Create Great Looking Craigslist Ads With Pictures

Looking to create a great looking Craigslist ad? Anyone who searches Craigslist knows that some ads stand out, and some don’t. Ask anyone who advertises regularly on Craigslist and they will tell you that the slick picture ads bring in more revenue than the plain old text ads.

Pictures add credibility to your Craigslist ad, as well as giving the viewer something to “see”. This is especially good for the services categories. You can include a screen capture of your own website, or some before and after photos of your services or products. With Craigslist, you only have a few seconds to “wow” your audience before they move on to the next ad. Ever hear of the saying ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’?

Currently, Craigslist marketing web will only allow you to add pictures to the Lost and Found, Housing, and For Sale categories. But what about the Services and other sections? How did they get those pictures in there? Well, read on to find out.

First you need a graphic you like (preferably in the JPG format), one that conveys what your ad or business is all about. Try to keep the image around 750 x 500 pixels. Now you need to upload this image somewhere to the web. If you have a website, and have access to your host, you can put this in your root or image folder on the server. If not, just Google “free image hosting” and you will find plenty of websites that will let you host your image for free. Take note of the complete URL of your image, as you will need this info later.

Now log into your Craigslist account. Create your title and type some descriptive text into the description box. Don’t rely on using the picture alone. Actually typing in some relevant text will eventually place you higher in the search engines organic results. After your last line of text, insert the code snippet, which you can find for free at the end of this article.

Be sure to preview your ad to make sure the sentences you typed in are as long as the length of your picture you are using.

By following the above steps, you will have your good looking picture ad up on Craigsllist ad posting in no time.

You can find the free code snippet here.

We design custom Craigslist & eBay ads, complete with graphics and text. You can place these ads in ANY category (not just For Sale, Housing, and Lost and Found).