{"id":84,"date":"2011-03-30T20:04:32","date_gmt":"2011-03-31T04:04:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/?p=84"},"modified":"2011-04-01T19:23:24","modified_gmt":"2011-04-02T02:23:24","slug":"craigslist-scraper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/craigslist-scraper\/","title":{"rendered":"This is how I find 1000s of customers on Craigslist."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Craigslist is a great resource for a number of reasons.\u00a0 Here are three reasons.\u00a0 One, everyone uses it.\u00a0 It&#8217;s ranked as the 10th biggest site in the US (per Alexa).\u00a0 Two, it&#8217;s very well organized.\u00a0 You start with a specific geography, browse by niche&#8211;finally, you can even search by keyword on top of that.\u00a0 Lastly, it&#8217;s free.\u00a0 Free and with no annoying ads! <em>Man, that guy Craig is a good samaritan.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Now, for you to find customers on Craigslist, your particular niche has to be listed on Craigslist.\u00a0 I suppose that&#8217;s the catch.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s walk through a few, different examples of how one can effectively use Craigslist to find customers.<!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>You&#8217;re promoting a service for musicians.<\/strong> Pick any geography, then go to the &#8216;community&#8217; -&gt; &#8216;musicians&#8217; section.\u00a0 Any post here is likely from an active musician.\u00a0 Similarly, you can go to the &#8216;for sale&#8217; -&gt; &#8216;music instruments&#8217; section.\u00a0 Any post here is from someone who plays a musical instrument.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>You&#8217;re promoting a moving service.<\/strong> Pick any geography, then go to any section under &#8216;housing.&#8217;\u00a0 Anyone who&#8217;s posted here here will be moving soon and likely will require a mover.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>You&#8217;re promoting web design\/marketing services. <\/strong> Pick any geography, then go to any small business category under &#8216;jobs.&#8217;\u00a0 This includes &#8216;food\/beverage\/hospitality,&#8217; &#8216;salon\/spa\/fitness,&#8217; &#8216;legal\/paralegal.&#8217;\u00a0 Anyone who&#8217;s posted here is likely someone who either owns or works for a small business.\u00a0 Plus, the fact that this business is hiring indicates that it is growing and spending.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, by knowing where to go on Craigslist, you have access to thousands upon thousands of customer contacts.\u00a0 You just need to email them.\u00a0 But, the task of opening up each listing and copying the email address is tedious.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s automate things, then.<\/p>\n<p>Most repetitive tasks on the web can be automated with a simple web scraper.\u00a0 A <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Web_scraping\">web scraper<\/a> is just tool that simulates a manual process.\u00a0 In other words, instead of manually clicking to each Craigslist listing page and copying the email address from the top 100 times, let&#8217;s use a tool that can execute this task 100 times.\u00a0 In our case, we will use this free tool I created, <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/craigslist-email-scraper.php\">Craigslist Email Scraper<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Use this Craigslist scraper and in no time, you will have 1000s of email addresses from targeted customers.\u00a0 It is important note that you can&#8217;t email all those contacts simultaneously.\u00a0 First, your email service provider (e.g. Gmail) usually limits how many people you can email in a single email.\u00a0 Secondly, Craigslist imposes a limit on how many Craigslist email addresses can be contacted by a single email sender within a certain time frame.\u00a0 These restrictions are in place to prevent email spammers.\u00a0 So, pace yourself and don&#8217;t be a spammer!<\/p>\n<p>There you have it.\u00a0 This is exactly what I do to find 1000s of customers on Craigslist.<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>dave<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Craigslist is a great resource for a number of reasons.\u00a0 Here are three reasons.\u00a0 One, everyone uses it.\u00a0 It&#8217;s ranked as the 10th biggest site in the US (per Alexa).\u00a0 Two, it&#8217;s very well organized.\u00a0 You start with a specific geography, browse by niche&#8211;finally, you can even search by keyword on top of that.\u00a0 Lastly, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[38,40,42,41,39],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-offline-marketing","tag-craigslist","tag-craigslist-email-scraper","tag-craigslist-scraper","tag-free-craigslist-scraper","tag-scraper"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":86,"href":"https:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions\/86"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}