Classified ad websites can be considered as a business marketplaces where users sell their products or service to anyone looking for the same. The sold products can be anything: mobiles, employment, real estates…, advertised with a specific heading and small messages. At the same time, the site owners can also add blog posts, articles… and provide helpful information that supports their business.
In overall, building up a classified site is a great way to get traffic, branding, and income all at once. With the benefit it brings, the growth of classified ad sites has become bigger and bigger over the years, which leads to the rise of classified ad software.
While there are many ways to build your own classified site, using WordPress classified themes is still the easiest & fastest approach. And if you were looking for one that helps you monetize your site efficiently, ClassifiedEngine would be your perfect choice.
[button type=”view” link=”http://demo.enginethemes.com/classifiedengine-preview”]View Demo[/button]
[button type=”buy” class=”btn-shake” link=”http://www.enginethemes.com/member/signup/classifiedengine”]Buy for $89[/button]
In this article, we’ll provide some suggestions to help you make the best from ClassifiedEngine.
The basic way: charge users for posting ads in your classified site
The easiest way to start earning income from your classified ad site is to charge your users for posting an ad. Supposedly your website has only 100 paid customers and they all pay you an average of $20 to post a few ads on your website, then you are making $2000 per month! Users and customers grow with time so as your income. If you have 1000 customers after a year then you are making $20000 per month from your classified website.
With ClassifiedEngine, you are able to create different payment plans suitable for different phrases of your site. Each payment plan has different detailed information and you can decide how many ads a user can post using the plan as well as the availability of the ads posted under this plan.
Supporting for all those payment plans are the payment gateways. Currently, ClassifiedEngine supports 6 different payment methods for you to choose from: PayPal, 2CheckOut, Stripe, PaypalExpress, Paymill and manual bank transfer. You can use all these gateways to satisfy the diversified needs of your customers.
Don’t forget to set up currency formats for your site. Since there might be people from different countries surfing your site, you’d better choose a popular one for the ads in your site – USD for example. Certainly, you can still set up a different currency for the transaction between you and your users.
Provide additional services
Besides the basic method, you can offer some additional services to encourage users using your service.
You can offer special/premium plans with higher price for those who want to make their ads stand out. If users choose these packages, their ads will be displayed above the normal ones. By this way, you’re able to not only satisfy your users but also increase your income.
Moreover, you can also provide free plans for the users. You may think that it’s useless, however it helps a lot in driving more traffic and creating a community depending on your classified ad site.
Even better, you’re able to set up a limitation for those free plans in order to assure your revenue. For example, your users can only post 3 free ads and need to purchase a premium plan for the next listings.
Offering ad spaces
Another good way to do business on your site is offering ad spaces. If you have a classified website for a particular business then you can sell ad spaces to the entrepreneurs in that business and charge them monthly or weekly.
For example, if your classified website was specifically for selling and buying musical instruments, your main audience would be musicians and there surely are businesses and advertisers who want to target them for their products and services. You can then charge them for placing banners in multiple sidebars in your site, and you can offer different prices for different positions.
To make a profit from paid banners you need to find companies interested in advertising on your site. Of course you can simply put your prices online and wait for your customers to find you. Or you can prepare business proposals and actively try to reach your potential clients.
Promote products by posting your own ads
In addition, you still have another way to generate more income: joining affiliate programs and promoting products in your site. As you can see, besides the sellers who only want to post their ads, you also have other audience who have interest in buying products from your website.
It’s simple: if a user has registered in your website and is searching for a guitar to buy, he would be a perfect lead for companies selling musical instruments.
Use the suitable extensions
The more convenient features you provide for your users, the more satisfied they will be.
Alongside the main packages, you can use the additional extensions to enhance the functions of your site. Of course, you don’t have to use all of them, choose the ones suitable for you.
As for ClassifiedEngine, there are different extensions for you to complete your classified ad site, for example:
– CE Coupon: this is a useful extension for encouraging your users to post more ads. It allows you to create discount codes for the package plans and sellers can get a cheaper price by using these codes when posting ads.
– CE Custom Fields: based on your specific model of business, you can use this extension to add more fields to your ad posting form.
– CE Map: this extension is used to locate the ads in your site, however, in case you want more space to display more ads on the site, you don’t have to use it.
– CE AdRoll: you can use this to display your ads in other websites or any other place in your site.
– CE Alert: allow users to subscribe for new ad notification emails. This extension helps to enhance communication with your users.
Tips to manage and promote your site
Don’t let your site become a public forum. You should enable the “Google Captcha” and “Pending ads” settings to prevent inappropriate content in your site.
Besides, don’t prison your creativity, try to take advantage of all the offered functions to bloom up the visual:
You can use the WP customizer to quickly arrange the structure of the site and modify some general style settings.
And don’t forget the Revolution slider. Use it to create beautiful slides and attract more users.
The success of your site also depends on the popularity. You need to work hard on getting traffic to your site. In order to do that, SEO takes quite an important role. You can use YOAST’s WordPress SEO to boost it up.
Besides, don’t forget to set up the options for your users to log in using their social network accounts. And you should start your own blog too, writing relevant content to get closer to your users. By this way, you can gradually build up your online community.
Last but not least, try to reach for your customers first. You can try some “paid tools” to make a fast approach to your users such as Google Adword, Bing Ad, Facebook ad, Twitter Sponsor, and Linkedin Ad. The paid ads will definitely help you generate a good amount of traffic in the short term.
The suggestions described above are only general ones. To succeed in any industry, you need to put a great effort. And by using ClassifiedEngine, you can cut down a long way towards your goal.
[button type=”view” link=”http://demo.enginethemes.com/classifiedengine-preview”]View Demo[/button]
[button type=”buy” class=”btn-shake” link=”http://www.enginethemes.com/member/signup/classifiedengine”]Buy for $89[/button]
As usual, please don’t hesitate to leave your comments in the section below if you had any concern.