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Craigs-Agent Software Review – Is It Really Totally Worthless?

This software is designed to reply to peoples ads on Craigslist that have posted in the wanted section looking for a certain item with an affiliate link to ebay for a related item whereby you would earn a commission if they bought or signed up. It was incredibly easy to use but the question is, did I make any money doing it? Here’s my review.

When I first saw this, I thought “what a great idea”. I had heard of people manually doing this but this software seemed to be cutting edge and I jumped right in to try it out. First, let me explain a little more about how this works for those of you who aren’t familiar with Craigslist.

Craigslist is like a huge classifieds site where people can basically sell their stuff. It’s organized by state and city so most of the ads are local sellers and local buyers. There are other sections there such as a ‘Wanted’ section where people post what they are looking for and hope that someone has one and will respond and maybe they will buy it from them.

Craigs-Agent actually pulls all the ads into the software and gives you a drop down box from which you select a city you want to work in and it will show all the ads in the left navigation frame. You then click on the ad and the actually ad itself is pulled in and displayed in the main screen where you can read it. Here you are looking for more details than the actual ad title like color, size, price they want to pay, etc.

Once you know what they want, you click the search ebay button and it will search ebays listings for what they’re looking for. You navigate through the ebay listings until you find either a specific auction you want to recommend or you can send a link to the search results page. Click the send reply button and the poster will receive an email telling them you’ve found what they’re looking for. Should they click through and purchase you earn a commission.

As the software comes right out of the box, it’s pretty worthless.

It has a built in url cloaker that is hosted on their website so all the urls look like http://craigsagent.com/recommends/cloakedlink , pretty obvious and especially once Craigslist became bombarded with Craigs-Agent users, these type emails would be deleted right away. However they did supply a url cloaking script that you could install on your server and it would integrate with the software so I definitely chose that route.

The software comes set up so that you can add in as many email templates as you like which is good. I think most people didn’t do this and the emails they were sending were so blatantly obvious that they would be constantly posting on the support forum that their click through ratio was horrible.

I had a very high click through rate with the templates I used. Here are a few examples:

==========================
TEMPLATE EXAMPLES
==========================

In response to your ad,

Hi, I’m replying to your wanted ad.

If you haven’t already found what you were looking
for, check the link below and see if that’s what
you needed.

#link#

Thanks, :)
#name#

==========================

Hi, did you find what you were looking for yet?

If not, I think I have found what you were
asking about, check the link below.

#link#

Thank you, :)
#name#

==========================

Hello,

I’m responding to the ad you posted.

I found something I think may be what you’re
asking for in your ad. Hope that helps!

#link#

Take care, :)
#name#

==========================

Hello,

Saw your ad on Craigslist. Any luck yet??

I ran across something that I think is just
what you were asking for.

#link#

Hope that’s it! :)
#name#

==========================
END TEMPLATE EXAMPLES
==========================

They are all similar but a little different wording so it doesn’t trip up any filters Craigslist may use. I used about a dozen different templates and found that my clickthroughs was outstanding. But does that mean I made money? I’ll get to that in a bit, but first…

Also, to help with clickthroughs, I made a few changes in the output code so that my shortened urls looked like mysite.com/temp/shortenedcode , this made it look like I had uploaded something into a temporary folder for them to look at instead of the default which was much too obvious that it was an affiliate link even though the supplied script did shorten it because of the way they named the folders that showed in the link. Easy fix though if you know what you are doing.

Here’s where the problems start.

You need to setup multiple email accounts to get this to work. Craigslist only allows an email address to reply to a limited number of ads before it blocks you. You have the option of creating numerous free hosted email accounts like gmail or you can set them up on your own server.

I started by setting up about 20 gmail accounts which was a pain. I then set up a main gmail account and set the others to forward everything to that one so I didn’t have to log in to all 20 every day looking for replies or problems. After a while I would notice that a gmail account would be full of bounced replies. Sometimes I would find out that Google itself had blocked them from being sent because it was “sending too many emails” to quickly. This kind of became a full time thing and I started spending more time setting up new email addresses than actually working the software, not to mention the feeling of working hard for a couple of hours only to find out that it was all for nothing and none of them had actually gone through.

I decided I would risk having my own domain blacklisted and registered a new one just for this purpose, I then set up about 50 email accounts and went through the tedious process of adding these into Craigs-Agent. This worked for a while but before long it was the same scenario and none of my emails were going through.

All in all, it was the most boring work I’ve every done! I would rather go get a real job than scroll through thousands of ads full of people wanted free cat food, other marketers trying to buy up iphones and all the other junk looking for the one in a hundred ad that would actually be something that could be found on Ebay and cost enough that you might actually make a profit.

At the end of the month, I had made a total of just over $300.

Unless you have an unlimited number of disposable domains, there really is no way to make money consistently.

There is a piece of software that was suggested you purchase (through their affiliate link, of course) that would automatically create gmail and yahoo email accounts. If I hadn’t found the work so boring, I might have given that a shot but I don’t really like buying software only to find out that I have to buy other things to even be able to use it. Something like that should be mentioned up front.

Anyway, it was just an experiment for me. I was really looking for a simple tool my kids could use to earn some extra money during the summer instead of trying to get a fast food job or mowing lawns. Guess I’ll keep looking.

Take care,
Gail

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