Make your ads indexed via Browsing

Since all the above scripts are used to create classifieds web sites, it’s important to have all listings indexed by search engine crawlers. Search engines can not submit search forms and view search results and individual listings, as opposed to human visitors. Therefore, there has to be a way to crawl every listing via a number of links pointing directly to it. The best way to achieve that is through the Browsing functionality.

In all three software products of ours you can make your listing browseable by any field. By default, in iRealty, all listings are browsed by State, in iAuto, by Make/Model or body style, and in iLister, by category. You can change the browsing parameters to fit you particular needs, for instance, allow browsing by City or listing type.

Here is a brief example of how browsing works from the crawlers’ point of view:

Home page

-> All Listings in Alabama

-> Listing # 164

In the above example, all three pages will be indexed by the crawler. First, the home page, then the page with listings in Alabama, and finally, a listing details page of Listing # 164.

Customizing Keyword-Rich Listing URLs

It’s also important to have listings information/keywords in the URLs of the listing details pages. The reason is because search engines use URL text to determine content’s relevance. In all three scripts, you can construct a custom listing URL by adding any listing field values.

Moreover, some search engines just don’t index pages with query strings, or, simply put, with stuff following the question mark at the end of URL (see http://www.sitepoint.com/article/search-engine-friendly-urls).

This relates to URLs like www.your_site/display_listing.php?listing_id=424. (our former URL look)

E.g., by default, listing details URL in iAuto v.4.x looks like this:

http://www.iautosoftware.com/demo/listing_details/424/2005_Volvo_V70.html

As you can see, all data pertaining to car’s year, make and model are included into the URL.

In iRealty v.4.x, a default URL is:

http://www.irealtysoft.com/demo/listing_details/24/222_Pappan_Dr_Imperial_Pennsylvania.html

In this case, URL includes property address info.

And in iLister 4.x, it’s:

http://www.ilistersoft.com/demo/listings/3/Huge-Antique-Solid-Oak-Wall-Entertainment-Storage-Unit.html

Ad title, entered by user, is included into the URL.

Displaying Listing Parameters in Title, Description and Keywords Tags

SEO friendly classifieds site should have listing keyword phrases in the title, description and keywords meta tags of the listing page (see http://www.geocities.com/frakilk/seo-title-tag.html ).

In iAuto, iRealty and iLister, you can include any listing parameters into these tags easily. In case of iLister, a listing title entered by user is displayed in the page title, description and keyword tags. For iRealty, a property address can be displayed in META tags along with the city and state, and in iAuto, vehicle’s year of manufacture, make and model are shown.

You can easily modify these META tags in the listing details page template. Here is an example of how these tags are set in templates:

{title} {$listing.Year} {$listing.MakeModel.Make} {$listing.MakeModel.Model}{/title}

{keywords} {$listing.Year} {$listing.MakeModel.Make} {$listing.MakeModel.Model}{/keywords}

{description} {$listing.Year} {$listing.MakeModel.Make} {$listing.MakeModel.Model}{/description}

To summarize the above, by properly using these features in optimizing your classifieds site, you can get your ad pages to index fast and appear in the search engine results on top positions. All you have to do is to configure it once, and just let your users to do the rest of job by filling out the content.

Visit www.ilistersoft.com – General Classifieds Software

Choose your business model

First of all figure out what business model you’re going to use. There are a few basic models that are used by online classifieds businesses. You can choose the one from this list or mix them, and come out with your own. Here is a list of basic classifieds business models:

Paid ads posting

The easiest way to start earning money from classifieds site is to charge your site users for posting an ad. This business model is usually used by vertical niche classifieds sites such as AutoTrader and Cars.com

There are may be different variations on how users can pay for posting an ad. You can charge certain price for each ad, or you can charge for monthly subscription of posting certain number of ads. You can also take money for any additional services, such as ability to attach more photos or making an ad featured and showing it on the first page.

iLister have advanced membership plans functionality that allows you to use any of described models.

Google ads

As any site owner you can get money from using Google ads on your site. It’s really easy to paste Google ads code to the templates and start earning your revenue.

Using this model you can start getting money even with a not popular site, since you don’t have to have a lot of registered users to start using it.

The template system used in iLister allows you to have Google ads on any page you wish.

Paid banners

And of course the old and good way to do the business on the web is paid banners. There are also a few ways you can charge your advertisers for placing banners on your site. You can take money for a certain period of time (e.g. per month), you can also charge per number of clicks or number of views.

iLister banner management addon is a good tool for making your banners advertisement campaigns.

You can choose one of these models or mix them based on what market you are targeting. There are no particular rules on which one to use, it’s all depends on different factors like geographic location your classifieds site is targeted, the niche of your site (cars, real estate, jobs or anything else) and etc.

Promote your site

In all 3 cases described above the amount of money you get from your online business, will directly depend on popularity of your classifieds service. So you should work really hard on getting traffic to your site.

Search engine optimization is one of the best practices to improve your traffic. iLister has a great tools for doing this, so with clever approach you can put your site to the top of search results without spending much on advertisement.

Find your clients

Now, after you decided what model you’re going to use, you need find your potential customers who are going to pay you. In case of Google ads you don’t really need to find any one, since Google have already done it for you.

If you’re going to use paid ad posting, then the registered users of your site is your clients, who will buy your service. So you need to get more people registered on your site, to get good revenue.

To make a profit from paid banners you need to find companies interested in advertising on your site. Of course you can just put your prices online and wait, while your customer will find you. Or you can prepare business proposal and try to reach your potential clients.

The steps described above are only general ones and could be accomplished in any order. As in any industry it takes a great effort to create a profitable business from your classifieds site. You need to use your skills and knowledge in marketing and finances and other fields to be successful. So good luck everyone with staring your online classifieds business.

