Transacting Safely In Craiglist

Published on: 21 August 2017 Last Updated on: 16 August 2019
buy and sell

Craigslist is used by many to buy and sell stuff due to its simple interface. You can find almost anything on it. However, due to the large scale of transactions occurring, it is hard to keep track or even find out the credentials of the parties to the sale or the authenticity of the things being sold.

To help you in maneuvering around the site, here are some tips for a safe and meaningful experience on Craigslist.

Conceal Your Identity

In Craigslist, you are given an option to either use your true email address or use the one provided by the site itself. Choose the latter. It’s safer to use the proxy e-mail as it can prevent scammers from accessing your real e-mail address.

However, when you respond to someone, your true e-mail will then be exposed. You can opt to create an e-mail solely for Craigslist. Use ones from Mailinator, Gish Puppy, etc. to hide your true identity and preserve your anonymity.

In addition, do not reveal your location or residential place. Always remember to remove geotags from the photos before you put them on Craigslist. Thieves and scammers can use programs that can read the information on location that are hidden in the file header. For starters, use the EXIF geotag removal app before posting online.

Aside from contact details, do not also give in to requests that can reveal any personal or financial information. Some scammers will ask you to submit “credit checks” and such is a big no-no since they can get credit card information from it. Money wiring services is also often used by scammers.

The best way to handle Craigslist transaction is by meeting in person and using cash or PayPal as a mode of payment.

To See is To Believe

Never buy something in Craigslist without seeing it personally. Scheming sellers can get photos online of items in good condition when in reality, the one they are selling is not in top shape anymore. You see this a lot when people sell their iPhone’s and you will be disappointed to see a different item when you receive it via courier.

Read also: 8 Incredible Tricks That You Didn’t Know Your IPhone Can Perform

When you do meet the buyer or seller, make sure that you are in a public place. Coffee shops, restaurants, and other places with lots of people are good locations to do the transaction. It is also advisable to bring a friend who will act as a witness to the entire sale. Do not leave your cellphone behind and make sure that at least one friend or relative knows when and where you will meet the buyer or seller.

Craigslist actually recommends that parties deal in person by advising sellers and buyers to deal with people locally whom they can meet in person.

Not A Dating Website

Though some people do it, Craigslist is not the best place to find potential dates. There are other free dating sites like Plenty of Fish and OK Cupid, plus applications like Tinder, that you can use to find a date. These sites and apps have specialized privacy and security settings that are just not available in

Content Rally wrapped around an online publication where you can publish your own intellectuals. It is a publishing platform designed to make great stories by content creators. This is your era, your place to be online. So come forward share your views, thoughts and ideas via Content Rally.

View all posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related

Digital marketing

Essentials For Digital Marketing

If you’re starting your own business in digital marketing; congratulations! Digital marketing is in and has a lot of potential in the job market. It is very lucrative for young entrepreneurs who are changing the way the world looks are business. There is a vast number of digital marketing jobs and career opportunities in the future. Having been born into an era of technology, Generation Z has a natural affinity toward technology and computers. It doesn’t hurt to be equipped with the knowledge and even though you may have talent, it is important to enhance it with learned skills. Now, apart from talent what do you need to have a successful digital marketing business? Read on to know more. Know your target audience: For any marketing strategy, it is very important to know who you’re targeting. You have to segregate consumers according to their economic status, age, sex, and location. A local company targeting another city won’t get much business so it’s of no use. Besides the digital market is not exactly cheap so you have to narrow down your options to the demographics that will get you the most business. Teenagers won’t buy diapers, and a strategy that is targeting this age group will fail. If you are a digital marketing firm or a single entrepreneur, ensure that you thoroughly study the market as well as the client product and service. You need to have thorough knowledge to be able to empathize with consumers Decide location: After setting the demographics, analyze the locations where the advertisements may be relevant. Some products can be shipped across cities. In such cases, you can target any location that has not been targeted by your competitors yet. Unless you’ve got great content and a great marketing team, play safe with the location. A lot of investment goes into digital marketing and unless you’ve got money to burn don’t experiment recklessly. If your client ships the product across cities, you may still have to decide a relevant area to start targeting. An untapped market is always the best choice and you can market aggressively if you have the budget. Decide content for  marketing: The consumer is king! For a digital marketer, content is king. With the right content and action words, you can sell any deal. Now, how do you decide what kind of content to add? It depends on the demographics. You will market brands, products, and services differently. Each of these has different methods of campaigning and so is the content. Brand marketing is different because here you’re establishing trust. You’ll target the audience with content that tells them why they should choose you. Products and services will have descriptive campaigns where you explain why the audience should spend their money on you. You can pitch the brand to a bigger audience whereas products and services will have a limited relevant audience only. Allocate budget: The next most important thing is budgeting. Now that you’ve decided upon the content and the demographics, you now need to identify the resources that will go into marketing. Do you have enough to do everything that you’ve planned? Allocate budget to each campaign according to their utility. Each campaign needs to be developed according to the content and budget available. Bear Newman from bearfoxmarketing.com says that spending more time and money on marketing will make a business more successful. Take cognizance of the platforms you’re advertising on. Platforms like Google and Facebook cost more than organic SEO practices. Which niche of digital marketing are you an expert at? Only stick to that and optimize marketing. Do competitor analysis: A very important component of digital marketing is competitor analysis. Unless you know what your competitors are up to you will not be able to build a good strategy. A good digital marketing strategy is one where you outsmart your competitors or target an area where you don’t have much competition. Analyzing the strategies that your competitors make use of is a brilliant idea. Fortunately, this is easy now because everything is visible online and you have tools that can measure competitor growth. Doing this is very important even if you are not running active campaigns to keep abreast of the trends in the industry.   Analyze how they place their content and the catchy slogans they use. Remember you can learn a lot from others’ experiences too. This will give you an idea of what works and what doesn’t in the world of digital marketing. As interesting as digital marketing is, the gruel is just as much. If you want to be good at what you do, choose your information sources carefully and go through case studies for the best results. Read Also: Should You Hire A Digital Marketing Agency? Why Every Business Needs Digital Marketing Four Things Marketing And Public Relations Firms Want To Tell You

