The Secret of Successful Classifieds

[Eric Barnes]

Building a successful classified website is not a lot different than starting any other type of site. It takes hard work and persistence. Here are a few marketing tips and tricks that will help your classified site become successful in no time.

1. Target a niche. When you are just starting you are not going to have the funding or the reach of big businesses. You must start small and grow.
2. Offer free ads at the beginning. This allows your site to start getting listings which in turn makes your site look a lot more active.
3. Start with a small amount of categories. This secret is the same as with forums. You do not want a hundred categories with only 50 ads. It is better to have 5 categories with 25 each as it shows the higher number of listings.
4. Use free advertising.
   • Start getting active in forums and be sure you include your url in your signature.
   • Send out a press release.
   • Send out newsletters to your users.
   • Put your domain name on your car.
   • Print flyers and go into businesses in your area that cater to the type of site you are building.
   • Become advertising partners with other websites. Trade banner ads.
5. Use pay per click ads. If you do elect to go this route make sure you are only targeting your niche. You do not want to bid some generic terms like classifieds or you could see your ad budget disapear in no time.
6. Write articles and place them on your site. This will give the search engines something to spider and can lead visitors to your site. Or as an alternate you can write articles about your niche and submit them to a service like goarticles.com
7. Partner with a local business. For example if you have a bicycle category go the bicycle shop and ask if they would be interested in you placing their bicycles for sale on your site. Then of course if it really takes off you can change it from free to a monthly fee.
8. Have Patience. A site takes a few months before they really start to get traffic so work hard on the site during this time and don’t expect instant millions the first month.
9. Offer great support. If someone is having problems and emails you always do whatever you can to make them happy. Even if it means placing the listing for them.
10. Keep your learning cap on. The web is fascinating and if need help or advice you can always find it. But not everyone out there will hold your hand. For example if you post something on a forum and they give you the answer but maybe not exactly what you where looking for, then try a search engine. They have become my best friends.

[Blair +]

Find a niche that interests you By working in your own area of interest, you will enjoy working with your customers, seeing the ads they place and marketing your site at events that cater to them.

[Chaslie +]

Thanks guys - an excellent 'checklist' for all.

[free2take +]

My two pence worth !

At startup when ad volume is lower I'd also recommend pushing the delete time for ads out and setting a long ad expire period.

These help keep the site populated looking when you are starting off.

One additional tool is to let members mark their items as sold and have it watermark across the photos this lets people browsing see that the site is having throughput and folk are selling \ buying from it.

I've found that you reach a point where you have to invest some cold hard cash into marketing it or just let it go. Marketing can be flyers \ billboards or whatever once you know it can work from your intitial experience its worth doing. With current competition in free classifieds on the web I think you'll only get so far without doing this.

[benobrien]

Hey, just been reading the threads. Thanks for the advice i'll sure use it!

My online classified site is www.adflyer.co.uk

Ben

[Jessej]

That is a great site!!

[benobrien]

Thanks jesse appreciate it, if you have any ideas on how we can make it better please say. The site will be fully complete by next week then we take it to market.

Ben

[Nealm]

It takes time to get a site up and running. I'm still in the free stage and looking to collect more ads. One thing that I found useful is push all ads with a photo to the featured list. That makes the site look fuller when you first get in.

Also you can increase your site SERP by posting to forums and having your URL in the signiture, posting your site to various free directory and trading links.

[ksuralta +]

Start with a small amount of categories

Great advice. I have a lot of categories now that are empty (which doesn't look good).
I should go ahead and remove or generalize them for now.

Thanks!