Thread: Problems, Ideas and Advice

Problems, Ideas and Advice

Hi All

Ok people, this aint a thread specific to problems regarding classipress, but if Moderators don’t mind, if we had a thread which could be made sticky or something, where we share our ideas and experiences regarding our ads sites, for example, how to promote it, customer behaviour, pricing and features that work etc.

Sorry if in wrong section

Ill start of with the first post and explain a few problems im coming across. In advance, sorry for any spelling mistakes

1-Due to the site being new, and me ranking only 5 – 6 on google, for the relative keywords i would like to be ranked between 1 – 3 on search engines, traffic to the site has been low. For some strange reason, im ranked number 1 on yahoo and Bing i believe, but anyway.

Traffic has been low, so i decided to promote the site for a while using ppc, as a tester to if the their is actually a demand for the service, i had 100s of people come in, so i do believe their is a big demand, but here is were the second and third problem comes in.

Most customers, are from different countries, and this means, i cant accomidate them, in their respected language, and although the site is aimed at English speaking audience, majority of the people that did come, were not from England, US and Canada.
Although I did realize, English speaking audience did browse the categories were as the non English speakers did not.
I guess this outlines to an extent the importance of a region / language selectable feature in the future for our classipress themes.

2-Getting ads to populate the site, ok, well before I started with Classipress, i used a very primitive looking theme, which i did receive an add from a customer, now the issue is, although i know this is a to an extent niche market and im using a 100% better theme (classipress), customers and traffic will slowly come as the ranking goes up, but i need to find initiatives to get this traffic their and customers to post once they are on the site, other then paid adds.

3-ranking, like I mentioned before, google ranking, i need to be first or second in the respect keywords i believe most of my customers will come from, how can we do this? I mean, honestly, i have news articles above me which have no relavence to what un doing.

4- link exchange, to keep it sort, how? Most of the relavant sites that offer link exchange don’t even reply to you when you post their link up and ask yours to be posted to. And i don’t want to post to any random forum or site as i believe on the long rund could affect the reputation of the site.

5- competitors. Well i did say this is, somewhat i niche market, but, their are other competitors dealing directly in classified ads, the main one is only 2 years or so old, the other one is mainly a directory/some classifieds, and the third competitor which i don’t see as a threat has a very poor quality site in a different language.

6 - Regarding competitor one and two, and in general for all of us, what are the features which could give us the edge over these guys? I mean, i was thinking with vantage or a plug in I could add a directory, but i will wait abit as i want it to look neat and professional when i do, but the new coupon features will also be a great value, but generally i do strongly think the classipress theme itself is very neat and attractive, giving a egde over most classified sites. What could you guys/girls add to this?

Hmmm thats about it i could think of at the moment, please do share your advice, concerns, problems with us to, other then technical issues regarding the theme itself. More to do with the business side of it.

Hope the mods don’t mind such a thread

It is good topic that covers SEO and site promotion in general and so I guess asking any other users to share some info or idea is definitely a good thing. Let's start the ball rolling.

LOL been three weeks, i guess everyones made a fortune, no ones having problems marketing to customers?

Classified Ads - Going from No Ads to Tons of Ads

We all know that classified ads can be profitable no matter how what approach you take with them, yet the dilemma we all face and biggest challenge is getting them going.

People generally dont come to places that are empty, forums, outsource services, ad places etc.. unless they see other people there

So does anyone wish to share how they have approached getting a classified ad site off the ground.

Getting those initial few hundred people using the site? Getting the site which has No ads and pitiful visitors to hundreds of ads and lots of visitors?

What is the key? Sure you throw advertising money at it, radio, tv, papers, blogs, ppc but without having any ads.. people will just arrive and disappear.

Sure you can setup some fake ads, but that will soon show clearly as tiring when people get no replies to their ads and never can purchase anything from your site from people listing as their fake ads

Sure you can get you mom, dad, brothers and friends to post there.. And they probably will out of pity.. but soon they will rush back to the larger sites like craigs list and kijiji..

So what does it take? How do you get real people, posting real ads and getting people interested in your site enough to post an ad, or deal with someone who has an ad?

Threads merged on this similar topic.. I'm sure there is another one too..I'll try and find it and reference it here to try and keep this all together..

I have cut your post to subjects I am going to write about. I know it is not a good thing making changes in quotes, hope you do not mind

1. and 3. Here I would recommand you to visit some webmaster forums - they talk a lot about changes in Google search results and the basic message is not good: it is not so much about the key words anymore since Google started making money on ways it displays search results. That is why you get a bunch of sites with no relevance to the typed search words above yours in Google, while Yahoo and Bing are still "playing fair". Maybe Google is making money right now (which they nb need desperately), but my humble guess is that in a long run it will ruin their reputation as a the major thing about a search engine is to be useful, which becomes less and less the case with Google. There are still ways to get around it, or better said - to use it to your benefits by finding "horses to run on", I will write about it some other time as it is a marketing subject with a lot of issues to present.