READ MOREDetails
Outdoor advertising

How we could be able to get benefits from the outdoor marketing

Outdoor advertising, very simple, is marketing that organized outdoor massive places to attract the customers. Various types of outdoor branding can be done to make a brand visibility. Billboards can be comprised about 65% of outdoor marketing. • Sitting benches branding • Schools gates branding • Specific event coverage • Recreational place banners • Shops branding • Shopping malls • Bus branding • Bus stands • Bridge branding Here we also include other populated areas are vital to show all types of flying flags imprinted with logos, images, and promotional messages. There are plenty of ways to attract your customers by seizing the attention and offering them a huge amount of benefits while the competitors are not. To make our brand a significant exposure outside the home where most of the folks are outing, visiting and taking rest of long hours of hectic work burden. Outdoor marketing isn’t a new way to market the products and brands. In the current era people are getting bored with the old stuff of commercialization – now they are demanding some new content as our world has advanced into the digital world of marketing. To make our brand’s promotion different from the competitors’ it would be better to give a strong reason to our customers so that they easily can buy products. Why should we use outdoor Marketing? 1. Target your audiences 2. Positioning at points of sale 3. Brands talking point build 4. Consumer pulls distributor push 5. Target your audiences efficiently 6. Outdoor advertising can’t be turned off 7. Other media cover outdoor promotional activities How we can take the maximum benefits from outdoor marketing through outdoor banners. 1- Outdoor Advertising has High Impact To preparing TV ads and other digital media promotional content, we keep in mind how to be attractive in the 30-second streaming ad. But in outdoor advertising, it would be slightly easy to attract the audience with just simple but reliable graphical that according to the place atmosphere where it has changed. No matter the passengers taking attention or just this outdoor banner going through their eyes. It is not just a 30-second ad that will stream off. This is the main benefit of outdoor marketing to be there for some particular period by attracting the folks. 2- It would be Very Cost Effective Way of Marketing Through a widely accepted survey, it has been reddened that outdoor promotion is very cost-effective form all other advertising phases. It is just given and take the way of marketing how much we invest it would be good enough return profit. 3- It has Widely Reach to the maximum Audiences As outdoor advertising is stand out directly to customers every time, while passengers are walking or passing through. Most of the time some folks are individually read out what is being shown off on the display boards, sometimes its texture, content, images, and graphics. Through all these, our display boards would be the maximum reach to the audiences. 4- Outdoor Marketing is an Engaging Media Unlike most mediums, outdoor is actually liked by consumers. Research from APN Outdoor found that 71% of Australians preferred buses with advertising than those without and that 36% stated outdoor advertising as a welcome distraction. 5- Outdoor Marketing Impacts’ well on Sale It is a good marketing channel and mostly seen by the buyers, so that is the primary concern to enhance the chances of sale on the brands’ outlet or other places it is put on sale out. In outdoor stalls or extra promotional activities, we could be able to get promotional, visibility and sale by investing in this type of marketing. Read More: 5 Marketing Tips To Help Grow Your Business On Instagram Google Maps Marketing: Guides On How To Boost Brand Advantage Social Media Marketing Role In Technology

