Getting Customers...

[sfzocalo]

Seems this is a problem for all of us and it's a nasty catch 22, you need people to put up items and you need items to get people to join.

This may OR may not be help to others, I'll let you know at the bottom of this text how it is working for me.

My steps;

1. remove the number of members count, I don't think it helps to see that you have only 5 members etc.

2. put some intesting stuff up yourself on the site, this is ok for me and www.sfzocalo.com because it is a sci-fi site and I have quite a bit of old stuff people might want (or not!)

3. I am offering free auctions and classified for 1 month

4. I am offering free auctions and classified for 2 months for sci-fi club members

5. I will then offer $10 or $20 of credit for selling their items, If I had thought about it first I would have offered this instead of options 3 & 4

6. I am purchasing google adwords (at max of 6p a click)

7. I have spent 2 days submitting www.sfzocalo.com to every seo web directory I can find (300+) and if you do this go to 10 sites at a time and then answer the same question on each site (copy and paste), and paste and paste and paste....

8 I went to a sci-fi convention at Earls Court (london) and spoke to all the retailers and left cards and leaflets (complete waste of time)

9. I have posted to every yahoo group dealing with sci-fi, some wouldn't let me in, there was one accusation of spaming (only one!!!)

and the net result for 3 weeks work!!!! 2 members, but it's early day.

now if only I could get picked up by sci-fi, time to talk to them I think

oh and I am contacting different user groupls who are on a web ring!

happy auctioning!!

all the best

mike

[scottalex1]

Thank you for your posting on the subject, sfzocalo. I have launched sites before (non-classifieds) and found google groups to be a great place to post. In the case of classifieds, I saw that there were many accusations of spamming directed to others that post their classifieds sites.

Back to the drawing board...

You almost need to have a lot of your own things or friends things that you can post to get the action going. If someone goes to your site and sees that there are no items, they will not want to post due to the lack of traffic.

This is quite the challenge... But I'll take it!

[dmc]

Seems this is a problem for all of us and it's a nasty catch 22, you need people to put up items and you need items to get people to join.

This may OR may not be help to others, I'll let you know at the bottom of this text how it is working for me.

My steps;

1. remove the number of members count, I don't think it helps to see that you have only 5 members etc.

2. put some intesting stuff up yourself on the site, this is ok for me and www.sfzocalo.com because it is a sci-fi site and I have quite a bit of old stuff people might want (or not!)

3. I am offering free auctions and classified for 1 month

4. I am offering free auctions and classified for 2 months for sci-fi club members

5. I will then offer $10 or $20 of credit for selling their items, If I had thought about it first I would have offered this instead of options 3 & 4

6. I am purchasing google adwords (at max of 6p a click)

7. I have spent 2 days submitting www.sfzocalo.com to every seo web directory I can find (300+) and if you do this go to 10 sites at a time and then answer the same question on each site (copy and paste), and paste and paste and paste....

8 I went to a sci-fi convention at Earls Court (london) and spoke to all the retailers and left cards and leaflets (complete waste of time)

9. I have posted to every yahoo group dealing with sci-fi, some wouldn't let me in, there was one accusation of spaming (only one!!!)

and the net result for 3 weeks work!!!! 2 members, but it's early day.

now if only I could get picked up by sci-fi, time to talk to them I think

oh and I am contacting different user groupls who are on a web ring!

happy auctioning!!

all the best

mike

Problem with your site: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (61)

[sfzocalo]

Problem with your site: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (61)

thanks seems to be working now

mike

[smartypants]

Seems this is a problem for all of us and it's a nasty catch 22, you need people to put up items and you need items to get people to join.

(steps 1-9 snipped)

and the net result for 3 weeks work!!!! 2 members, but it's early day.

Make sure you personally welcome each and every one of them. Ask how you can help, if they have any ideas, etc.

I firmly believe in the following three-step development process: content, community, commerce

If you have interesting content, you can attract a community of interest upon which you can base a business. If you don't have interesting content, keep your day job.

Cheers,
George
Smartypants.com

[sfzocalo]

Thanks George, I can see why you are a smartypants now, great idea

mike

Seems this is a problem for all of us and it's a nasty catch 22, you need people to put up items and you need items to get people to join.

(steps 1-9 snipped)

and the net result for 3 weeks work!!!! 2 members, but it's early day.

Make sure you personally welcome each and every one of them. Ask how you can help, if they have any ideas, etc.

I firmly believe in the following three-step development process: content, community, commerce

If you have interesting content, you can attract a community of interest upon which you can base a business. If you don't have interesting content, keep your day job.

Cheers,
George
Smartypants.com

[smartypants]

Seems this is a problem for all of us and it's a nasty catch 22, you need people to put up items and you need items to get people to join.

This may OR may not be help to others, I'll let you know at the bottom of this text how it is working for me.

<snip>

mike

Any chance of an update?

Cheers,
George

[Festus]

Hi,

There is an inherent problem with search engines finding classified ads: People who place ads write poor content, at least in a search engine's eyes. As webmasters we can optimize our hearts out, but when people write really terrible ads (again, in the eyes of a search engine crawler) they just cut the legs right out from under us.

For example, if I were selling a widget on a classifieds site, I might put in a title something like "Nylon widget, used, blue." Then I would repeat those words in my ad, and in my photo description. A search engine would probably have good luck in finding the ad when a person at the search engine site would search for "used widgets" and also "blue nylon widgets."

But the average person placing an ad doesn't think the same way. In their titles they frequently type "L@@K" or "Awesome widget, must see!" I think very few people at a search engine website would search for anything by searching for "l@@k" or for "awesome widget."

I have noticed on my site when someone types GOOD ads (titles and descriptions) the search engines not only find them, they can rank really high. So, thinking I had a real brainstorm, I typed a short article on my site teaching people how to write ads for search engine traffic. Then, I placed a link to the article all around the site. When my stats showed me no one was reading the article, I renamed it and put up more links. Sigh. Hardly anyone ever reads it. I've removed a lot of the links to it but the traffic to the page hasn't dropped. People just don't seem to care.

We still need to do all that we do to optimize our sites, but there has got to be a way to educate the average person placing an ad that they need to help themselves out (and us) by writing ads with content people are likely to be searching for.

Ok, I'm off my soapbox now and I'll go to bed.

Festus

[smartypants]

Our site's been up since late November and the results so far are encouraging.

After ten weeks in operation, the site is generating about 50,000 page views a week. We only have about 100 live ads, but membership has reached 300, with another 1,000 visitors a day that we haven't converted yet.

Our personal classifieds are free - we started with up to three per members, but boosted that to five - and we're selling commercial ads to businesses.

Our business directory goes online later today, and we have four signed and paid advertisers. We've also sold about 50,000 banner ads (the site has generated slightly more than 150,000 banners since the launch).

Still a long way to go, but we seem to be headed in the right direction.

Cheers,
George
http://justFRED.ca/

[smokey216]

Hi George,

I'm VERY impressed...GREAT WEBSITE!

We launched in late November too, but are not getting the type of hits you are, though we're doing Google Adwords, press releases, biz expos and many other types of promotion. Any advice? Would love to know how you generated so many pageviews.

Would appreciate any kind of advice, also about getting people to buy banner ads though we're currently not offering that. And how are the commercial advertisers responding? I find that the most challenging, that people are afraid to pay for something yet because the traffic isn't there.

Our site is www.listasaurus.com.

Thanks much!

Melanie