Driving Traffic to free marketplace site

I am having a problem with generating traffic to my website and getting members to sign up. It is a craigslist-like site where users can buy and sell aquarium hobby equipment. The benefit of this site is that it is directly related to the hobby and has more specific hobby-related categories for searching for items.

My problem is that (I think) in order to get people to join and post, they want to see that the website has traffic and members who will buy their stuff, but I cant get members to join because of that!?!

Is this thinking accurate?

The site is free to sign up for and free to post, so all revenue on my side will be from advertising and eventually charging for Featured Item postings

I can't promote my site on the hobbies most popular forums and I've started writing craigslist users who are selling aquarium hobby equipment, but havent had any sign up yet.

My SEO is good, I show up first when searching Blue World Aquatics, but most users I get are checked as sploggers.

Any help pointing me in the right direction would be appreciated

 

I see your dilemma, perhaps sign up with forum exchange sites and work on your SEO, offer people a reason to get involved even if there are not a lot of people on the site. Perhaps a free offer or some kind, or a false sense of authority will help you get the initial momentum.

 

I was thinking of just creating 10 or so different accounts and then posting my own items to show some action on the site. Think that is a good start? Those items should show up in SEO for more visibility

Can you explain what you mean here?

 

create the illusion that you already have authority and they just didn't know, testimonials, be personal and add information about you and your websites goal, explain why they should use your service and why they should work with you. Trust seals, etc.

Also make your site look professional and as modern as possible, and make sure its just as responsive from mobile devices, the more you put into your site, the more people will expect out of it.

 

You need to register your sellers manually and add they're good. It's only what can works. Then with SEO and payed traffic increase visitors volume.

 

When creating a marketplace, you ar basically looking to sync both supply and demand. This type of two-sided website is the hardest one to develop.

Look for ways you can attract one side(either sellers or buyers first) and then the other side will come unconditionally.

I am truing to create something like this and it started to gain traction.

I used content marketing (for buyers) with lots of infos. Once I get the traction on social media, I created a Facebook group, and invited the supply side to check it. And then from the supply side, businesses started registering. And for the moment I am still work in progress.

Creating a two-sided marketplace (as yours) is the hardest thing you can do. But the benefits could be huge. Good luck!

 

Can you tell me more about how you did the content marketing for buyers?

 

Create a content calendar.

Each blogpost should be answering a question (real or imagined by you).

Try to be as helpful as you can.

Once you have a few blogposts, start promoting them on social media.

Use title creation tools to generate titles. And develop those titles into articles.

Example of titles:

How often to change the water in your tanks
Top 5 mistakes to avoid when buying new fish
3 tank bottoms sceneeries to create in your fish tank

You ideas don't have to be original. But your content does.

 

Thank you for the info. That makes sense to me. I'll

 

- Make account sign ups optional / allow users to post ads without an account (At least for a year or so. Once you have a solid customer base you may ask your users to create accounts. It may sound counter intuitive, but it can actually work well in your case.).

- Don't post ads / send emails on CL or backpage or any other classifieds asking people to join your classifieds. It's a total waste of time. Personally, I think it's a terrible practice.

- Make social media your best friend: Facebook, G+, Twitter. Create business pages for your classifieds on FB and G+. Create at least three Twitter accounts which will be addressing three different aspects of your classifieds (i.e. Support Page, Stuff For Sale, Recent Posts). Grow your Twitter accounts. Twitter is really excellent when it comes to traffic.

What is your site? Sometimes a site's design can be the #1 hindrance to growth. Would be interesting to have a look at it.

 

Your logic is spot on. Why would someone waster their time posting an ad when no one will see it? That's an extremely niche site to start, it's going to be an uphill battle.

 

I think this comment is spot on. I would listen to him as he has direct experience with the marketplace niche.

 

Write good content because the content is king. When you write any post you should be aware of reader.

 

site is BlueWorldAquatics.com. It is the ClassiPress Theme for Wordpress

 

So I've created a twitter, facebook and Google+ account for my site. I am using the Yoast SEO plugin for wordpress and I can link my social media accounts to my Wordpress. I think the functionality is that posts from WP are migrated to the social media accounts via the yoast plugin, but I havent tested with posts/content yet, just ads. I was hoping ads would be migrated as well, but that might be overkill.

Now that I have social media accounts, I will start posting content. How do I promote my social media accounts? Or should I just friend/follow other people and my content will be available to them?

 

Yes, just keep following preferably real, active accounts and post / tweet regularly. From my experience, the more I post / tweet the more followers I get. Obviously, don't overdo it. I'd say 5-10 posts a day on G+ business page and 20-50 tweets a day will not be out of ordinary. With twitter follow 50-100 people and then wait for a few days until you get some followers back, otherwise you will reach the following limit rather quickly.

In a way a niche site is harder and easier to kick off at the same time. When it's a generic classifieds a target audience comes to you, since it covers a wide range of categories. In your case you need to actively search for your target audience. The good news is once your classifieds gets some traction you will have die hard users that will be referring everyone interested in aquatics to your classifieds.

 

Thank you for the information. Is there any benefit to boosting or promoting via payment on facebook/twitter/g+?

 

I don't know, never tried it. Maybe someone else can give you some info on that. But I'd try a free route first. Those things are not cheap and can end up being a waste of money.

 

Should my posts/tweets always link back to content on my site, or could I do original posts/tweets with just a link to my site?50 tweets a day, thats alot of content in one day.

I have a personal twitter account for support and communication, a marketplace twitter account where, once ads start getting posted to my site, I could tweet the featured ads. I just want to create one more twitter handle for general news, info on the site. Sound right?

 

It was just a rough estimate. You can do what your content allows you to do. You can go a bit creative and tweet different aspects of your site. You have probably a hundred categories, you can tweet category related tweets hashtagging them with a category-specific hashtag (ie #dryfood #frozenfood #fragmounts etc. etc.). As an example:

Buy / Sell Booster Pumps:

http://blueworldaquatics.com/ad-category/rodi/boosterpumps/

#boosterpumps #classifieds