Visit www.ilistersoft.com – General Classifieds Software

Small companies can become competitive when struggle for a narrowed part of a prey on the market they’ve chosen themselves The sense to choose a niche of a market is to shift the game to your field, even though the field can be very small.

You need to concentrate to determine a high-ascertained needs of your potential customers and provide them with a certain set of mutually complementary services.

In case you live in a mountain region, you may create a service for placement ads relative to extreme sports: buying and selling equipment for ski, rock climbing, parachuting, mount boarding, buying and selling specific vehicles as off-road cars, sporting bikes and SUVs.
If you live on a seaside, you can offer local hotels to place the information on their rooms and services with multiple images and video tours.

Another example, you may focus on interests of parents, who have one, two or more children, and they cannot run about the shops in their district and make long choice of goods they need, thus they would prefer to use a web-based service to purchase what they want. Accordingly, you may create a service to buy and sell goods relative to a child care and maternity as children clothes and food, car seats, toys and books. Your users will be
able to buy a car that perfectly fits for a large family, or find a company to walk in a nearest park with kids in the “Just friends” section of your iLister-based site.

You may place an advertisement for paid children playing or educational centers, and iLister offers you a help of Banner Management add-on to do so.

ILister can help you to build all of the above. You may easily compose a necessary set of fields for your customer-oriented website. An easy-to-modify templates do not require a deep knowledge of PHP or good programming skills, all you need to know is an HTML and some Smarty tags.

ILister is a high-capacity script that gives you a powerful tool to raise your site up by means of built-in search engine optimization functionality as SEO-friendly URLs; an ability to put any data of a listing into page keywords, description and title Meta tags; and custom URLs for search or static pages.

Visit www.ilistersoft.com – General Classifieds Software

One of the main benefits of iLister is SEO features it has, such as SEO friendly URLs and keyword rich title, description and keywords meta tags. Optimizing your classifieds site for search engines is critical for up-to-date online business. Using iLister, you won’t have to spend money on additional SEO modules, like with most other classifieds scripts. All these features are included and preconfigured for you.

Another important benefit is customizable templates system. By modifying iLister templates you can change the look and feel of your site to whatever you want. No professional PHP knowledge is needed for that, you only need to know HTML and a few SMARTY tags. This allows you to save time and money, since you don’t have to hire expensive PHP professional. You can either modify templates yourself, or give this job to a HTML coder, which is cheaper than hiring programmer.

There is also a long list of functions of iLister that could be beneficial to you depending on what business model you’re choosing for your classifieds site. It has integrated popular payment gateways, that is useful, if you’re going to charge your user for posting ads. You can implement different charging models using Membership plans and packages options. And if you’re going to make money from banner advertisement, Banner management addon will make it easy for you.

So to summarize the said above, iLister is a great tool for creating SEO friendly classifieds site, and could be customized to any basic classifieds business model without additional coding and components.

Visit www.ilistersoft.com – General Classifieds Software

Classified advertising on the web exceeded the most generous forecasts and today the sector is larger than press classifieds and regional newspapers. So what is the classified ads market and why it is one of the best way to earn your e-money?

The online classifieds market sector is quite large. Businessmen often use classifieds to sell their services or products. Classified ads are also among the tools used by many companies in recruitment for available job opportunities, for example. Today’s trend is to create multi-category classified ad websites to advertise several types of services and goods.

One of the most popular classified ad website is CraigsList.org. The service was founded in 1995 by Craig Newmark. As of September 2007, Craigslist had established itself in approximately 450 cities in 50 countries. The web site serves over nine billion page views per month and has over thirty million unique visitors. It is in 66th place overall among web sites world wide, 9th place overall among web sites in the United States (per Alexa.com on April 9, 2008). Craigslist’s users publish over 14 million new ads per month, and today Craigslist is the leading classifieds service in any medium. The web site is earning nearly $25 million per year. Indeed, it is a great example of the online classifieds success.

Nevertheless, most people don’t appreciate the pulling power of classified ads. They think classifieds ads are for selling cars, or finding jobs, not for expanding a business. And while it’s true that a classified ad is a good way only to sell a car, or find a job, it is also true that classified ads can be used to launch and operate multi-million dollar businesses.

In fact, many businesses rely exclusively on these low cost ads to generate all their sales and get new customers. The reason is simple. Once they have discovered how to use the power of these ads, they won’t run expensive ads in mass-media. Classifieds, when used effectively, can be one of the quickest and inexpensive ways to increase sales and customers. A single well-written classified ad can generate thousands in sales, but only costs you dollars to run. That is why classifieds website is one of the best ways to start your online business.

Typically all you need to start your classifieds web site is to decide what sector of advertising you are interested in (real estate, job classifieds, auto or personal classifieds etc.) and to make the right choice of the classified ad script for the website. Usually the best business ideas for the classified ad web site are related with your areas of interest: professional activity, hobbies, etc. After you have chosen the area of your interest, it is time to find a classified ad script for your web site.

You can find a lot of such scripts on the Web. But remember, one of the important features of the classified ad script is the ability to customize it for your needs, ad search and browsing capabilities, SEO-optimized URLs and content. iLister is one of the script that corresponds to all the requirements for the cutting edge classifieds script. It is an all-purpose SEO-optimized platform for creating classifieds websites of any kind. With iLister you can create you own website to advertise anything, from cars to houses, to watches, to pets, to software scripts, or to works of art.

So to summarize the said above, online classified advertisement is one of the most fast-growing e-commerce sectors. Today it is very promising to build your online business with classified ad web site. You need to create your business idea and make the right choice of the classified ad script to start your classifieds web site.

Make the right choice in the wide market of online classified advertising!

Visit www.ilistersoft.com – General Classifieds Software