Craigslist for Heroes, Rogues, and Middle Management: Buying and Selling When Crowds Are the Product

By Christopher Lotito

"Put succinctly: 'Craigslist is the website where when you ignore the economy, the invisible hand slaps you.' This is a book about crowds. It’s about things that crowds do when you give them a blank listing box and no moderation, it’s about the data that they generate, and how we can use that data to increase profits, to increase organizational knowledge, and to pull buyers, sellers, and everything else out of those faceless crowds." (~Christopher Lotito, Author) (About the Book:)If you've been looking for ways to maximize your sales on Craigslist, to sell your own home, your own car, or any other product, if you've been looking for a job, for ways to increase your connections, to "build your database," you've found your guide in this book. A little marketing, a lot of business experience, a few technical secrets, and a host of real life examples, this is certainly the most comprehensive guide to Craigslist ever published.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781300786207

Book preview

Craigslist for Heroes, Rogues, and Middle Management: Buying and Selling When Crowds Are the Product

Craigslist for Heroes, Rogues, and Middle Management:

Buying and Selling When Crowds Are the Product

By Christopher Lotito

Copyright

ISBN 978-1-300-78620-7

Copyright Christopher Lotito / Lotito Technical Services

2013 All Rights Reserved

Preface

A book about Craigslist? she said, eyeing me suspiciously, as if tensed for the punchline to some joke that I wasn’t telling, you mean the classifieds site?

Yep, the one and, well, not the only, but yes, that one, I replied, not exactly making my case.

You’ve got earthquakes, tsunamis, elections, and global warming and you’re going to write about a 10 year old classifieds website? she continued to sneak fries off my tray.

Clearly I was losing her, Well, it’s not really just about Craigslist, I mean, there were the murders but it’s not about that, it’s more about marketing and selling and uhh tricks and secrets for using the site... I trailed off, coming impressively close to talking myself out of this fiasco right then and there.

Well, if it pays the bills, she said, still not looking convinced.

6 months later...

I don’t know anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to write about Craigslist right now.  After nearly 20 years in business, Craigslist is still raw and lawless, has one of the most unprofessional, unattractive, and lackluster interfaces in the business, and does not support modern technology like Flash animations, video, or HTML5.  Anyone who decides to base their business or their interests on Craigslist as a result of its software features has got to have a screw loose.

So why did I write a book about Craigslist, in 2013, after the Craigslist murders were over and done with and it isn’t even a popular topic?  Why bother digging into a topic that’s the journalistic equivalent of covering the newspaper classifieds (which by the way have seen more technological advances than Craigslist)?  As with so many things in life: Democracy and Capitalism.

Craigslist is awful at presentation, at marketing, at technology, at advanced features, but none of that matters because the service has a few small strengths and plays to them ferociously.  Craigslist is Democratic, perhaps the fastest, purest form of Democracy since HotorNot.com, having a tiny staff and relying almost entirely on unpaid, unregistered, and anonymous users to produce and moderate content for the site internationally across dozens of markets acting in an equally diverse number of legal jurisdictions.

Craigslist is also Capitalistic on the verge of becoming a defining example for the term.  Craigslist is one of the largest online markets in the world, acting as the virtual meeting place for consumers and sellers across the globe.  Capitalism reigns supreme in the cars+trucks category where prices are set not, as the sellers imagine, by Kelley Blue Book value or the seller’s desires, but by the whims and motions of the market itself.  Whenever a seller makes the mistake of ignoring these trends, the market provides a strong reminder through a complete lack of buyer interest until the offending price is reconsidered. 

Put succinctly: Craigslist is the website where when you ignore the economy, the invisible hand slaps you.

All of this I learned personally from trial and error (with some prejudice towards the latter).  Attempting to find a decent book about Craigslist that covered both the philosophy of making a sale or a purchase through the site as well as some of the technical aspects of putting together a decent looking post with 1995 era technology left me adrift in a sea of scammy, badly written ebooks.  Ebooks which hadn’t been updated since the Bush Administration, reference software that was long out of production, described acts that bordered on criminal, and were clearly written by teenagers between classes.

We can do better, we have to do better than that for a website that plays an integral role millions of sales every  year.

This book is dedicated to your grandmother, who has survived through