Transacting Safely In Craiglist

Published on: 21 August 2017 Last Updated on: 16 August 2019

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.

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

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Should You Consider Outsourcing Your Brand’s Marketing Campaign?

If you’re in higher management, you strive to make sure your marketing team is doing its best to market your brand and bring in leads to the sales team. Lest outsourcing becomes ponders publicity, keeping your organizational processes internally is crucial to you because you want to keep control over operations, and you want to keep costs at a decent minimum. Now you’ve realized that internalizing all of your online marketing efforts might not be working out as well as you’d imagined. Businesses that outsource marketing have specialized marketing services on their side, collaborating with them with every campaign and a new initiative to make sure it’s successful. Online marketing services are often more efficient than an in-house marketing team and, more often than not, more affordable. Systems are even created to make sure your brand still has control over activities and the reputation of the company. Outsourcing your marketing efforts can be a great option if you understand the importance of a powerful marketing campaign but don’t have the resources to do it by yourself. Who Can Benefit from Outsourcing of Brand Marketing Campaign? Many companies and brands decide to outsource their marketing activities to help them create brand awareness and generate leads. But certain businesses tend to use outsourced resources to implement their marketing agendas. Here are some of them. 1. Early-Stage Businesses Upscaling a new business is a challenging and stressful job. You have many decisions to make while developing new services and products. At the early stage of the business, business owners often concentrate their efforts on creating the product and do not have the financial power or the time to hire full-time marketing people. As the company prepares to launch their service, they need to develop a brand image. An outsourced marketing agency often handles the processes that design the style guides and website and creates the company logo. 2. Growing Companies When companies launch their service or product without problems, they often enter a high-growth phase to quickly bring supplementary marketing resources. Outsourced marketing services provide the necessary talent and resources to increase revenue growth without adding a lot of overhead. More often than not, businesses in growth stages cannot afford the time it takes to train and hire new staff members. Outsourced marketing firms or Virtual PA services provide expertise and flexibility during these growth stages. Often, venture capital firms invest in companies at this stage and use the influx of cash to accelerate growth through social media platforms, content marketing, SEO, and digital advertising activities. 3. Companies with Large Marketing Teams Global organizations hire hundreds, if not thousands, of marketing professionals to back their brand and sales initiatives. These enterprises will often use outsourced firms and professionals to provide crucial services. For instance, a company will hire outsourced professionals to promote an event, save money or launch a new project. Outsourced resources are often more affordable than in-house professionals. The company may want to skyrocket a specific product line and outsource for a short-term initiative. 4. Niche Companies Brands and companies that operate in specialty markets like engineering or biotechnology may find it challenging to hire in-house marketers with the experience and the know-how they need to create and launch content marketing campaigns. Outsourced marketing services often specialize in a specific niche market. They bring not only valuable resources but also experience in these unique markets. Virtual assistants, for example, combine technical expertise with marketing education or experience. These professionals work in leading organizations and have a greater understanding of the market than full-time professionals with little experience. When To Do Outsourcing? If you do not see the results you want from your in-house marketing team, then you should consider outsourcing. Your in-house team is working relentlessly with the goals set before them, but the results continue to be short of optimal. Staying on top of performance and campaign optimization isn’t easy. Often in-house teams have no time to optimize these campaigns for better performance, so they end short of hitting their goals. Evaluating the results of marketing efforts is critical to the success of a team not only in-house but for outsourced professionals as well. If it’s been a few months since your brand launched a great marketing campaign, it might be time to outsource marketing. a. Your Marketing Team Is Burned Out In marketing, there is graphic design, copywriting, SEO, website development, email marketing, lead generation, and so much more. How many professionals do you have in your team? Do you have someone assigned to each task involved in marketing, or do you have one marketing guru filling many hats? A copywriter can’t be a graphic designer and vice versa, but so many entrepreneurs expect so much from one marketing employee. One team member cannot meet the massive marketing demands in today’s market. b. You’re Always Running Out Of Time You’re planning a stellar email campaign this month, but your team ran out of time, so you reschedule it. You’re rushing to get the offer, the Facebook posts, and the blog posts out before Christmas. If you feel like you’re always running but never get anywhere, then it might mean you don’t have the necessary systems or strategies in place to run efficiently. c. You Lack Proper Strategy Getting things done might feel rewarding, but those things are time idlers instead of business generators when they are not part of an overall strategy. Posting on social or sharing a blog post is useless unless you have a purpose of reaching your goal. Sharing for the sake of staying active on social media platforms is not a real strategy. You feel the pressure of staying active online, so you ask your marketing team to ensure the social accounts are active always, but you don’t give them a genuine reason. As a business, you have income goals, but if you lack a proper strategy to meet those goals, then you might want to consider outsourcing digital marketing services. Summary That’s all about the logic behind considering outsourcing your brand’s marketing campaign. I hope the article was intriguing enough to make you understand why you should outsource the marketing campaign. The rationale is justified above along with specific situations to make your concept clear. Wanna clear any doubts? Drop your queries in the comment area below. Read Also: What You Need to Know When Outsourcing SEO How Legal Services Outsourcing Aids Law Firms and Legal Departments Balancing the Books with Outsourcing – Virtual Receptionists 9 Things Conservatives & Liberals Have in Common How To Reduce The Operating Cost of Your Business?

