When you need to sell a car, here is how to write an extremely effective car for sale ad that will sell your car fast with a minimum of time, money and hassle.

If your old car is looking pretty beat up and old then I suggest you wait until after you clean it up before you decide on a final selling price…especially if the publication your ‘For Sale’ ad runs in requires some lead time.

The reason I suggest waiting until after is because you might be amazed at how good your car looks after following all the techniques I list on this site for preparing a used car for selling.

I experienced this personally many times where I looked at a car I’ve owned for quite a while and thought “Hmm, I don’t think it will sell for more than $XXXX.00 because she just isn’t looking very good.”

Later, after I was done preparing my car for selling, I was somewhat shocked to realize that my original selling price estimate was far too low because my old car now looked so much better than even I had envisioned!

If I had placed my ads (like maybe started an eBay auction) before I got it ready then I know I would have lost hundreds of dollars because I would have priced it way too low.

When you sell a car, there is nothing complicated or mysterious about writing a classfied ad that pulls. Find out in advance how many spaces and/or lines you’re allowed for a given price from the publication you plan on advertising in.

Now take out a piece of paper or open your word processing program and start practicing. Write down just about everything you would like (within reason) and keep whittling it down so it still has the six basic components (year, make, model, condition, price and phone number).

This example is for a publication that allows thirty four spaces per line and four lines per ad but there are several excellent free sources for advertising a car like, Craigslist, Backpage and Kijii. You can make ads in those online publications as long and descriptive as you want without ever worrying about going over some stupid space restrictions.

This is how I started out for an ad with space restrictions. I put it all in and then modified it to fit. If you are going to use Craigslist, Backpage, or Kijiji then I would pattern your ad by running a long  and very descriptive ad like the following example. Remember: If you have the space in the ad, then its always better to include more details (assuming they are positives) then to not include enough…

Read part 2 on How To Write an Effective Car-For-Sale Ad  >>