Craigslist is awesome, but let’s say you want a hyper local craigslist for your community. When I say community it could mean your high school, college, church, temple, gym, company, neighborhood or in my case – my Apartment Complex.
I know it sounds a little weird, but it’s genius. It’s genius because I’m busy and I don’t have time to drive around 25 miles looking for things, but if things and services are near me (like literally right next door) then i’m totally willing to take 15 minutes out of my day to walk over and show my neighbor how to do sit ups (for $20/hr) or buy some furniture (I don’t have a truck, so I’d pretty much be dragging it out to my apartment).
Step 1.
You don’t need a hosting account, you just need to go to AdCommunities.com, sign up for free and make a hyper local craigslist there. I made mine. You can check it out here: http://springgarden.adcommunities.com/.
Step 2.
Market the hell out of the url. www.AdCommunities.com makes it easy – by letting you print out pre made fliers with a click of a button (you can see ones I printed out and posted around my apt complex below). I’m also going to talk to my neighbors about it too, and my property manager so she can get her staff to slip fliers under people’s doors of the buildings. Her benefit is that she’ll have a centralized location to post announcements quickly to her community.
fliers on mail boxes
fliers in laundry rooms
fliers on apartment building doors
A little tip:
Tear off a slip or two on the bottom of each flier before posting them up to make it look like people have been looking and tearing the slips off by themselves. This way it’ll encourage people to look, read and tear off more slips. I know it’s sneaky, but isn’t that life?
Step 3.
I’d jump start the community with some stuff. I posted some ads for my community – you can check them out at this URL: http://springgarden.adcommunities.com/
I’d totally encourage you to start one. It’s really empowering to help facilitate your own community’s hyper localization.
The Bottom Line:
AdCommunities.com is a community classifieds site where anyone can launch a classifieds site easily (like craigslist). If you’re a college student then this is the ultimate site to launch a college classifieds site made specially for your college, which you can manage or not manage (whatevs bro).
Hello there I liked your informative article on How to Create a Hyper Local Craigslist for Your Community. Great post, thanks alot.