5 Times DOOH Helped Companies Reinvent Their Marketing

Digital-out-of-home advertising continues to speak to us in the most innovative language that everyone can understand and comprehend. That is why companies approach DOOH product marketing with excitement and now one plays it safe. DOOH is highly impactful, remarkably creative and, unlike most of the traditional ways of advertising, is literally impossible to block or ignore. Thus we’ve figured it’s just the right time to make the top 5 list and pinpoint the times DOOH helped companies reinvent their marketing. Listed below are the most inspiring, engaging and entertaining ways DOOH is used for effective marketing. A friendly warning: please refrain from any marketing reinventing through DOOH until you’ve found a digital signage software provider that fits your brand. Establishing a fully-functional digital signage network is a challenge, so my suggestion is: make a 5-10 key qualities list for DS and go from there. Honestly, there are staple requirements that will help you to make the most out of each display. Your DS soft should be able to play key media formats, integrate another innovative tech, and play interactive content. DS should allow you to seamlessly run a growing network, have a good health system in place, etc. The designs have to be exciting and up-to-date, and there is always a very important matter of quality customer support. Whatever it is for you – list the key requirements and start your search. We’ve spent a good couple of months searching and testing out DS soft, fortunately, we are pretty happy with our Kitcast digital signage software (check them out at https://kitcast.tv/). Best Examples of DOOH Advertising: i) That time we all wanted a Burger King Whopper. Calling me a Burger King fan would be a bit of a stretch, what I am though is a huge fan of their marketing. So, let’s talk about the impressive BK DOOH campaign, their digital-out-of-home pièce de résistance called “The traffic jam whopper”. The amazing never before attempted DOOH campaign in Mexico aimed to end hunger in all traffic jams. They used dynamic DOOH and promoted services in gridlocks bases on real-life data by locating the potential buyers in traffic. Traffic info and real-time data analysis were used to adjust the content of the billboards. Burger King ran messages displaying the time left in traffic and tracked and displayed time left before receiving the order. Additionally, mobile ads with campaign promotion were sent out as soon as cars entered traffic and were in close proximity to billboards. The cars were tracked with Google maps API to pinpoint the exact car position in gridlock. This was the first time ever anyone has attempted a delivery to drivers on the move and it was an outstanding success: the campaign boosted Burger King’s delivery service and the orders for food delivery increased by unbelievable 63%. ii) That time Kylie Jenner won programmatic. The latest Kylie Jenner’s billboard campaign was an ode to programmatic DOOH and has finally shown all of its power. I’m pretty sure that the new Kylie Skin ad campaign was to biggest programmatic campaign to date. Just imagine, it took 1 300 screens in more than one thousand cities across the US to make this digital-out-of-home marketing campaign a success. But, hold your horses, we haven’t gotten to the most impressive part yet! It has been reported that the whole programmatic digital out-of-home campaign was carried out with unimaginable before speed: it was conceived and made public across the US all in just under a week. From idea to Kylie’s face appearing everywhere - from the Times Square to a shopping mall in West Covina – all in just under a week. Jonathan Gudai, Adomni’s CEO said, and I fully agree, that Kylie Skin was absolutely groundbreaking DOOH marketing campaign: “To run that many ads on that many boards, with that minimal effort, is truly a remarkable thing” – stated Gudai. iii) That time McDonald’s teamed up with Met Office. It is getting harder to impress and engage consumers, but, last year Leo Burnett came out with a pretty amazing and a rather simple way to grab people’s attention with a DOOH marketing campaign for McDonald's. They’ve presented a digital outdoor campaign that turned McDonald's famous and highly recognizable menu items into weather icons of the five-day weather forecast and brought all of it to life on giant screens. iv) That time Pepsi brought us the HD live-feed AR 3D “Unbelievable bus shelter” DOOH campaign to scare the life out of us on the way to work. This award-winning campaign is hard to forget: Pepsi MAX has shown us an amazing and unbelievable experience with their innovative DOOH. Life-like lions, aliens and UFO’s, meteors, and people getting dragged underground by octopuses were all appearing before people’s eyes on a morning bus stop. We urge you to watch the promo video for Pepsi MAX - more than 8 000 000 people did! It is one of the most watched ads on YouTube. It was high-tech, creative, entertaining and to this day one of the most unforgettable DOOH marketing campaigns out there. v) That time the Emoji Movie digital-out-of-home won London. Let’s end our list with a really bad movie and a remarkably great augmented reality and DOOH marketing campaign. Sony Pictures has brought a very creative and fun campaign to the streets of London with just a billboard, augmented reality and facial recognition soft. Advanced soft was used to turn the passersby’s into emoticons, it was able to identify gender, emotions and facial expressions with a very impressive speed thus managing to bring AR experience to the high-foot traffic street. The campaign’s reach and “shareability” was up there with the best of them. Read Also: Effective Ways To Utilize Digital Marketing Avoid These 5 Mistakes Before Starting An SEO Signs Your Traditional Marketing Campaign Is Working A Guide To Running Your Instagram Marketing Campaign

