Classified Ads Scripts...have you used one?

[leadology]

I have spent over 2 years looking at classified ad scripts and can honestly say that I am more confused than when I started

The commercial ones all say how great they are and they have testimonials that agree of course. Testimonials that have links to their sites range from pretty good to awful.

I am looking for a great, inexpensive script that we can use on many of our domains that is robust, flexible and stable with plenty of support if needed. I want to charge for some of our ads and probably use paypal.

I would love to hear your experiences if you have used one.

Thank you and have a great day

 

[leadology]

Still no responses from this awesome group??

Surely you must have tried some classified scripts.

Please, I really need some guidance on this.

Thanks!

Mark

 

[nielsencl]

I might be able to help a little, but not in recommending a script. I think you should make some decision and try one after two years of thinking about it. What I would do is make a list of what is important to you. Then see what scripts provide most of what you want. Then I would see which one is used on sites that you like the most. I think FUNCTION is more important that FORM or appearance if you have to make a choice.

My partner and I have 11 classified ad sites that look like our main site, www.Racecar2000.com. The site was built with what I think was a sample ASP template from somewhere. My partner made some changes and we've been using it ever since. It's not perfect by any means, but it does the job. My favorite classifieds site is www.usfreeads.com and I wish we could have a site that looks and functions like that one does.

One thing you will want to consider, and that is if you charge for ads, you will limit how many ads you get. If you have limited ads, you will not get as much traffic from the search engines (in general). We don't charge for ads on any of our 11 sites. This allows us to get many more ads than we would otherwise. We make our money from the network ads that run on the sites.

But if you charge or are free you will still have to work hard to get a number of ads to begin with. If your site is empty, no one is going to post an ad even for free, since they will think no one will see it. What we did is ah, "borrow" classified ads from other sites and post them on ours so we could get things started. After a while we didn't have to add anymore ourselves.

Good Luck!

 

[leadology]

Thanks Nielsoncl for the advice. I own about 4400 domains and envision making numerous ones into classifieds and directories paying and non paying and partial paying.

I had previously built an ad serving network of 500 sites and 1500 total domains servicing a niche market that did fairly well and was acquired by a national media company.

Based on that experience, I want to make even better ones and want to start out with the right software, etc., to be virtually automatic with no human intervention other than the users.

I have learned from my experience that the fewer employees I had, the happier I was and the more money and freetime I had.

 

[nielsencl]

Well, thank you for the additional information. I can see now that you are more serious and more experienced that I first thought. In addition to the classifieds sites I have a few directories, but the only one that has been very successful has required a lot of time and work. It also does not charge a fee, but is one of the top earners that I have.

If you would like have some discussion off-forum I would be interested. I might be able to help with some of the confusion you are dealing with and I could help you to evaluate and decide on a classifieds script, and I could certainly benefit from the product research you have already done. I have had in mind to put up a real estate classifieds site for the area that I live in for some time.