As part of our Useful Wednesdays series, today I will be talking about getting traffic to your classifieds website, although the rules I will be talking about can be generalized to almost any website out there, I believe that they are must-know rules for any website owner and especially if you want to build a classifieds site.

Important Rules to Get Website Traffic:

Rule #1: Know where you are

when you start a website you have to know a bit about the space you’re creating your website at, which is the Internet and its users. The internet has grown a lot in the past decade and now there are as many as 2.9 billion people surfing the internet as they make up about 40% of the total world population, but still, you might find that out of all of those people you only get few ending up at your site. But now you know that there is a huge potential in getting traffic to your classifieds website.

Regardless of how good your idea is, you have to find the best ways and follow the best practice into getting a part of those 2.9 billion out there to visit your site. If you’re interested in that then keep reading.

Internet users are distributed according to their age with the following chart:

Although this is general information but this will give you an overview perspective of what’s going on and who’s out there viewing everything.

Rule #2: Consider local market

Nowadays, We hear a lot about on-page optimization and off-page optimization but there is a considerable amount of webmasters who are neglecting their personal networks and people they know physically and meet on a regular basis. Trust me, those people are key and essential for your website. You never know when your friend or acquaintance becomes an influencer in the local market and a simple phone call might double (if not triple) your current website traffic.

So keep networking and use those networks that you established for the benefit of your classifieds site.

Rule #3: Create content

With content marketing taking the top spot in the list of priorities for global and European marketers in 2014 you should better not fall behind and make sure that your site has relative content to the type of business you’re running. This would not only give you a better chance to add more related keywords to your website, but it would also increase the trust in your business and show your expertise in the field. Not only that, but also branded content increases purchase consideration, brand affinity and brand familiarity among users.

Rule #4: Build reputation

According to a recent Kasparsky study, 70% out of all sent e-mails are spam. And I don’t think I have to say this, but you should not be one of those 70%. Building a good reputation through tending to your customers personally if possible or not leaving an issue open without a solution would help you in becoming recognized as a trusted resource and would indirectly increase traffic to your website.

It’s good to note here that when you build a good reputation the quality of the website traffic you’re getting would serve you much better than the website traffic that comes without having a good reputation.

Rule #5: Get the right tools

Of course, you need to be able to implement all of the above mentioned rules, so you need to either have a very good knowledge in web development or pick a platform that grants you access to everything you need. That is why the choice of which classifieds script or classifieds software is essential!!

You have to make sure that the classifieds script is up to date with all latest technologies, gives you access to content creation and helps you in having a good impact on your users to build a good reputation.

At Open Classifieds we are aware of your needs and we’re constantly improving the software to be able to give you all the tools you would require to get a huge chunk of those 2.9 billion people looking at their screens and browsing your website.

If you have any other rules in mind let me know by posting them in the comment section below.