Monitor Craigslist Posts In Your City

One thing that Craigslist doesn’t offer that would be very useful is some type of alert system to follow a specific item. In other words, you are hoping that someone decides to put that item onto your local Craigslist market and you would like to be the first to know. Of course you can always go to Craiglist.org each day and search for that specific item, but who has the time to do that?

Enter Google’s popular notification technology called Google Alerts. This is a magical service that puts Google to work for you. At the alerts home screen, you can enter your search terms and other specific details like the number of times you are notified and the type of search. In order to get your alert crawling Craigslist, you want to use the search term specification: ‘site:’. For instance, if you’re looking for a Macbook Pro in the San Diego area, you’d want to enter the following search terms: “macbook pro” site:http://sandiego.craigslist.org/.

So play around with that as much as you’d like. Feel free to see what works best for you as you are allowed 1000 alerts at a time. Quickly get a leg up in internet marketplaces around the country!