I’ve come across what was once a road-block and have created a workaround. With creative thinking there is always, and I mean always, more than one way to skin a cat.
The issue:
CraigsList will not allow a user to embed a YouTube video. More specifically, CraigsList has a short list of acceptable HTML elements and the <embed> HTML element is not one of them. This means that you can’t “embed” any video in your CraigsList ad, thus a page visitor can’t watch video residing on your page.
Why this should matter to you:
If you are an investor and/or a Realtor, you can find great use for YouTube videos for property marketing.
Google reigns supreme as the most popular search engine, they have the greatest market-share of all search engines. In November of 2008, YouTube (a Google company) surpassed Yahoo in search engine market share to take the #2 spot and has extended its lead margin as of July 2009 (comScore). CraigsList is #7 worldwide in terms of english-language page views.
By implementing two heavy hitting websites such as YouTube and CraigsList together, you will greatly increase the marketing exposure of your business.
The Solution:
While you could just place a text hyperlink to your YouTube video on your CraigsList ad, this isn’t very effective. Web users respond more to imagery than to text. If you simply use a text hyperlink, chances are the end-user will skim over the link and never view the video.
Currently, there is not a way to get around the <embed> HTML-element ban. Any inserted HTML elements, into your CraigsList ad, that are not included on the safe-list will be stripped out at posting time.
The next best tactic to embedding the video is to implement a hyperlinked image of your YouTube video in your CraigsList ad. This can be done as the <img> HTML element is acceptable per CraigsList.
The Step By Step: Embedding YouTube in Craigslist
Please note that you can click on any image below to see it full size.
1.Take a Screen shot of your YouTube video page. An easy tool to take screen-shots and manipulate them is FireShot. FireShot is a screen-shot editing web-browser plugin that can be used with either FireFox or Internet Explorer. I prefer FireFox by the way. On a Mac, you can take a screenshot by pressing Command-Shift-3 OR by pressing Command-Shift-4, then selecting an area that you want a shot of.
2.Crop the screen-shot so that only the video window appears and save it.
3.You will now need to post the image to the web, you may use a site such as www.flikr.com. This step is necessary because you will later need to use the URL of the photo’s location on the web.
4.On CraigsList, you will need to compose the text for your ad. For more attractive and colorful CraigsList ads, I recommend Postlets.. When you create an ad via Postlets, it is syndicated to multiple sites at once. Also, the site generates the HTML that can be copied and pasted into CraigsList.
5.After composing the ad copy with or without the beautification of Postlets, now it’s time to link your screen-shot so that it appears in your CraigsList ad and links back to your YouTube video.
5a. You will need to grab the URL of the screen-shot (as seen in step 3)
5b. You will then need to insert that screen-shot URL and YouTube URL into the HTML mark-up that can be pasted to your CraigsList page.
I have done the work for you below, just insert your specific URLs (red text):
<a href=”http://www.YourYoutubeLink.com” rel=”nofollow”>
<img border=”0″ src=”http://www.YourImageLink.jpg” width=”480″
height=”295″>
</a>
6.Paste your specific HTML markup into your CraigsList ad (both red and blue text)
7.Once the CraigsList ad is published, it can look like the following:
8.Or if you decided to use Postlets with your ad, it can look even more polished as shown below:
Conclusion:
To the common user, the YouTube video will appear to be embedded. By mimicking the embedding of your YouTube video into CraigsList, you are sure to see an increase in your marketing response rate as comprehensive property information is conveyed to buyers both in written and visual form. The redirect of users to your YouTube page will create more exposure for your targeted property as well as other properties that you may have YouTube videos for on your profile.
Article Author:
Justin McClellandJustin has written 11 articles for us.
Visit Justin's Website: http://www.JustinMcClelland.com
Joshua Dorkin
Charles Feldman
Ted Karsch.
{ 30 comments… read them below or add one }
What an amazing post! Bravo to you my friend! This is something will be immediately implemented. Thanks!
Nick Johnson´s last blog ..Stop Foreclosure in Joplin with “Subject To”
Excellent article, Justin! Great tip that I certainly intend to use in the future.
Shae´s last blog ..Sharing my Go-Giver experience with you!
Awesome tips, Justin! This post will come in handy for a LOT of people!
Great article, very informative, creative, and detailed (step by step)
Nice job.
Will Barnard
Nationwide Property Investments, LLC
Good article, but I think you should have placed “embed” in quotes in the title!
Really enjoy your articles!
I’ve uses this image strategy everywhere but craigslist. I feel like such an idiot. lol
Great Great Post! Thanks Justin
J. Lamar Ferren´s last blog ..Michael Jake Reveals The Best Part Of Any Real Estate Deal
Great post. This will be put to good use.
