A Quora.com user posted a question today and curious how to go about attracting and promoting their new classified advertising directory startup.
Question: When starting a classifieds ad's website, is it better to allow people to advertise by location or categories in a single country only (not worldwide)?
Answer: It's a good idea two people advertise by location and categories before going worldwide and here's why. For starters, anyone who starts a classified advertising website wants to better understand their demographic audience from a marketer's perspective by starting out small. Of course, you want your classified and website to go global. What you want to allow people to advertise by location and categories within a certain city, state or country first. In other words, since you're most likely going to start a classified ad website in the United States, you want to test the waters by creating categories within your classified ad site and advertise to people on social networks and possibly conduct some PPC-pay per click advertising to people within a certain demographic area such as New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Illinois or perhaps even Delaware to see who wants to run a classified ad with you.
Once you start tracking advertiser behavior on the classified website, you can start making internal judgment after viewing your marketing analytics and determine from there which markets you'll target next to attract advertisers.
Long story short… Allow people at first to advertise by location and categories before thinking on a global scale and venturing outside your local area.
Food for thought: If your web startup idea is a classified ad website, you know right off the bat that your site is vulnerable to building large sums of traffic in short period of time. Make sure your web startup project is hosted on the right kind of server to handle large sums of incoming traffic from social networks and search engines. The reason being is because if you choose the wrong hosting plan, your web server can crash and you'll have to start all over again with your website and possibly creating a new MySQL database, if you don't have your website and SQL database backed up.
A cloud server or dedicated server is the ideal transformation business solution for handling large sums of traffic and hundreds and thousands of people on your site at once. In addition to your web startup project being a classified ad website or even a large traffic discussion forum, you'll still need a personal self hosted blog on your cloud server or dedicated server. The best blogging solution to install is WordPress. There's thousands of free WordPress plug-ins available to help increase the functionality of your WP blog, and help your blog potentially reach global audiences. Don't just rely on your web startup project alone to drive traffic.
Your blog is your personal voice. You need it no matter what. As long as you have a cloud or dedicated server and a self hosted WordPress blog on your web hosting plan, you'll be in the drivers seat to potentially attract traffic and turn traffic into sales 24 hours a day while meeting your online marketing goals, either locally or globally. Starting small and targeting local advertisers is the best way to go before anything else. That can't be stressed enough.
Stay tuned and check back regularly for questions and answers on the topic of "web startups and business web servers."