Start Your Own Community Classifieds Business

In this economy it's hard to find a business opportunity any better than classified ads. Some people are selling what they don't need for some much needed cash to survive on.  Others are bargain hunting - buying some great stuff for a fraction of the price of new. Either way, the real winner could be you. If you are looking for a business opportunity that practically runs itself then online classifieds are perfect. Once you set it up you need to do little more than sell advertising. But I'll tell you how to automate that too!

There are a few ways to work this business. You can offer free ads and sell display advertising, or you can offer paid classifieds, with or without display advertising. Paid classifieds only work well if you have a real niche market where there aren't many competitors. You may have a hobby where an online classifieds may justify a small fee per ad. My personal favorite is community classifieds. This has all of the appeal of those big classifieds sites, but serves only your local area. The advantage here is that all transactions can be face-to-face, so there is little chance of fraud. The other advantage is that you are getting traffic from local consumers, so your website's display ad space is valuable to local merchants. In this economy more merchants are turning to lower cost alternatives for advertising. You could be a major force in your local economy by supporting your local merchants with low cost advertising.

Low cost doesn't mean low profits. The overhead for online classifieds is less than $10 per month, so almost all of the money you make is profit. How many ads could you sell to local merchants for $25-$50 per month. 10? 20? More? You can see that it's possible to make $1000 or more per month with little effort.

To get started in this business you will first need to get a classified ads script. There are many out there, but I recommend BM Classifieds. It's simple, fast, and fully configured to run a community classifieds site off the shelf. Besides that, I created it and I use it myself so I know it works. You don't need to come up with categories as there are over 140 preinstalled. You can be running in 15 minutes. I even include a built-in display ad manager to make selling display ads easy. Next you will need to host your site somewhere. There are some recommended hosts at BM Scripts that will save you some headaches. You can go almost anywhere, but trust me. I have hundreds of scripts installed and these hosts are the best.

Working this business is simple. Launch your site and do everything you can to get visitors. My favorite marketing tool is business cards. I print thousands and leave them all over town. It works very well and costs only $50 a month for 5000 cards. The more visitors you get the more valuable your advertising space is. Then sell, sell, sell.

If you don't want to do any selling there is another option. You can join Google Adsense and make the display advertising areas of your site targeted ad units. Now local business can target your site in their Google Adwords marketing campaigns, plus you can get ad revenue for other Google ads as well. If you can generate good traffic you will create a good income.

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