Freelance gigs can be difficult to land. Although you may see them all the time, actually getting one of the ad posters on craigslist to reply can be extremely difficult. For awhile now I’ve been searching for and finding freelance gigs on Craigslist.org. All the while I was paying attention to what was working and what wasn’t in order to refine what I call my “Freelance gigdar.” I started to notice that when I did things a certain way, I would get better results. I ended up pulling all of my notes together into a word document and then eventually a PDF. The PDF was created with the intent try to sell the product on clickbank, or just online. Try to profit from the research I had done. Well, I’ve decided to post it here for the readers of my blog. Hopefully some of you will find it as useful as I have. Good luck!

Some of the verbage may be off, but this was originally developed to be sold. And since you are getting it for free, I have no pity. This should go without saying, but don’t repost or sell this. It’s mine, I’m just letting you read it.

The Freelancer’s guide to:
Craigslist.org

By:
Richard T. D’Haene

© 2009 – Richard T. D’Haene – freelancers.guide@gmail.com

Allow me to begin by thanking you for your purchase of this product. Secondly, congratulate yourself for deciding to make this purchase. If your experience with Craigslist has been anything like mine, its well worth the money.

Introduction to Cragslist:

What is Craigslist?

Craigslist.org is a local classifieds site which services 570 cities in 50 countries worldwide. Craigslist has many categories from apartments and real estate to electronics and computer games. Along with the products are a very healthy listing of jobs and what craigslist refers to as ‘Gigs’. This is where the freelancers make their home. The Jobs section is primarily full of businesses looking for full-time, on site employees. What we’re looking for is people who need some specific, skilled tasks completed. These postings can be found in the gigs section. The categories listed under the gigs section are: computer, creative, crew, domestic, event, labor, writing, talent and adult.

How can I use Craigslist?

For the most part, Craigslist is free to both post ads and view ads. This means you can do anything from posting items for sale, advertising for a business, posting help wanted ads, or even finding a job. As mentioned on the Website, people whom have a skill set which can be utilized via the internet, or is otherwise not restricted by physical location can benefit the most from this ebook. Because local gigs may be few and far between, not being confined to a specific area broadens your possibilities of finding work. That being said, however, this ebook can still be of help to those who are constrained to a specific location.

Do I need an account?

This really depends on what it is that you are trying to do. If you would like to mainly respond to ads, then no. Email addresses, or their anonymous equivalent are available directly on the ad. If you would like to post an ad of your own you may need an account, depending on which category / section you wish to post into.

How to Find Freelance Work on Craigslist Fast

The Tool

For this to work correctly, you will need to download and install Mozilla Firefox. Simply visit www.mozilla.com/firefox/, download and install the program, then run it.

There are two main reasons we are using Firefox.
1. This technique makes use of the tab feature this browser supports.
a. The ability to have multiple pages open at the same time.
2. This technique makes use of several of the bookmark features.

The second and final tool we will make use of is the Craigslist search system itself. When you load the Craigslist page and select a city to view, you will see a ‘search craigslist’ field off to the left side of the site. Typing in a search term, selecting a category and then hitting the search button will return results based on your entry.

Once you have downloaded and installed Firefox, and have firmiliarized yourself with the search feature on the Cragslist site, we are ready to begin setting up this technique.

The Setup

1. Begin by opening Firefox and navigating to http://www.craigslist.org/about/sites.

This page is a list of all of the locations that Craigslist covers.
For this tutorial, we will focus on the Primary US Cities.

2. Starting at the top of the US Cities list, either middle click (press the middle roller button on your mouse), hold down the control key and left click, or right click and select ‘open link in new tab’.

You will now see that a new tab has opened which is the Craigslist page for the city of Atlanta.

3. Continue by clicking the rest of the cities in the list in the same fashion, or as many as you like. However, you must have at least two open including Atlanta.

4. Once you have all of the city pages open in their own tabs, go to the first tab, Atlanta, and type in the name of the freelance work you would like to find. In this example, I will use the term “logo” as I commonly look for logo design gigs. You may choose to search for “develop” for development gigs, or anything you like.

5. Next, click the drop down menu below the search box, and select “gigs”. Now click the arrow to perform the search.

You will now be shown the search page with the search results.

6. Now, click the radio button next to the word “pay” to make sure our search only contains paying gigs and click the search button one more time to filter out the non-paying gigs.

Although this list is exactly what we are after, it only contains the listings from one city. Let’s fix this now.

7. Ignore the results for a moment and look up at the address bar.
It should read: http://atlanta.craigslist.org/search/ggg?query=logo&addThree=forpay
We are only interested in the search/ggg?query=logo&addThree=forpay portion.

If you searched for a term other than “logo”, the term you entered will appear in this string where the word logo is.

8. Highlight everything after the: http://www.atlanta.craigslist.org/
This means you will have highlighted: search/ggg?query=logo&addThree=forpay

9. Either hold down control and press the “C” key on the keyboard, or right click the highlighted text and select copy to copy the highlighted text.

10. Now, click the next city tab, if you selected the first two cities in the list, this next tab will contain the Austin page. In the address bar you will see http://austin.craigslist.org/
Position your mouse cursor at the end of all of the text above, and paste what you had copied from the previous step. You will end up with something like this:
http://austin.craigslist.org/search/ggg?query=logo&addThree=forpay

11. Press the “Enter” key on your keyboard.

Now you will see that the Austin search page displays your search term, with the pay option selected.

12. Repeat steps 8 – 11 for the rest of the city tabs you opened.

Be sure to leave all of the tabs open. DO NOT close them after you perform the search.