What to Consider When Starting A Marketing Agency

Marketing is a competitive field, and if you want to start your own agency, you need to make sure you have the right stuff to compete. There’s a lot of stuff to consider when starting your own firm. For instance, what services will you offer? What type of businesses will you cater to? Will you build your own website or outsource it? What sort of marketing agency hosting will you use? What to Consider When Starting A Marketing Agency It seems like a lot, doesn’t it? For this reason, we’ve created a simple guide to help you get started building your marketing agency. Read on to learn what you need to get started: To begin with, you need to make sure you have the right stuff to run an agency. To start a marketing firm, you should be adaptable, have a desire to learn, and amazing communication skills. Next, you need to decide what is going to set your agency apart from your industry competitors. The best way to figure out what will make your marketing firm unique is to start by asking yourself some questions: 1. What can you specialize in? Some services your agency can specialize in are: Search engine optimization (SEO) Email Marketing Content Marketing Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising Event Marketing Guest Blogging 2. Will you specialize in more than one thing? It’s a good idea to start small and specialize in one or two services; however, the more services you offer to clients, the more desirable your agency will be to potential customers. This is because people tend to like to be able to get all their needs met in one place. Utilizing marketing automation solutions could make it simple for you to provide a variety of marketing services to your customers. All-in-one marketing tools like digital marketing software for agencies will also enable your staff to perform more effectively and successfully. 3. Will you cater to B2B companies or B2C companies? B2B is short for business-to-business. It refers to companies that sell products or services to other companies. B2C is short for business-to-consumer. It refers to companies that sell products or services directly to consumers. Once you’ve figured out what services you’re going to offer and what type of businesses you’ll cater to, it’s time to identify who your target market will be. Ask yourself: 4. What market are your competitors targeting? Who are their customers? You don’t want to go after the same market as your competitor, or the same customers when you’re first starting. For instance, if your competitors have lots of eCommerce clients, you may want to choose a more underserved market like real estate. 5. What specific demographics can you target? It’s important to know not only who needs your service but also who is most likely to buy it. Consider the following factors: Age Location Gender Income level Education level Occupation Ethnic background. Now that you know what services you’re selling and who you’re selling them to, its time to write a business plan. Your business plan should have several components: The goals for your business. Predictions for your finances and cashflow. Forecast for your business activity. Outline of which revenue stream(s) you’ll utilize. Description of your target audience and how you intend to reach them. Finally, we arrive at the last part: finding clients. You may feel like the best thing to do is to get as many new clients as quickly as possible. Instead, it would help if you focused on retaining clients. It is much harder and more expensive to acquire new clients, then it is to keep existing clients. So how can your marketing agency find and retain clients? Find clients by: 1. Networking Networking can be done by attending industry events, trade shows, and conferences, participating in networking sessions, posting and sharing content on social media, participating in LinkedIn groups and discussions, as well as sharing information on relevant business forums. 2. Offer Free Trials Free is a golden ticket word for most people. Offering your agency’s services for free will help you build a portfolio while showing potential clients what you can do. 3. Referrals Once you’ve acquired some clients, use them to expand your client base by asking if their customers or suppliers need your services and letting them know that your firm is available. 4. Promotion Create a website, use social media, and design promotional material to market your marketing services. Retain clients by: 1. Making sure everything your firm does is client-focused. 2. Document all your work and file reports. 3. Keep abreast of the latest changes and innovations in the industry. 4. Approach your work with creativity. Read Also: How To Choose A Practice Management Software For Your Law Firm 5 Ways Construction Businesses Can Gain New Clients

Transacting Safely In Craiglist

Conceal Your Identity

To See is To Believe

Not A Dating Website

Oh, Crop! Killer E-commerce Mistakes You Need to Conquer

What Can I Do To Make My Company Website More Profitable And Powerful?

Content Rally

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.

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Related

Should You Consider Outsourcing Your Brand’s Marketing Campaign?

5 Times DOOH Helped Companies Reinvent Their Marketing

What to Consider When Starting A Marketing Agency

Transacting Safely In Craiglist

Conceal Your Identity

To See is To Believe

Not A Dating Website

Share this Article

Oh, Crop! Killer E-commerce Mistakes You Need to Conquer

What Can I Do To Make My Company Website More Profitable And Powerful?

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.

Leave a Reply

Popular

Follow Us

Recent

Related