Finding Gigs on Craigslist

by: Randy McKown

Successful marketing means taking advantage of every resource in order to reach out to past & future clients. When most people think about marketing their new business they think “Ok, I’ll stick an ad in the local paper, one in the yellow pages, upload my website and watch the business run in off the street.” Yeah, it doesn’t work like that. It would be great if it did, but it doesn’t. You need to explore every marketing venue you can. You need to network. You need to come up with fresh ideas. Look for new products you can tie into your services. After awhile, you start to realize this is taking a lot of time and money. So, obviously when you have a source that you can profit from in some way, without spending a penny on it, you need to jump on it fast. This is where Craigslist comes into the picture.

If you haven’t heard of Craigslist, you’ve been living in a cave. It’s that freebie classified website that has no graphic design whatsoever and a out of date layout navigation. It looks horrible but for some reason it is one of the biggest things since ebay. Anyone can go on there and sell their products or services. You can post ads looking for products or services. You can barter for items. There is even a huge free section where everyone says “I’ve got this stuff sitting out by the curb, come and get it.” Stick a post about a free truckload of junk by the curb then look out your window in a couple hours. It will literally all be gone. (We cleaned out our garage last summer with this method).

Start out by navigating to your nearest location. It shouldn’t be hard. It seems they have all the major cities covered. Once you’re there scroll down to the bottom and you will see the following sections, which I have highlighted for you here. It pretty much says it all. You can post advertisements for your photography services in the two categories under Services. I recommend put general advertisements in the Creative section and advertisements for weddings in the Events section. Next don’t forget to check the two sections under the Gigs category. In my city there is not a lot of activity in the Gigs section so what I do is check it once early in the day and then once more at night.

Most of the time, people on Craigslist are there looking for a good deal. So, don’t expect to get any high-profile clients from Craigslist. For the most part, you will find clients who are working with a smaller budget. If you are running any discount specials, promotional events, etc., then Craigslist is definitely the place to post them.

Recently, I tested a couple theories out on Craigslist. I placed a total of 6 ads. In half of the ads I included detailed background info, such as, the fact that we are internationally published photographers with over 20 years experience, a brief list of our major well known clients, magazines we have appeared in, etc. The ads appeared to be well thought out and professionally written. Then I placed 3 ads that looked like an amateur wrote them and did not include any info about our skill level, experience, etc. Surprisingly, the non-professional ad received a great deal more attention. Most likely, this was because people were looking for a deal and assumed a studio with those qualifications would be way out of their price range. In my next experiment, I placed 10 short ads on Craigslist. 5 with sample photos and 5 without. According to my online web statistics report, 3 potential clients clicked-through from the ads with no photos. 57 potential clients clicked-through the ads with the photos. From these experiments, it seems obvious to me that a photographer will definitly have better luck by creating a simple ad with a couple photos.