All You Need To Know About Online Classifieds

      Online classifieds have been the leading method of job postings, listing of real estate, dating and community activities.  Before online classifieds, newspapers and magazines had sections built just for readers to post and connect with posters.  With the opening of Craigslist.org the old fashioned way of print advertising slowly became obsolete.  Classifieds that were printed moved to the internet due to the ease of the new way of listing and responding through email. 

      Eventually, other classifieds sites started to show up and gain popularity like Backpage.com and Kijiji.com.   These website’s web 2.0 structure allowed them to grow and prosper. Many smaller sites opened as well such as 29posts.com.  Smaller online classified sites get just a fraction of the market share the bigger sites get but fulfill a demand for webmasters looking for backlinks to their sites.  The trade-off is every time a poster decides to post on the classifieds site they are actually helping the website grow and gain indexed pages.  

      Online classifieds are known for having some shady-dark areas where law enforcement has gone as far as shutting down the entire site like backpage.com.  Backpage.com was named after the magazines that printed classifieds in the back normally advertising businesses that were not totally legit. Therefore online classifieds naturally have to deal with the possibility illegal businesses are being conducted within their pages.  Even craigslist had to shut down certain areas of their website due to law enforcement purposes.

    Currently, there are scripts you can buy that will give you your own classifieds site by simply installing free software.  Many of these sites are built for spammers by spammers. Spammers use tools to quickly post on these types of sites in order to advertise and gain links for their own benefit.  True classified sites do not allow this and work hard to avoid being spam havens. 29posts.com is a new site but works hard to keep all business conducted on the website legit. Truth be told, it is very hard to start an online classifieds site and get traffic right away so catering to spam tools sometimes gives the site a good boost in traffic that is needed.

    Trying to get just a portion of the market share the major classifieds sites get marketing is very important.  Currently no classifieds sites advertise on television or print. It would be a waste of money because sites like Craigslist are known by name and do not need to advertise.  It’s also hard for a new classifieds site to gain posters when the website is essentially empty. One solution is to fill the categories with data from other websites but this is not a white hat method since these posts are copyrighted material.   

Hopefully this article sheds some light on the online classifieds business for those interested in starting a new site or those who already have one.