Craigslist, as you know, is a large network of free local classified advertising… an excellent regular source of freelance writing/editing/related gigs. But here’s the problem: It’s a large network of free local classified advertising. TRANSLATION: It’s multiple local sites.

A lot of the writing/editing work advertised is open to anyone anywhere with a Net connection, but their ads don’t usually appear throughout all the various sites in the network. To find these gems — and they do pop up with amazing regularlty — the typical uninformed freelance gig seeker manually visits each and every local Craigslist site to check each locality’s constantly changing batch of ads. Wikipedia says Craigslist currently serves 450 cities in 50 countries… that’s a heck of a lot of local sites to visit… and revisit. I think you’d rather spend most of that time writing.

Well, unless you’re already illuminated, you can now consider yourself among the ranks of the informed. There are a few sites out there that let you search all of Craigslist by keyword, category, etc. And lets you do the searching for free.

This is the one I’ve been using lately: Craig’s Helper. Again, it’s free, but more important, it gives you a high degree of control over your searches. Try it!

ADDITIONAL TIP: Once you’ve set up a search “formula” that works for you — keywords, locations, categories, etc. — use the site’s “Add this search to favorites” feature so you can easily redo the search at will.

ADDITIONAL TIP #2: Since the search results are really a moving target, you may want to download any given set of search results for you to work with. To do that, after generating your results, use the site’s “Get RSS feeds” feature to download your search results in an .OPML file that you can then use with RSS news reader software (also called RSS aggregators). — EES

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