How to Search in Every City on Craigslist
Searching on Craigslist is an easy (and free) way of finding freelance work. For those of you not familiar with the classified ads site, it allows you to post and search classified ads in nearly every city and country. I have been using Craigslist for years, and have found many clients in the "Creative Gigs" section.
The Problem
Since Craigslist lets you search in only one location at a time, most people resort to just searching the city in which they live. If the nature of your work is such that you can complete entire projects through e-mail, then the location of your client does not matter and you can increase your chances by searching for freelance projects in other cities.
One Attempt
Of course, if you try searching in every city on Craigslist, you will be spending too much time searching and not enough time working. What can we do? One shortcut is to search only in major cities, such as New York and Los Angeles, where there are many ads posted daily.
The obvious downside of this shortcut is that you are overlooking a majority of ads posted in the U.S. (not to mention the world). Although the smaller cities have fewer ads, there are many more medium or small cities than there are large ones. Also, the projects you may find in smaller cities will probably have much less competition from other freelancers, because they’re all busy searching in more populated locations! If only there was a way to search in all cities at once, you would not only have a huge advantage over your competition but also more than double your chances of finding a project!
The Solution
After realizing the importance of being able to search every city at once on Craigslist, I thought of a very simple method of doing just that, and it utilizes Google's site-search feature...
If you want Google to search only in a specific website, you can type site:website.com after your search query, where website.com is the website in which you want to search. For example, searching for "cartoons site:craigslist.org" (without quotation marks) would show you every ad on Craigslist that includes the word "cartoons."
So Google will show you results from all of Craigslist. In other words, you’ll be able to search in every city at once!
