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Craigslist, the mighty popular free classified website is always engaged in a constant battle against evil; the spammers. Oh brother, they have designed sophisticated mechanism against spam and what is the result? None, they keep coming back with new strategies of war against the anti spam worriers.

Here is my dilemma; what exactly means spam? Look at it this other way; you own a business that offers a service. Now, this service is possible to be run not just in your area but in different cities and states. So why should we consider this “spamming”? Oh please, I have been posting advertisements in Craigslists for over 4 years now, since the days of innocence I have posted over and over again day after day in multiple cities and I have been flagged in many occasions by the very own Craigslists system, while other times I have been flagged by other advertisers who apparently did not like my competition.
Funny thing; as wrong as it is I can understand having advertisers from my competition flag my postings. But what I just see it ridiculous, is that other group of people who spend their divine time looking for the so called “spammers” so they can flag them and provide a loyal patriotic gesture towards Craigslists. What a bunch of morons.

Now that is funny. If I have the time off, I will go to the park, enjoy a day at the beach, visit my friends, spend time with my family and one thousand other reasons before sitting down in front of this cold shinning monitor waiting for the first spammer that appears to flag him away.
My friends; you will never avoid what you wrongly call spam. You never did and you never will. Craigslists, the way I see it is about done with all of their “anti spam laser worriers”. See, they watch for duplicate title, so we learned to go around that. They watch for duplicate content, so did we. Then they adjusted their parameters and begun to watch for IP posting frequency, and once again we calculated the number of posts per IP and adjusted our selves by purchasing fake IP’s. In another effort Craigslists created the “Phone Verified Accounts”. Each one of us have over 50 accounts and raising.

So, I think there is very little room for Craigslists to move on to; come to think of it there are a few options; they can accepts only local IP’s, but hey, that too can be arranged. They can start charging per postings; well, that will put them in competition with major tycoons out there and honestly; once you start free, you will remain popular until you change that. What else can they do? Not much. It is sad, because once again the people advertising on Craigslists are the small people, small business owners who can not afford to spend $7.00 per click on a big time search engine like Google or Yahoo. These people do not mean any harm to any one, they just want to survive to the point that one day they can lift their wings and fly away from Craigslists and enter the world of the paying advertisers. People like my self too, we are not spammers, we just need to survive and while we save hundreds of dollars in paid advertisement, on the other hand we spend day by day a good amount of time trying to have our advertisements posted in Craigslists with out been flagged by the filters or the idiots who have no life and dignity.

These days an increasing number of people are relaying on an idea, or more likely; an illusion or fantasy. The thought that having a website will relieve them from their economical stress. The equation seams so flawless; “If I build it they will come”. I am a web developer, I have been designing sites for quite a while now and I have come across many clients to whom I had to be very straight forward and open their eyes. Most of them call me and the last question that comes out of each one of them is; so, you will submit the website to Google?

Let’s make one thing clear; a website is nothing but just a website. It is a series of files that rest on a server provided by a hosting company. I will make a point by giving a very simple example; the equivalent to a website would be a flyer that has been designed and it’s ready to be hand it out and distribute. The website as well needs to be distributed, advertised. Most people who believe that the website will automatically show up in Google on the first page, they are about to get the surprise of their live. If your website ends up in the 15th page in Google that is really good. All those websites you see at the first page of Google; their owners have spent many thousands of dollars and a lot of time in order to manage that position.

There are 2 main ways to drive traffic to your website; one is called “organic” and these are all of those websites that you see on the search engines on the left hand side. They do not pay to be there, but at one time they did had to pay some one or some company to help them reach that position. The other option is called; “Pay per position”. This one means that you will pay Google, Yahoo or any search engine of your choice a given amount of money for every person that clicks on your website. The advantage is; you get traffic to your site right away, the disadvantage is that some times the cost of your advertising campaign is much larger than the profit you make.

One way or the other, in order to make money you need to spend money but one thing for sure is that your website will not sell by it self. You paid a web developer and in a few weeks your website is up and running, now you need to market your site and that is going to take time and money. How much money you invest will depend on how much you research and learn before taking action.

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