Content is King: Use Craigslist to Find Some Writers (part 3)

Tuesday, October 24, 2006 at 11:15am by David Askaripour in Life

Ok, so this is it: you�ve written your sparkling proposal letter, you�ve properly posted your letter on Craigslist (CL), and now you�re starting to receive a nice flow of response � YAY!!

Now what?

Now you�ll want to spend the time of carefully going through each response to determine if the writer is a good fit for your company; many will not.

I use a certain filtration system that quickly determines if I respond to the writer or not:

Spelling:

If there�s more than 2 or 3 blatant spelling errors in the response email, that tells me that the writer doesn�t pay attention to the details. And if he/she is already off to a bad start �before� they got the position, you can only imagine what will happen when they get started.
Attitude:

You can usually tell how hungry someone is from their response letters. If they write a few lines of blah..blah..blah� basically telling you how much �you� need them because they are so qualified, then you may want to pass on such a person.

On the other hand, if you feel a lot passion and enthusiasm coming from the writer � possibly through a strong background story of their experiences and why they love to write about stocks — then that may be an excellent candidate. You�ll know who�s hungry and who isn�t.
Teammate:

You�re better off finding a team player who is willing to learn and has a lot of passion, than taking on someone who is an excellent writer and possibly has more experience, but isn�t a team player at all.

You don�t want to poison your company by taking on the wrong person. Find a team player who is going to add real value to your venture.

Just keep at it

As I�ve stated, most of the respondents will not be what you�re looking for � that�s just how CL works. So you�ll want to stay determined and keep on posting listings every 2 weeks or so; possibly tweaking your proposal letter and experimenting with different propositions.