1. How did you get the code for my pic? I was not able to find it.
2. Once I input the code into the html code and clicked on continue, once it went to the preview page it does not show the image, its just blank. Any suggestions? Here is the code, please look at it and let me know if I am doing something wrong.
Great tip.
This technique can work with any video or slideshow.
Also a great post! I’ll bookmark this for use later.
WOW! I knew how to make a picture ad and make it clickable, but THIS is awesome! Great tip will be used today…
I tried your little trick for trying to get video into Craigslist. It wouldnt work
I tried to do this several time and I can’t get it.I copied and pasted the HTML and put in my links and no picture came up.HELP
Reply with the URL of your screen-shot, mentioned in Step 5B.
Thanks for the tip. What a brilliant work around! I would have never even though of pasting the picture and using the picture itself as a link back to youtube. Is there any way to include links back to my web site from my youtube profile?
It’s also slick to autoplay the property within the single property page so the CL visitor sorta gets what’s been promised.
Even better if the visitor lands on a page that offers a bunch of videos of your other properties with an opt in… “Receive a weekly digest of my latest distressed property videos.”
Cool post… built a list 150 strong with this technique last fall…
Im having a problem because its linking to the picture instead of youtube?
so when you click on the pic it brings you to image shack where my pic is hosted…can anyone help?
Yeah, craigslist caught on to you – this doesn’t work. Waste of time.
Hey Justin . . . is Shep right? I can’t imagine this wouldn’t work.
Yes this works.
@Mike
If your picture is linking to itself that’s because you need to place your YouTube URL in place of the picture URL. Step 5B explains this (…href=”http://www.YourYoutubeLink.com…).
@Shep
Tell me what isn’t working for you (if you can). Your comment appears to be groundless. There is nothing for CraigsList to “Catch On To” as this is not some sort of hack. In laymen’s terms, an image is simply being linked to a YouTube page. Nothing more.
My apologies, I was peeved at wasting so much time – glad it works for you guys.
I did EXACTLY what you said, 3 times. No typos, I didn’t put the wrong url in either spot. All it does for me is show a blank page where the code is. All other html code in the page takes effect.
But, I’m not in the USA and I’m using free craigslist, not the paid adverts so maybe that has something to with it.
cheers
*update*
I’ve figured out the problem here – my spot won’t work with the way you have the last bit coded; if I take out the size (width= and height=) and move border=0 to the end of the line the picture links fine to the Youtube page and my image now shows up.
So for me it looks like this:
So anyone else feeling left out of the party too – try that one up there
hmmm well I guess you can’t post html in a post! lol sorry – in that case you’ll have to imagine the the brackets , and put them in of course: (if it will post this time, lets see…)
a href=”http://www.THEYOUTUBELINK” rel=”nofollow” img src=”http://THEIMAGELINK.jpg” border=”0″ /a
It wouldn’t work for me either.
I tried BOTH ways outlined above and no matter what I did, it just wouldn’t show up on my CL post.
@Will
Once you paste the HTML to CraigsList try deleting and re-keying each double quote that appears.
Justin McClelland´s last blog ..Procrastination is the enemy
To let everyone know, Justin McCelland is correct. I have been having the same problems as other in trying to get this method to work for me on craigslist. no matter what I tried it wouldn’t show up on craigslsit, or it wouldn’t work. For some reason, before you paste the youtube and image hosting links….delete and retype the quotations marks before and after the links. I don’t know much about html but this definitely worked for me.
Great job Justin! It took a little playing around with the quotations, but now they are up and running! Thank you!
THIS IS FANTASTIC, THANK YOU!!!
I had a little trouble at first, my issue was the quotation marks, but once I changed them everything magically appeared.
I have a few questions: 1) I use Firefox and my friend uses Safari and it works perfectly however, when I tried it using Internet Explorer I couldn’t see it. Is there a way to make this viewable to all browsers? 2) Is there a way to open the link and keep it within the frame while still on Craigslist? Now it directs me to Youtube, as it should, but it would be nice to be able to view the video while still on the Craigslist post. Any Solutions???? Thanks again.
I don’t have an answer as to why you are having troubles viewing this in Internet Explorer. It shouldn’t be an issue across all browsers. Perhaps, reset your internet explorer browser to its’ default settings.
And no there isn’t a way to truly “embed” a YouTube video in CraigsList, this tutorial is meant to serve as a workaround or sorts.
Justin McClelland´s last blog ..Another 8 hours
Here’s the code after I tweaked it and it definitely works!