Using Craigslist To Generate Leads

This post will go over how we use Craigslist to generate Motivated Seller and Cash Buyer leads for our websites. This is a great free way to generate leads, but the leads don't flood in for motivated sellers. They do, however, flood in for Cash Buyers. Check out the Results section at the end.  

The psychology of Craigslist is not set up for finding motivated sellers that will reach out to you. Craigslist is a place where people go to buy discounted items for sale and to get good deals (this makes it great for finding cash buyers). 

Putting yourself in the shoes of a motivated seller. The first thing that you're going to do it not go to Craigslist to figure out how to sell your property quickly. You're most likely going to go to Google and search for keywords that you can pull out like "we buy houses," "how to sell my house quickly," etc. 

Now that I've gotten the disclaimer out of the way, let's get to it.  

Posting

With this strategy, you're going to have to be persistent and patient. It took us about 3 weeks to start getting leads from Craigslist, but once we got them, they were pretty hot. 

We create a Google Doc with a list of different post titles and bodies. The reason for this is so that we don't spend a lot of time rewriting all of the post every day. Basically, we're just lazy. You want to have diversity in your posts' content because if you keep posting the same content (titles and bodies) back to back then Craigslist will cut you off. We have about 15-20 different titles and about 10 different bodies typed out. 

For pictures that we use, we create them for free in Canva. We cycle through about 30 of these in various forms. These are more pleasing to the eye than the usual "we buy houses" spam ads that you see and you can personalize them to your own business. 

Tip: Put your number and website on the picture. This is so that other people copying you can't just steal your content that you spent time working on. It also keeps your pictures unique to your business. It's your branding. 

Our Strategy

You will have to start out small. We started out posting to CL once in the morning, once at lunch, and once after work. Now we have worked our way up to 5 times at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Granted, we have some posts that are removed by either CL or members of the site, but we dominate the CL feed with our ads. If anyone ever goes to CL and is thinking about selling their house, we will be the ones that they see the most. 

We link these posts to our websites. If you want to see what the sites look like, check out Breyer Home Buyers or East Atlanta Cash Buyers.

Residual Benefits

If you post a lot like we do and include keywords in your post's body (don't keyword stuff because you want to appeal to the seller and show that you can solve their problems). We will put We Buy Houses [market_city] or Sell My House Fast [market_city]. After awhile, when you search for We Buy Houses [market_city] then you'll see CL's feed pull up. For my city, the CL feed is always on the first page. So they will go to CL feed and see all of our posts on there. 

Results

We've been doing this for two months. We've gotten 6 leads for Motivated Sellers and about 500 Cash Buyers. As you can tell, this is great for building your cash buyer list for your city. It's a great FREE way to build your Cash Buyer list too. We use it for both and have had great results.