One of the largest projects I have undertaken was a program I developed called CELB. CELB was a windows based software application created to build targeted email lists on complete autopilot . CELB was not a commissioned project, is was simply a pet project of my own, spured on by a unique challenge that I just had to meet head on. It had it’s share of obstacles to overcome but at the end of the day, I was proudly dancing around the computer in some sort of modernized victory dance ritual.
The Idea for CELB came after posting a Craigslist Ad for a television set I was trying to get rid of back in late 2010. A day or so later I recieved an email response asking if it was still available. Thats when the idea for CELB was born.
The Vision Behind CELB
As an internet marketer you are always hearing how “the money is in the list”, an email list specifically. Basically, it boils down to shear numbers. The larger your list, the more people you can market to via email, and depending on how targeted that email list is, a certain amount will convert or buy in to what you are marketing to them. It’s sounds like a simple task but its execution is quite difficult, and for the following reasons.
1. Creating an email list usually starts with identifying a niche market with low competition. A challenge in itself.
2. Create a website that has the trust authority your market needs to engage with your site.
3. Identify the keyword terms that your market is using to find the product or service you are offering
4. Engage in various SEO strategies to optimize your site high in the search engine results pages for your designated keyword search terms so you can draw targeted traffic to your site.
5. Create a high value offer to convert visitors into subscribers or buyers and leave their email address.
As you can see, this is not an easy task by any stretch of the imagination.
CELB stands for “Craigslist Email List Builder”. After receiving the reply of interest regarding a Craigslist ad I posted in late 2010, I realized that corresponding with the interested party would leave my email open to the stranger I was in communication with. Craigslist does a good job of allowing you to post an ad on Craigslist.org with an anonymous email so that you aren’t publicly sharing your personal email. However, when someone responds to your ad and you choose to engage with the interested party, your email now becomes publicly visible to them. Upon understanding this, I asked myself, what if you could automatically respond to thousands of craigslist ads with a generic random response? This would be sure to prompt the seller to engage with you as they have a desire to find an interested buyer for the item which they have listed. For each engagement, you would be able to capture one email address. Could this be done automatically? If it could be done, it would mean a very large email list in a very short amount of time, and without the traditional overhead associated with doing so.
Overcoming Obstacles to Make CELB a Reality
Creating CELB had a large number of very frustrating obstacles. Some of these obstacles were out of simple ignorance while others were discovered in the process of creating this challenging piece of software.
Obstacle No. 1 . Violation of Craigslist TOS.
After building the software to automatically search craigslist ads and harvest the “REPLY TO” addresses, I then began the process of sending out random responses to these addresses in order to prompt interaction with the poster. It was then that I found myself in violation of Craigslist Terms Of Service. Craigslist only allows you to send out so many responses per email. Well, I only had a few email addresses of my own and each email address was only allowed to respond to 18 ads in a 24 hour period. Anymore than this and you had a temporary suspension to deal with. This hardly allowed me to build an email list of the magnitude that I was hoping for nor in time frame which I desired. The only way around this was to scale the system. I would need to create a large number of my own email addresses to respond to each craigslist ad I could harvest within the same time period.
Obstacle No. 2 Creating Multiple Email Addresses
I started by creating Gmail addresses. This alone caused another problem. Google has a limit on the number addresses you can create from a given ip address each day, so I found myself driving around town finding unsecured networks to connect to so that I could get around the Gmail System and build my personal list of accounts faster. This proved to be very ineffective, entirely to slow and to make matters worse, I found out during this process that each Gmail account only allowed you to send out 150 emails a day. This was still unacceptable. CELB had the potential to harvest over 20,000 Craiglist ads within an 18 hour time period which was how long I had planned on running it each day. It was time to go back to the drawing board. I would need at least 1500 email accounts to respond to the number of listings harvested each day.
After doing a ton of research, I discovered that creating your own domains and setting up email addresses under those domains would be the wisest solution as their was a very real possibility of automating it. After some time, I embedded into the program an automated solution to create an unlimited number of email addresses. I had three different hosting accounts with Hostmonster.com which allowed me to send 500 emails per hour per account. That was a total of 1500 emails per hour and was now putting me on target with the number of ads I was harvesting. As an extra safety net, I purchased 5 domains on each hosting account and created 100 emails under each domain. Creating the email accounts was done autmatically by integrating a couple US Census files. The program would choose a random US firstname, and a random US lastname as well as set predefined password to use for each created account. CELB would automatically log in to each host and under each domain create the desired number of email addresses. It was awesome! It was perfect!
Obstacle No 3. Harvesting the Results
Finally I was able to harvest and respond to Craigslist ads at a rate of 1500 per hour via 1500 email addresses from 15 domain names spread across 3 different hosting accounts. Whew! All I had to do now is figure out a way to harvest the results, which were the email addresses and display names of each Craigslist poster that followed up on one of my random replies to their Craigslist ads. Up to this point, the only way to do this was to login to each individual email account (remember their were 1500) and cut copy and paste the email and display names to a file. It was hard to see that the system was finally working beautifully but the cost of time to harvest the results made the whole project worthless.
My first attempt at solving this problem was with Outlook. I had always used outlook and thought I could setup as many POP3 accounts as I desired but quickly found out that that was not the case. I looked into Zoho mail, Thunderbird and a variety of other email clients before realizing their simply was not a solution out there to address my needs. It was then that I decided I would have to attempt to program my own POP3 download client to harvest the results sitting in the 1500 accounts I now owned.
Fortunately I found a sample email client program created in C# that I was able to download an alter the source code to my specifications to accomplish what I needed thus saving me quite a bit of time. Within a week or so I had a newly designed pop3 client that would download all results from each email account before deleting them off the server, and export the display name and email address to a text file. Automatically!
Obstacle No. 4. Organizing & Filtering Results
The last obstacle that I had to overcome was organizing and filtering the results to insure that I wouldn’t have duplicate records in the results pulled from each individual campaign as well as from one campaign to another. This was one of the easier obstacles to overcome and I quickly did so with a small software utility I integrated into the CELB application also.
Conclusion & Production Results
After the program was completed in it’s entirety, I was able to to send between 20,000 and 25,000 emails a day from the same IP address without any problems, and recieve a 25% to 30% return rate after harvesting the results. I would harvest anywhere from 4,ooo to 9,500 new email addresses each day depending on the size of the campaign I ran. It did take a little overhead to setup. I spent approximately $500 for the three hosting accounts and 15 domain names. Time and labor would’ve added to that significantly but I didn’t bill myself a penny for that!
Long story short, I found that accomplishing such a task could be done, and all on autopilot of course!
Below is part of what once was a 95 minute video demonstrating how the program works. I cut it down just to quickly show the program in action as well as the newly created pop3 client to harvest the results.
