m probably better than most. I wish they would put some R&D into User Experience and update their platform. Maybe a nice Public API regulated by the GNU Community would help to clean the site up and get rid of some of the 50% that is scammers and schemers.
This post is about my experience on Craigslist. I would love to read about experiences from other people if they’re willing to read mine and give me some notes on it.
Posting an article on my blog helps to start the conversation with myself. Then I start researching and reading about whatever topic I’m writing about. In this case, I just posted 2 more ads on Craigslist before I finished writing that last sentence.
CL is a great way to organically connect with the local community to make deals with strangers. The site uses old school, simple technology to replicate the old school, simple industry it replaced–newspaper classifieds. The main competitors for CL are thrift stores and eBay. Earlier this week, I sold an old Vizio tablet through CL. I did a factory reset on the device, met the guy at the library, he checked it out and gave me my full asking price–CASH!
If you have a side gig or do a freelance business, you should always be posting ads on Craigslist. It doesn’t cost you anything, you can post ads in any city you want, and the more clever you are when writing your ads, the more people you’ll get to respond.
What’s your Craigslist experience?
networkn8 
There are some great mobile craigslist crawlers that allow you to put in search terms items etc that you want notification on. The app will crawl the site at given intervals (you set) and distribute the data in a different viewer framework built into the app. None of these apps are perfect (or big) yet so there is room for development but the basic idea may help you find resources or customers more timely than your competition. I will note that Craigslist does actively block search bots so you may have to stay on that wave or else you may find that they are blocking your tool and you’re missing info.
Hey Kris, thanks for the info! I am going to tryout some of these apps and maybe one will impress me enough to write a review