OK, I am going to help everyone out on their craigslist monitoring even though it may cut into my own craigslist success. I just found this out about a month ago and it will greatly improve your ability to get in on deals quicker. Almost everyone has a smartphone these days and using what is called an RSS feed and an RSS reader you can easily monitor craigslist for ANYTHING your little heart desires.
If you are familiar with the above items I will simply state that when you perform a search on craigslist if you scroll to the bottom of the page in the lower right hand corner there is a link to subscribe to the search as an RSS feed.
Now for those of you who are not familiar with these things i will elaborate. First you will need to sign up for an RSS reader. I use Greader(
LINK) which is Googles RSS reader. It is completely free and costs nothing. Once you have a Greader account you will need to go to the respective market for your smartphone and download the Greader application. You can however use any RSS reader that you want.
Once you are setup with Greader you are ready to start subscribing to RSS feeds. An RSS feed is basically a stripped down version of a website that provides you simple and quick updates of the site you are subscribed to. You can change the settings in Greader to check the site at specified intervals for updates.
In the case of craigslist whenever you perform a search you can scroll down to the bottom of the page and there is a small orange button with white letters that simply reads RSS. If you click on this button after performing a search it will add an RSS feed to your Greader for that search. I have my phone set to check every 30 mins so basically it runs my search every thirty minutes on craigslist and if it finds a match it gives me a little notification icon to let me know to open up Greader and see what it found.
It sure beats the heck out of trying to remember going to craigslist every day or several times a day to check for things.
Another trick that you can use to make sure your search only returns what you want is to use advanced search functions. Here is an example of an issue that we would run into. Say we search for bottles, this will return ANY posting that has the word bottles in it. The problem is this returns searches with baby bottles, pop bottles and so on. If you find that your search is returning too many hits you can narrow down your search results using the "minus" advanced search function.
Using this looks like this in the search field, bottles -baby -pop. this will return any postings with the word bottles in them but will basically filter out the postings with the word baby or pop so you don't get the junk you don't want. That is just a simple example of what you can do to customize your searches.
HERE is a link to craigslists webpage explaining all of the advanced search options that you can use. You can use multiple ones on the same search so you can see how you can completely customize what you are searching for.
You can of course simply use your Greader account on your computer without a smartphone so this will work for anyone with a computer and internet access. However the app and smartphone route will greatly increase you efficiency. Happy craigslisting!