Choose your business model
First of all figure out what business model you're going to use. There are a few basic models that are used by online classifieds businesses. You can choose the one from this list or mix them, and come out with your own. Here is a list of basic classifieds business models:
Paid ads posting
The easiest way to start earning money from classifieds site is to charge your site users for posting an ad. This business model is usually used by vertical niche classifieds sites such as AutoTrader and Cars.com.
There are may be different variations on how users can pay for posting an ad. You can charge certain price for each ad, or you can charge for monthly subscription of posting certain number of ads. You can also take money for any additional services, such as ability to attach more photos or making an ad featured and showing it on the first page.
iLister have advanced membership plans functionality that allows you to use any of described models.
Google ads
As any site owner you can get money from using Google ads on your site. It's really easy to paste Google ads code to the templates and start earning your revenue.
Using this model you can start getting money even with a not popular site, since you don't have to have a lot of registered users to start using it.
The template system used in iLister allows you to have Google ads on any page you wish.
Paid banners
And of course the old and good way to do the business on the web is paid banners. There are also a few ways you can charge your advertisers for placing banners on your site. You can take money for a certain period of time (e.g. per month), you can also charge per number of clicks or number of views.
iLister banner management addon is a good tool for making your banners advertisement campaigns.
You can choose one of these models or mix them based on what market you are targeting. There are no particular rules on which one to use, it's all depends on different factors like geographic location your classifieds site is targeted, the niche of your site (cars, real estate, jobs or anything else) and etc.
Promote your site
In all 3 cases described above the amount of money you get from your online business, will directly depend on popularity of your classifieds service. So you should work really hard on getting traffic to your site.
Search engine optimization is one of the best practices to improve your traffic. iLister has a great tools for doing this, so with clever approach you can put your site to the top of search results without spending much on advertisement.
Find your clients
Now, after you decided what model you're going to use, you need find your potential customers who are going to pay you. In case of Google ads you don't really need to find any one, since Google have already done it for you.
If you're going to use paid ad posting, then the registered users of your site is your clients, who will buy your service. So you need to get more people registered on your site, to get good revenue.
To make a profit from paid banners you need to find companies interested in advertising on your site. Of course you can just put your prices online and wait, while your customer will find you. Or you can prepare business proposal and try to reach your potential clients.
The steps described above are only general ones and could be accomplished in any order. As in any industry it takes a great effort to create a profitable business from your classifieds site. You need to use your skills and knowledge in marketing and finances and other fields to be successful. So good luck everyone with staring your online classifieds business.