Now you should have all of the city tabs open with the searches performed.

13. Click the “Bookmarks” menu at the top of the Firefox web browser and select “Bookmark All Tabs…”. You will then need to name the folder. I would recommend naming the folder something resembling the search that was performed, “logo” in my case followed by the areas searched. Perhaps Logo – US Cities. Click the “Add Bookmarks” button. Now, confirm that the folder exists in your Bookmarks menu, and that it is populated with bookmarks.

14. Close the Firefox web browser and reopen it again, without any pages active. Or simply close all of the tabs you have open.

Utilize Your Hard Work

Whenever you want to search Craigslist, click the “Bookmarks” menu at the top of the Firefox web browser and locate the folder you created. Hover your mouse cursor over the folder until it expands to show you all of the bookmarks it contains. Now, make your way to the bottom of this list and click the option, “Open All in Tabs”.

You will be presented with several tabs that will all open at once, each one of them loading one of the city pages you had bookmarked along with the search preferences you had entered!

This makes searching for what you’re looking for a snap!

Next, go through each of the pages to find new listings that you are interested in replying to. Use one of the clicking methods explained in step 2 of The Setup section to open each of the prospective ads in its own tab. Close each of the city search tabs once you’re done looking through each list either by right clicking on the tab and selecting “Close Tab” or by middle clicking on the tab. Once close all of the tabs you will be left with tab after tab of perspective gigs to reply to, EXCELLENT!

Repeat this process for any other search terms and / or any other locations you like. Remember to save each new set of tabs in a new bookmark folder.

How to get Hired for Freelance Work on Craigslist

We’ve discussed how to search quickly through any of the many, many locations listed on Criagslist. However, there is still the matter of actually getting the gig. Listed below are a few tips / techniques I use to help better my odds of success.

Appear as Professional as possible while Remaining Personable

Either small companies or individuals who are looking for assistance with projects post the majority of the ads in the gigs section of Craigslist. This means that appearing overly professional may scare them off. These people are more comfortable working with someone who is kind and easy to work with.

Connect with the poster of the ad as much as possible in your response.

One ad I see quite often goes something along the lines of, “I’m looking for a designer for my website. I’m a developer and I have been coding for X years, but when it comes to design, I’m all thumbs.” An easy way to connect with this poster would be to identify with is problem. Perhaps send something back along the lines of, “I have the exact OPPOSITE problem. I have been designing web sites for X years but have never been able to get the hang of coding them.” Then break into your normal email and provide any information requested.

Create a Template

Create and make use of a template whenever possible. As I stated earlier, I reply to logo design gigs quite often. So I made a generalized response template that includes the most commonly requested information. The easiest way to build your own template would be to first reply to a few ads of the same type and copy the email into a word document prior to sending off the email. After you have a few in the word document, go through them and extract the most commonly repeated points or phrases. I’m sure your name will show up in each email, along with your profession or skill set. Format this information into a paragraph structure attempting to stay as brief as possible, 3-4 sentences maximum. Now, use this template as the basis for each email you send out. Alter it each time to make sure it is applicable to the specific ad.

Place the subject of the ad in the subject line of the email

This is more of a recommendation than anything else. I think it helps your email stick out in their inbox. They may not recognize your name, or your email may even go in their spam filter, but they should notice the format / wording of a title they wrote themselves.

Include a link to the ad in the email or…

One problem I had at the start of my Craigslist experience was not tracking the ads I had replied to. As you can imagine, replying to 20-30 ads a day can make them all kind of run together. This makes specific tidbits of information difficult to remember. For a while, I was bookmarking each of the ads and then purging the bookmarks after a few weeks. I would move the bookmarks to an ‘active’ folder if I got a reply from the ad poster. This may work for you, however I found it to be too cumbersome of a process. Now, I include a link to the ad at the bottom of the email. I’ve recently been wondering if this might be making people think I may be a bot, automatically responding to their ad posting, or something like this. So I have started adding a line before the link that says, “In RE to your ad posted at:”. I have not noticed a difference in response rate as of yet, however I wanted to present this so that you can do testing of your own to make your own decision.

Include proof of your good work

This may be difficult for some, depending on your profession. If you are a web designer, such as myself, an online portfolio can be a good selling point. However, the quality of your work can also be a detriment. I was utilizing an old portfolio toward the beginning of my efforts on Craigslist, after I updated the portfolio to represent some of my more recent work I definitely noticed an increase in responses.

Utilize the search technique, and search often.

The early bird gets the work. Yeah, that’s right. Consider the following scenario. A person posts an ad looking for assistance for a problem that he cannot fix on his own. Lets say it takes about 10 minutes for the ad to actually appear on the site. If the poster is still online and he receives a reply 15 minutes after posting his ad you might have a gig. Also, consider that you may be the first, and possibly the only one to reply to his ad when he does check his email. This puts you at the top of the list, supposing all other elements are in order.

Never underestimate the power of advertising

If you’re serious about getting work you would have to be a fool not to post an ad for yourself in the services section of Craigslist. Admittedly, responses to ads on Craigslist can be few and far between. However, even one paying gig from an ad makes it worth taking the 5 minutes once ever two days to post the FREE ad.

That concludes this ebook. I hope you have gained some knowledge and will put it to use to better your freelancing efforts on Craigslist.

© 2009 – Richard T. D’Haene – freelancers.guide@gmail.com

Well, that was the Freelancer’s Guide to: Craigslist.org. Free of charge.

As usual, I have a few “for further consideration” links for you.

Easy Money with Craigslist.
and
The Ultimate Guide to Buying and Selling on Craigslist.