A guide for small business owners on how to make your classifieds online business a real success, in terms of monetization, business stability, and well establishment.
There are a variety of ways through which you can make money online. Running a classifieds advertising website can be a good way of earning online income. There are several thousands of successful webmasters who are running a small business via classifieds website. Earning online income via classifieds is one of the popular means to be successful online while only attending it as a part time work which you can run from your home.
However, you have to be creative to be able to make something out of your classifieds website. The following are perhaps the best ways through which you can monetize your classifieds website.
10 ways to make money online via classifieds website business
Table of Contents
The scope, options, and basic alternates for earning online income from a classifieds website
With the constant expansion of the Internet world, there are immense possibilities to earn good online money from a classified website business. We have just tried to compile the most commonly used and practiced methods of monetizing a classified website. If you dive deeper in this business you may encounter lot more ways and techniques to be successful with your online business. Here is a list of 10 such highly successful means of monetizing a classified website business :-
#1. Membership at a premium
The idea here is to offer the users an option to become a member at a small monthly or yearly premium. To make the deal attractive, you can come up with exclusive features that only members can access. The features could be anything from the ability to place ads at strategic locations in your website to getting credit in the pay to post categories. If you are creative enough in coming up with beneficial features for the members, you will definitely get users interested in subscribing.
#2. Featured Ads
This is one of the most common and straightforward way to monetize a website. Along with showing Google Adsense ads (or ads from any other ad networks) you can enhance your overall earnings by allowing users to post premium or featured ads. With so many users posting ads in your classifieds website, some of the users may want their posts to stand out. You can enable them to achieve this through featured ads and charge them a small premium. Posting featured ads will enable a user to get the attention of more visitors in your website. For this deal to be attractive, you need to have high amount of traffic in your website.
#3. Banner advertising
Banners are still among the best online marketing tools to monetize a classified website. You can easily grab the attention of visitors by the use of attractive banners. As the online business owner, you can allow users to utilize banner ads to advertise their businesses at a small fee. This is particularly attractive for users targeting specific groups of people visiting your website.
#4. Special ads placing
You can also make money by allowing users to pin their ads at the top of a category page for a premium. You can set the amount to be paid depending on the number of days the ad is to remain on top. If you have enough and highly targeted traffic to your site, you are likely to get regular requests from people who want to use that option to advertise their businesses. You can make additional income from your website this way.
#5. Affiliate links
Affiliate marketing is still a very effective way of earning online income through classifieds websites. You can enter into a contract with interested marketers and charge them a fee for placing their links on your website. Alternatively, you could charge them through pay per click or pay per conversion rates. Though, the most common way to earn via affiliate marketing is through PPS (Pay per Sale) or PPA (Pay per Action). PPC method is rarely used in affiliate marketing.
The amount you earn through this kind of arrangement will depend on the number of visitors that you are getting on your website and how many of them are interested in those links. For this method to work well, your website must have highly targeted visitors.
#6. Pay to Post/ Pay per Post/ Guest Posting/ Sponsored Reviews
You can turn your classifieds website to a work from home cash cow through pay to post arrangements. However, considering that posting in other websites may be free, your site must offer something unique that users cannot get from other sites. This could be the presence of huge database of users or a unique category and niche that users cannot get from other classifieds websites. For this to work, you must also have a blog in your classified website (for ex, at- www.yourclassified.com/blog). But, the Classifieds Blog should have good Alexa Rank, Google PR (Page Rank), and better DA (Domain Authority) . You can check a website’s important SEO stats here at http://smallseotools.com/
#7. Using conventional advertisement platforms
Apart from the users of your website, you can rely on other advertisement platforms, such as Google Adsense, to make some good cash on monthly basis. Remember that users together with other visitors translate into great traffic that you can take advantage of through Google Adsense and other marketing platforms.
#8. The inverse model
The inverse model involves charging the viewers instead of the advertisers. This works well for classifieds websites that offers job boards, tender listings and other categories that provide valuable information to the visitors. Posting the ads becomes free but people who want to view complete information on the ads are charged a small monthly or yearly premium.
#9. Using the craigslist model
You can build a sustainable online business by running a classifieds website and employing the craigslist model. The idea is to offer everything for free and charge a fee for only the advertisers who will gain the most from advertising through your site. The free service attracts huge traffic into your site and people who can gain a lot are willing to pay a premium to take advantage of the traffic.
#10. Creating classifieds websites and selling them
Make Money Classifieds Web Designing– If you can create a website that generates an impressive amount of targeted traffic in a certain niche, you will definitely get interested buyers. You can develop classifieds websites targeting certain niches and sell them to interested parties.
There is a separate business market of creating and selling classifieds websites, templates, themes, plugins, etc. There is a great scope of online classifieds web development business. You can earn even as a freelancer classifieds designer and developer. There are numerous companies in the market that design classifieds advertising website and you could get affiliated with them if you have desired skill sets for their designing platform. And, you could develop your own plugins and themes independently and sell them on a suitable freelance website for web designers
