Craigslist is becoming THE place to look online for just about anything. It’s more than just a job board, as you can find things for sale, apartments for rent, personals and way more. It’s a classified ad type site, covering everything you can imagine, including freelance writing jobs.

Now, Craigslist is actually a number of sites, each for a major city or region. It’s not just one site that you can browse through. There are about 20 major US cities, and 8 major Canadian cites, with a total of more than 450 location-specific sites. That can make it awkward for searching, as you basically have to check each city.

Each Craigslist site has the same category structure, with a few being of interest to us freelance writers.

In the Jobs category, there is writing/editing and office/admin. If you are more technically-savvy, there are also categories for web/info design, Internet engineers and software/dba. The last 3 are more for programmers or designers, not writers. But you should still keep an eye on them, as many people are unsure how to categorize online writing and do sometimes put job ads under a computer category rather than a writing one. In the Gigs category, you should check under writing or computer.

Finding jobs is a gamble, as with any job board. Since the site is designed to cater to specific localities, people with online or telecommute jobs will often post across a number of sites. So expect to see the same ad repeatedly if it’s a work-at-home opportunity.

The best way to search through all the sites is up to you. I personally have a list of bookmarks to the writing categories for the major US and Canadian cities. About 30 pages, and it doesn’t take long to click on my bookmark and check them. But you can also use RSS feeds for each page and see the ads using an RSS feed reader. I always get a bit overwhelmed with that option, as some of these pages get LOTS of ads each day.

Craigslist can have plenty of scams or work-for-pennies ads. They have a flagging system in place, where readers can mark bad ads for removal by staff. It generally keeps the site free of crap. But not totally. Some city sites now charge for job postings, which also helps to keep out the scams.

Though they may not be specifically a freelance work board, you can NOT overlook Craigslist as a place to search for work.  I’ve gotten one ongoing job from a Craigslist ad, and have picked up a number of short-term projects as well.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 4th, 2007 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Job Boards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.