How to Generate Leads Automatically on Craigslist

tl;dr Create an out of office reply to automatically email Craigslist leads.

So you’re building up this website or business, but are having a hard time getting people to your landing page. With this technique, all you have to do is post to Craigslist as many times as you want and sit back.

This is the method I used to build up my lead generation website in the first few months and get some highly targeted traffic. Direct Craigslist traffic is pretty powerful, as these people were actively looking for what I had to offer.

What You’ll Need

Dedicated email address

You will need to have a completely separate email address for this to work or otherwise it will affect your everyday email activity. I used recruiting@myurl.com for my email, but use whatever you need to gather leads.

Landing page

Ya gotta send that traffic somewhere. You could have them go to a page that collects their actual email instead of their Craigslist email. You could send them straight to a product you’re selling. Where ever you need traffic sent, be sure to plan according.

Note: if you have more than one landing page you plan on sending traffic, you will need more than one email account for this method.

Very basic knowledge of HTML, depending on email account

I used Hostgator’s email provider to set up my lead generation email accounts. For whatever reason, I had to format my emails with HTML code to get them formatted properly. No big deal, a few bold, new paragraph, and italics tags and I was set.

What You Do

So you’ve created recruiting@myurl.com, now it’s time to get moving. What you’ll do is create an out of office reply that automatically responds with relevant information to your Craigslist ad, as well as directs them to your website.

It’s really that simple. I was getting 5-10 leads per day with less than 10 posts in various cities with <200,000 people. Granted that’s small time, if you hired out a virtual assistant to take care of posting, you could easily scale up in no time.

Other Tips

  • Be sure to sign up for Craigslist before setting up your automatic reply.
  • Have your automatic message only responds one time per email, in case you have to go back and forth with a lead.
  • Test, test, test. It took me a bit to format the emails to look good, so be sure to send a test email to yourself before going live with the advertisements.
  • Don’t be mad if your ads get flagged. Scummy people in your industry use bots and programs to automatically target and flag based on keywords in your ads.

This can be used in so many other ways, from driving people to your lead generation website to having people opt-in to join your mailing list so you can take advantage of email marketing.

Big dawgs gotta automate