Craigslist ad text formatting - Step 1

Last post, I showed you how to make your Craigslist ad title stand out.  Now let's work on improving the appearance of your ad message.

Here's an example of a possible ad:

Sell Your House Now!

Are you behind in payments
Facing foreclosure
Need a Short Sale
Thinking about bankruptcy
Job transfer or job loss
Tired of problem tenants

We Buy Houses - Quick Closing - Cash Now

Call (555) 555-555

Visit us at:[your website here]

The text of the ad covers what you want to say, but the plain text is boring.  How can it be improved?  Simple, we will reformat the text using a few html tags.

I will not cover all the details of html tags.  However, I want you to understand a few tags that you can use to improve the appearance of your Craigslist ads. Over the next couple of days, I will take you step-by-step over the transformation of our simple text ad above.  When we finish, our ad will look like this:

Sell Your House Now!

• Are you behind in payments
• Facing foreclosure
• Need a Short Sale
• Thinking about bankruptcy
• Job transfer or job loss
• Tired of problem tenants

We Buy Houses - Quick Closing - Cash Now

Call (555) 555-5555

Visit us at:Link to my website

I will take you line-by-line of the reformatting of our ad.  

There is one thing to understand about html tags, there is a start and an end.  The general feel of a html tag will look like this:  start you type something here end.  I just want you to remember that when you start a tag there should be an end to that tag.

Html has rules or a syntax for tags.  The syntax for a html tag will look like this:

<tag>you type something here</tag>

Notice that the start part above is "tag" and the end is "/tag".  And the start and end parts are enclosed in <>.  The slash before tag in the end part is  also required.  The slash denotes the end of the tag.  Also notice that the start and end parts have the same name, that is required also.

Ok, enough explanation, let's get to our original Craigslist ad.

Step 1 - The first line of our ad

Sell Your House Now!

The text must be bold and blue in color.  Html tags will make it happen. 

Here's how to make the text bold:

<b>Sell Your House Now!</b>

The tag "b" stands for bold.  We started with "b" and ended with "/b".  Now our first line will look like this:

Sell Your House Now!

Now, we need to make our first line bold and blue.  We just need to add another tag that will turn our text to blue.  Here it is:

<b><font color="blue">Sell Your House Now!</font></b>

We just set the font color to blue by using the follow tag,

<font color="blue></font> 

Notice we just encased that tag inside of our original bold tag of <b></b>.  This is an example of combining tags.

At this point, you should go to Craigslist and create a test ad in the ad editor.  You don't need to actually publish your ad.  Just try some different tags and keep editing your post so you can see the effects of different html tags.

Here are some html tags to try.

<b></b>    =    Bold
<i></i>      =    Italics
<u></u>    =    Underline
<font color="color name here"></font>       =    font color
  color names: black, blue, fuchisa, green, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, teal

Tomorrow, I will show you how to create the bulleted list of six items for our ad.