Waiting for gold

Yesterday morning I spent my pre-work time signing up with webdesignfinders.net. I opted not to pay $190 for a platinum listing and went for gold. The gold listing requires you to cross link on page your home page back to the website.

I immediately woke up this morning and checked the analytics on my website to see if I had any new traffic. I am on a mission to spread out my traffic sources. Currently ( am very heavy on direct traffic and very sparse on search engine and referral traffic. My two clients have signed up with local agencies for their industries - their traffic on their websites have been even spread.

I did come up as the last listing on the first page for houston, tx, which I was plased with. Here are the links for the search results and the link, I think, to my info page:

http://webdesignfinders.net/texas/houston-web-designers.html

http://webdesignfinders.net/details/7765.html

Ads on Craigslist

Recently, at the suggestion of a very kind supporter, I was reminded of Craigslist as a route for finding work. When my girlfriend, oops - I mean this kind supporter, sent me a bunch of links for possible jobs, I was enthusiastic. I sent replies back to those ads, but none of them panned out.

A few days later, I posted an ad under 'creative services'. The following morning, I posted a new ad which I created in Illustrator. It was a graphical ad. I noticed some ads have a very nice and formatted mixture. View the Ad.

At my first response I was excited. It sounded like someone was going to send me to a site that could also help out. When I followed the link sent later that day, it didn't make sense. The following day, I got a similiar email. And as of now, all Craigslist has yielded on my ad is spam.

The jobs out there seem legit and some of the other companies advertising had valid and impressive work. Have I found an avenue or stumbled onto a road under construction? Much of what I have seen and experienced on Craigslist has matched my contempted opinions before this experience.

To create an ad under creative services, which is free as opposed to creating an ad under jobs wanted which cost $25 an ad for people in some of the major cities, you have to re-post it daily to be competitive and found. I'm not so sure of the spamming rules there, (obviously they are weak in the way of email), but they do warn you that deleting existing ads to re-post the ad immediately or within a two day period is considered overposting or spamming. So, I will have to research a little more and see how to approach this.

(In testing Craigslist on deleting the post, my previous ad was deleted without asking me if I was sure I wanted to delete my ad, so I guess after that spamming period has expired, your ad gets deleted immediately when you hit the delete button, BE CAREFUL! I quickly had to re-post the ad! The link above has been updated.)

In each of the 3 ads I have posted, I have changed the title. Am I spamming or over-posting? I saw one company there on multiple days, so I figure there is an allowance of some type of repetitive advertising under the creative services.

I guess the point or moral of this post is to figure out the advantages of posting on Craigslist. I can"t hurt and the spamming on my email hasn't been overwhelming. Only time will tell. I had much contempt that Craigslist was a bunch of spamming and quick online dating results (after hearing a story a few years ago about someone who got caught using Craigslist as a way to hook up), and although it may all be ture, it still may be a valid way to expose (should I use a better word?) or advertise my creative services.