Are you frustrated at not being able to find the information you need online? Or maybe the information you found isn’t really providing substantial value (money?) for whatever purpose you have in mind? Fear not, I will share with you today the power of the internet – an information gold mine.

Say you’re considering to go to a brand new city for a degree or simply a career switch, you might want to find out how populated the city is.

Or, to put it closer to the theme of this blog, you want to make some money but you don’t really want a job.

There’s a great tool out there you could use to do these, you’ve probably heard of it, it’s called Craigslist.

Study the population of a city

If you’re trying to check out a city, go to Craigslist.org and search for the city you plan to move to, say New York City. You’ll undoubtedly see a ton of posts every day, showing that people are active and there are probably a lot of Internet savvy people in the city (which is true).

On the other hand, if the city is dead, you’d most likely see very few posts on Craigslist. And pardon my bluntness, most people in the neighborhood are probably older too (cause they don’t use Craigslist!).

Make money from Craigslist

What about the money? You got it, Craigslist is literally a gold mine. Well, maybe not exactly a gold mine, but good enough anyway. You can often get free stuffs off Craigslist, especially furniture, provided you’re willing to go grab it from the owner. Many people want to get rid of their old furniture so they tend to give it out for free. It’s usually on a first come, first served basis, so it’s best to find somewhere local that you could get to rather quickly.

Also, as you may already know, there are many freelance jobs available on Craigslist. However, what you may not know is that there are companies out there that pay you to help them with their marketing effort.

I have a friend in the West Coast who went for a teeth whitening experience study and got a lot of freebies (teeth whitening products) worth hundreds of dollars. Of course, he had to go to the place almost every day for like a week. But hey, his teeth are sparkling white now, in fact I’m gonna meet him tomorrow so I’ll find out how effective that has been!

How to avoid scams

Truth be told, there are a lot of scams on Craigslist. If you’re not careful, you could easily lose hundreds of dollars. When I was hunting for apartment in NYC (I live in White Plains now), I always looked for posts that contain phone numbers and photos. Those without phone numbers are instantly labeled as scams by me.

If you still don’t believe me and email them anyway, you’d most likely (99% of the time) get an email asking you to pay some sort of deposit for a key to a really awesome apartment (in photos) at an incredibly affordable price. The owner is abroad, and will deal with you through an agent, bla bla bla…

All in all, only deal with people just like how you’d deal with them in real life. Don’t give them money until you see the real products (in this case, the apartment). Craigslist has a full page on scams, check it out before you’re doing transactions through Craigslist.

Dig around

Look around and see what else you can find, I probably haven’t talked about a million other things you can do on Craigslist. It’s essentially an online marketplace for everybody in the world, although it’s locale specific.

Having said that, Craigslist is not for the faint of heart. If you’re not comfortable dealing with strangers through Craigslist, that’s cool. Know that you’re missing out a very useful tool on the Internet, but then again nothing is indispensable.

In fact, later in the week I will touch on more tools out there that would help make your life easier, so wait for the next post!

What’s your Craigslist experience like? Share some good tips with us!

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