What is Craigslist Spam?
Dec 8th, 2007 | By Kevin | Category: How To, affiliate marketing, personalIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed with Feedburner. Thanks for visiting!
With the rise in popularity of Craigslist.org, it has become an active invitation to SPAM. SPAM on Craigslist happens a couple different ways. At least once a week now, there has been a posting on Warriors Forum about posting Affiliate Ads on Craigslist to make a bunch of money. In reality, Craigslist does not allow affiliate marketing and if you are posting direct affiliate links, you will get banned very quickly. Besides being against the terms of service, most of these marketers were also posting multiple ads frequently as well as across several cities.
While Craigslist is very powerful for marketing, we do not want this service to be flooded with a bunch of crappy affiliate offers. If it does, it will gradually loose it’s effectiveness. Don’t get me wrong, you can make money on Craigslist promoting affiliate products however, you have to front load the sales sequence with your own product or report.
The second type of SPAM on Craigslist.org is what I described on my post about John Lesser. This SPAM is from emailing people who have posted an ad with a commercial email about products or services they did not request. If a user posts an ad on Craigslist, and does not check the checkbox saying it is OK to contact this poster with service or other commercial interests. This is what John Lesser did to me when I posted an ad about my house for sale.
Basically, I was pissed. I replied to John’s email telling him he was an idiot. He’s probably not an idiot and trying hard to promote his mortgage business. However, the reality is what John did is against the law. It is no different than the SPAM email you recieve each day in your inbox. The difference was, John actually gave complete contact information. John of course did not reply to my followup email probably because I called him an idiot and was obviously pissed.
Now that my blog post about John dominates Google for the phrase John Lesser Preferred Mortgage, I finally got my first threatening comment on the blog post from Lee Hansen. You can read my response to Lee on the comments for the John Lesser is a Spammer post.
Here is an example of an ad that does not allow commercial contact:
Here is the SPAM email I recieved from John Lesser:
Originally from Wisconsin, I moved out to Salt Lake City over ten years ago on a six month software development contract. I now have over 15 years in software development, and was introduced to internet marketing back in 2003. During the wild west days, our business focused on content sites for Adsense revenue. As it became harder and harder to keep up with the search engines, our business has evolved, and forced us to focus on building lists and creating products. We now have a list of about 5000 interested in goal setting, and a small internet marketing list of about 500.