As far as the language: that is a tricky part. Many sites have "change language" option and I guess that is what you mean. But they are static sites and their owners hired translators to actually write the whole content on the site in respective languages. On a dynamic site like an advertising site you will be able to change only the static parts while the content will still appear in the original language, unless you: a) plug in google translator (bad idea, will turn the ad content to a language circus); b) hire a team of translators that will manually translate the content of each ad (very expansive, in my country for instance a translator gets 1-2 dollars per 6 words and double if it is an express order which ads would be). In my job I have translated many web sites, but none of those were dynamic sites with costantly changing content.

Sorry for bringing bad messages, the next post will be more optimistic as far as marketing.
In a mean time some clues: layout and fancy adjustments are fine, I have seen many really great looking sites presented here, but still more important is:

- think like your users do - how useful and easy to navigate/search is your site. Compare it to the popular sites and get the tools they have
- what is better about our site compared to others. We have to offer something else, something different and good, otherwise it will be "just one more site".
- target - what is your market. define it and go for it, do not try to reach everybody everywhere from the beginning, start small and expand
- there is no "American Dream" (people please do not shoot me for this one, he he), it is all about hard work and patience.

For now I am working hard on making my site foremost useful and user friendly, before I start making marketing plan. The way ClassiPress is now, is a great looking theme with a lot of useful advertising tools available (love those!) and a lot of useful tools missing. So when somebody visits the site, they see a bunch of ads... and what now? They do not even see location without opening an ad plus they need a lot of luck when using the search to get results - annoying from a user's perspective. Please try the search pretending you are looking for something more or less specific and look at the result from a user's place.

Again thanks to rubencio for understanding my needs and helping me out with many issues

Good feedback

Thing is though I dont think that language and seo is the biggest issue here with a brand new site as wordpress is pretty good anyway seo wise if you know what to do with it.

Biggest challenge I think is getting people to USE a site that is barely being used or doesnt even have its first ad

I mean sure we can put fake ads on there, we can get family members to post initially but its not just people posting ads that we want to attract its people who want things and if they find fake ads and ( family members who are in only one city ) it will soon not work and people will realize.

So question is.. how do you get your first 100 people to use your brand new site?

Good thread.

I'm still using 3.01 because I changed many little things and I need to evaluate how I'm going to migrate to 3.05. But that's another problem

What I wanted to contribute with is what I did when I started my ads site. I spammed Well just a little... Not in great quantities, and always directed to someone that might be placing ads.

I sent out some emails to some addresses, saying I had a new service, that it was free, and would they please consider using it in their future ad campaings. I made double sure I only sent this email once per email address
I also sent emails to people that had advertised in other sites, and had posted their email address. This email also presented my site, and asked their permission to copy the ad they had posted elsewhere. I kept all the contact info, and a lot of people answered giving permission.
This allowed me to post a couple of ads every day. Now the ball is slowly rolling by itself.
All in all I must have sent about 100 messages for 3 weeks or so...
Not very ethical I know, but that's what I did.

Hi everyone

Well, two ways ive sorted out some of the problems, i think.

In regards to the point about the user language, i thought, ok i am getting more visitors from non English speaking countries, but at the end of the day, for best customer service, id have to keep the website to being aimed at mainly English speakers – Conclusion ive narrowed my target base down to UK, USA and CANADA.

Also i realized the visitors stayed alot longer on my website when there are adverts on it, so i posted adverts myself, simply checked shop fronts that advertise rooms and services, and posted them onto the site, so at least customers have something to interact with. I actually got an ad which i didnt post, so i know people are coming onto the website and checking it out, just maybe have no ads to post or are abit shy lol.

My google rank is now among the top, i think this is partly to do with the increase in number of ads and blog posts, use your blog posts now and then to say "oh we have added this and that feature", "thank you for your support" , "we are in our third month of running" etc etc im sure it wont hurt.

Also realized my competitor is getting alot less ads, im guessing this is partly to do with 1) they cant be bothered and 2) possibly customers dont know which one to choose from (i hope), in that case, its the first step in the right direction, or it could simply be 3) the time of year and know one is bothered to post.

My plans, if any will help, but thought id say in the hope it helps people.

When i have more time from my studies, i will go out collecting email addresses of my target audience, explain my website and its aims, and register them myself, send out and email to keep them updated now and then.

Also will do the same to the businesses in my area, go out, give them a sheet which I will say I will collect later on, the sheet will explain everything so will i if need be, will have a part on it saying “this service is optional but we usually charge a small fee of £2 a year for registration, in return you have access to this this and that bla bla bla, we send out regular emails to our customers etc etc”.

Thats my plan at least for now, nothing to lose i think