READ MOREDetails
Content Marketing strategy

4 points to consider when creating a Great Content Marketing Strategy

The proverbial ‘holy grail’ of digital marketing is a slow but steady increase in your organic traffic, on a day-to-day basis. The key issue is not the fact that one is able to generate numerous hits on the website itself (important though they may be) but the fact that these hits will eventually be converted into actual sales. In this case, a suitably high conversion rate (resulting in actual earning of revenue) is of near-absolute and paramount importance, especially when it comes to the creation of an entirely self-sustaining and viable online business entity. Yes, the seminal importance of generating leads can never really be overlooked, but the far more critical objective of eventually making these sales remains crucial to the success of just about any business at hand. 4 Keypoints To Remember While Creating A Great Content Marketing Strategy For successfully doing content marketing you will go to need to follow some basic strategy. Your goal is to attract as many as possible audiences to your website. More audiences mean more potential customers. If your content is not going to attract audiences to your website. Your content marketing is not going to be successful. For doing this Here are the four key tips for you and along with this enhance your content marketing strategy. 1.  Attracting The Relevant Traffic : It is pertinent to note that most such successes are only possible if the website in question is also able to attract the relevant traffic, in the very first place. This is precisely why many hits right at the initial stage, is of such supreme importance.  As a matter of fact, the more such hits, the more the potential for the actual kind of leads that will almost inevitably lead to outright sales, either online or even offline (as the case may be). This can of course, only happen with the website itself is also able to ensure that the ‘just right’ traffic not only comes to the site but also stays there for a long enough period of time to enter the ‘web marketing funnel’ (that is, the process that leads an individual to not just the site itself, but also converts him or her into becoming a long-term customer. This entire process is colloquially known as a ‘marketing funnel’). This is the part where a highly effective content marketing strategy can easily come into the picture. That is, the kind of strategy which will be able to deliver both a sustained and an impactful message to the overall target audience. But in such a manner that it will also help them come to a suitably favorable purchase decision. Let us see just what such a strategy actually entails: 2. Understanding the target market : Here, it is very important, to understand that just about any content generation strategy has to come from the point of view of the target audience itself. The more important points and salient features of this aspect include the psychographics as well as the demographics of the audience that the enterprising content marketer is targeting. For example, if a website retails sports-shoes in the city of London, it would hardly make sense to pepper the website with articles on the Vietnam War (for instance). Here the key point to understand and learn is that one has to ‘tailor-make’ the content to fit in with the audience’s very own likes and dislikes, per se. (An interview with an Olympic hockey, for example, will be able to generate a lot more interest in the products on offer, then if the site owner and marketer were to just simply pick up random news items.) Similarly, if you are a heavy equipment dealer and sell used cab-over trucks and dozers, the content on your website should be relevant to the target market. 3. The seminal importance of creating great headlines : When it comes to understanding the importance of the ‘ubiquitous’ headline, the odds are that many if not most, such ‘digital marketing content specialists’ just simply love to write entire reams and reams of their very favorite articles without ever really understanding the gist of their work. In other words, they just simply fail to realize the fact that it is not the long-winded content that really catches the eye, but rather the headline, itself. If the headline is eye-catching enough, then the odds are that it will also vividly capture the imagination of the reader who will, in turn, be so hooked that he will have no choice but to read the whole thing. And once he does that, it will be easy enough for him to slide into the marketing funnel without even realizing it at all. This is why all content writers should almost always opt to go for a truly eye-catching headline if they possibly can. 4. Express and articulate your ideas very clearly : It is an axiomatic enough of an assumption that any article that converts is a winning article! This is why the web content writer should always avoid writing a lot of complicated stuff as well as long-winded and extended sentences that basically look like absolutely indigestible paragraphs, in their own right. Here, the need of the hour is to keep all such writings, both clear and concise. Albeit, having said that it is important to understand that your writings should be highly effective Here, the best policy and practice is to typically use short, concise and fairly simple words that even a child would be able to understand. In fact, the content writer should try to cut out all unnecessary words, if he possibly can. The point to remember here is that being clear is always much better than merely ‘showing off’ one’s own knowledge. Conclusion : In 2021 Content Marketing is the biggest medium by which you are going to convey your message to your audiences. Ultimately, the quantity and the quality of content on your site will easily go a very long way indeed, in effectively ensuring that you can also retain the core interest of your own target market in a manner that will be calculated to generate not just a single sale, but rather to create repeat customers, again and again. Read Also : How To Monitor The SEO Health Of Your Website Best SEO Tools For Ranking The Website Get A Return On Investment With Your SEO

READ MOREDetails