How do we do them fancy pictures?

Since Craigslist ban on <html> and <img> tags on the General and Housing sections, tracking ads, and hosting your own images is only available in some Services or Jobs categories. Which happens to be where most of you are posting anyway. The flagger groups tend to flag any commercial interest that is posted in the general sections anyway, if you haven’t noticed already.

You can make a picture of your contact details, or you can make a really cool advertisement with your business graphics, logo, and some you tube videos. Video’s? I must be delusional, no one can post you tube videos on Craigslist you must be thinking. Well, wrong again. We do, every day. In the video section, we describe how this is done! Right click on the image, “save as” where ever then test post it yourself to Craigslist section that still allows HTML and IMG tags, or yesbackpage.de if you want to find out if it really works. If you would just like to make a quick template, there are many online template sites for free. Don’t pay for one.

To begin understanding gif video, we need to understand a bit about Photoshop. Photoshop’s claim to fame is its ability to work in layers. You can have one layer for all your text, a different layer for each image. You will want to create basic ads in Photoshop using nothing more than layers. As your technique is perfected you will begin to want to use gifs. Gifs are very similar to Photoshop, they use layers. Gifs also use frames. So it becomes a little more complex very quickly. You can open a gif and see it has many frames, but it also has many layers in each frame. This allows you to give the appearance of video. In fact, video is just frames played in a sequence. Gif is the simplest form of computer video. It is also one of the oldest forms of image compression. The fact that it is so old, can lead one to over look it. Like DOS. Who needs DOS any more? Who even uses a gif? This leaves a great opportunity to explore and learn to master the little known art of gif creation.

Many classified ad sites allow animated gifs. This means that if you can master this, or at least learn to hack some basic elements together, you will have an advantage over your competitors. More importantly, your ads will stand out and it can give you an advantage over your customers. You need to remember who you are doing this for and why. A great example is this software/course right here. We have an advantage over you, the customer. So, you pay us some money, and we then share our product with you which will allow you to have an advantage over someone else. You need to convey this message clearly and confidently to your customer within the smallest space possible. You need to convey, confidence, and advantage, or they will not want your product. The very best way we can do this is with video, and in Craigslist, we will need to use the gif video. It may be difficult at first to comprehend everything, but relax, and take the time. Once you learn this, you will have a great marketing advantage over every single Craigslister who cannot do this. The competition, and most importantly, the customer. The easiest way to learn this all is to begin in Photoshop. Create a basic page, what ever size you like. I use a transparent background always. It helps me manipulate the layers and shuffle around all my elements until I get it just so.

Locating elements

It might be easier than you think to begin in Photoshop. The trick is, learn where to find your elements already pre made for you. On a big project you might want to use the Web Image Scraper. Just type in anything, and let it go. It puts a all the google image full size pictures in a folder, so you can go through them at your leisure. But, this tool can only grab what you tell it to search for. What if your name is Fred’s Lawn care. Did you google this term in google images yet? Chances are, someone in another state or country is sharing your company name, and has even hired a graphic artist, (or became one) and they have created an entire website of pictures and text banners and maybe even ads. You can grab these from google, drag them into Photoshop, and chop them up into useable elements, change the hue, colors, and edit in your own telephone number. There you go, a new great looking ad in less than 20 minutes.

You can search “lawn care gif” and see if any funny gifs come up, grab them if they do, drop in your name, number, re-size it all, crop what you don’t need in there and have yourself an animated gif very quickly as well. There are websites that allow you to upload video clips ad create gifs from them, and there are also websites that allow you to make sparkle gifs, text gifs, you name it. You can learn to increase the size of your gif canvas and paste the frames from one gif into another, thus creating moving text, funny gif and photo-shopped background very easily. There is just a bit of a learning curve, but once you understand it, you will have a clear advantage over an age old technology, the gif, that will put you in the lead of the marketing wolf pack on any Craigslist.

We use an extensive list of software to grab videos, mix them, convert them, splice them, edit them and combine them into our ads. Check out our list of software link for a list of what we are using and what we use it for. There are many sources for videos, and many kinds of codecs. Your final file is going to be a gif. You need to have a basic understanding of how to grab videos you like from the internet, how to convert them into mpeg format, which is a very simple widely used codec that the rest of the software can handle. When you’re done editing and combining your video, you are going to use a video to gif converter. When you have done this step, you are going to then remove all the extra frames from your gif with adobe image ready, until you are left with about 30 frames. When you export your final gif, you are going to downgrade the color and dithering options until you have an optimal file size. When you get all the different clips completed, you will want to Photoshop a nice background with all of your contact details. Then you will open your gifs in image ready, add your background and combine them all into the 30 frames. It’s really not that complicated if you are inclined at all with software. In our studio it takes 6 to 8 hours to create a new ad like the one in the example. We charge 300$ to 500$ to create them for personal clients.

Our objective is not to create ads for you, but to instead reveal our methods and allow you to create them yourself. A basic understanding of Photoshop is required. It also pays to understand image ready and adobe premiere. With these 3 tools, you can unleash your imagination. There are great tutorials all over the internet about these topics, and we are not going to cover all the little details here. We are simply revealing our secret methods. Now you can search out the software and the tutorials on your own, and advance your education directly for the purpose of mastering Craigslist.

Once you have made over a million dollars in a self employed setting, you will be considered a Phd in business. You do not need a degree, or certification. You do not need permission to do it again. If everyone could do all of this, you would have to find even more complex and incredible ways to stand out so you can advance your business. These topics presented are worth learning. You don’t need to go back to school to get a paper that says you can use Photoshop. Just get it, do it, learn more, and google every little detail until you master it. Take the time, there is no real investment here, you already have the computer.

Once you can master your own graphics and not have to out source for anything, you are well on your way to achieving your Doctorate in Business. In time, we are going to drop some excellent Photoshop and gif creation tutorials into this section as we go through them. Until then, You Tube is your classroom, and it’s free, so please use it. An “I want money now” attitude is going to give you a mental block. No one will help you. We all want money now, get in line. You want an education now. Our tutorial gives you all the methods you need to do amazing things online. You just need to follow it up if you haven’t learned the basics yet. If you have not found the answers you seek, perhaps you’re just not asking the right questions?

6) Mass Image Posting

7) OCR Pattern Recognition