It is searchable, but most of your searches are limited to the metropolitan area you have selected, in my case Charlotte. You would have to change your location multiple times to search multiple locations. That’s a drag.
But if you have an iPhone, you have a much more efficient option.
For the standard 99 cents, head to the App Store and pick up CraigslistPro+. It pretties up the Craigslist interface quite a bit, and makes it very easy to respond to listings directly from your iPhone, save listing and searches. It’s the saving of searches where the magic begins.
Once you install and open the app, you’ll see the prettified home screen:
To make this work, you need to add cities you want to search in and the category you want to search. To do that, tap on the “Location” button. You will have the opportunity to Add a city by tapping on that field:
Next, select “US Cities.” If you are outside the US, this should also work if you select your region.
When you tap that, you’ll get a list of all the major Craigslist cities. Tap on “Select All.”
You’ll get all of them added to your search options, and it will look like this:
You can go back and add more cities that didn’t appear in this listing, as it only contains the largest metropolitan areas. Once you have added all of your target cities, you can go back to the home page.
Back onthe home page, tap on the Search Category button, and select Gigs, then Talent Gigs. Once that is set, head on back to the home screen.
Once there, type “voice over” in the search field at the top of the screen. Your results will come up with every posting from all of your target cities. Neat huh? You can tweak your search on the home screen by tapping on the Filters/Setting button on the home screen, including filtering out no pay jobs.
But we haven’t reached the neatest part. Tap the “Agent Setup” button in the top right corner. You’ll be taken to a screen where you can set up a search agent.
Tap “Save Search as Search Agent,” name it, and your agent will be in place. You get push notification automatically to your iPhone if your search term comes up in any of your target markets. Your first 50 are free, and you can add up to 10,000 notifications for 10 dollars. That, my friends, is a steal.
The only downside is that you have to scroll through your search results to find a new hit, usually by the date you received the push. I would much prefer a button on the push notification popup that would let you go directly to the new hit, and I have submitted that as an improvement.
Your mileage may vary, but it is a cheap way to search one of the lower level sources for work to expand your portfolio. Obviously, you have be be selective in the work you try and get: as I mentioned before, there are a lot of low/no compensation gigs. But occasionaly, you may find that diamond in the rough. And you may have only paid $11 to find it. That’s a pretty good return on your investment, don’t you think?
I don’t intend to leave Android and Blackberry users out; I just don’t know their apps as well since I don’t have either of those smartphones.
Because of the way I have to import this blog, if you want to see this post laid out slightly better, trip on over to the actual entry. Good luck!
