Hello OC-Friends,
Having more and more online classifieds, it is important to stand out from the crowd and offer something different than your competition. If you are able to do this, you will attract more people to your website, hence you will increase your sales. In this blog post we will share some tips with you on how to improve your classifieds site and generate more traffic and thus higher revenues.
1. Make an amazing first impression
Making a good first impression really helps. It only takes people a split second to decide if they like your site or not. So having a great homepage that is very appealing is important. Your content on other pages might be fantastic, but if potential customers already left your website after only having seen the homepage, great content on other pages doesn’t help you.
2. Have fantastic photo’s
It is a fact that people remember more of what they see than of what they read. Having great pictures on your website will therefore help to be remembered easier by your visitors. For that reason you should make sure that you have attractive, sharp, clear pictures on your homepage. Besides that it really helps to have great pictures on the advertisement pages too. If you invest some time in good pictures, this will pay you back later.
3. Improve the navigation on your site
Offer good navigation on your website. People will leave fast if they can’t find what they are looking for. Therefore it is important to organize your ads. Make categories and use the location option to inform people where an item is located. Next to that you can add ‘special’ categories, like “latest ads”. This is a great help for returning customers that immediately want to see what is new, without having to go through all the categories separately.
4. Have unique selling points
Another important point is to have one or more unique selling points. There are thousand and thousands of classifieds websites and therefore you want to differentiate yourself from the rest. If you are offering exactly the same as your competitors, it will be more difficult to make sales. Therefore you have have to sit down and think about what you can or want to offer to your visitors, that other classifieds websites aren’t doing. Things that you can ask yourself to come up with your unique selling point:
A great help when trying to formulate your unique selling points is the W9 questionnaire, that was developed by Sam Horn, author of the book “POP!: Create the Perfect Pitch, Title, and Tagline for Anything”.
W1. What am I offering?
W2. What problem does my idea or offering solve?
W3. Why is it worth trying and buying?
W4. Who is my target audience?
W5. Who am I and what are my credentials?
W6. Who are my competitors and how am I different from them?
W7. What resistance or objections will people have to this?
W8. What is the purpose of my pitch?
W9. When, where, and how do I want people to take action?
5. Start a blog
Blogging is a great way to increase traffic to your website. It helps you to attract more new customers, but also to build customer engagement, what will lead in a higher return rate.
The great thing about blogging is that you can talk about a big variety of subjects. You can blog about your personal experiences or opinions, talk about your favorite products, write about the niche your are focusing on or how your business developed over time.
6. Tell about yourself
Your customers like to know from whom they are buying. A good “about us” page that is transparent and shows your public who you are, will help to gain trust. On this page you can tell about the kinds of product(s) that you offer, about your mission statement, your values, something about the history of your company and also who is behind the company. Don’t hesitate to mention who is working for your company and add pictures of your team members.
7. Create a good SEO strategy
A good SEO strategy is very important these days in order to be found by your (future) customers. There are literally hundreds of tips that could be given and a quick search on Google on ‘SEO optimization” will give you millions of results. It is a very extensive subject, but nonetheless we would like to give some of the most important aspect of your SEO strategy.
- On your product page you should use keywords. Also relevant image alt text will help to improve your search engine ranking.
- Use friendly URL’s. So instead of using http://yourwebsite.com/products?category=2&pid=25, use http://yourwebsite.com/products/bikes/colnago
- Add a review option to your product page, so that people who bought the product can tell what they think about the product.
- Add social media plug-ins. This makes it easier for your visitors to share the products that you sell with their friends.
- Use internal links. This helps your customers to navigate easier through your website and is good for your SEO ranking.
- Link to other websites. Also this will improve your ranking as it shows you want to provide helpful content.
8. Target the client with the right product
Recommend products to your visitors. This can increase your sales with up to 40%. One strategy is to show what kind of products previous customers bought, based on the product that is viewed by the visitor: “customers who bought this item also bought this”.
You can also display related items to the item the visitor is currently viewing. This makes the chance that they will visit other pages on your site much higher.
9. Use the messaging system
Make it easy for your customers to contact you. You might think that sending an email already is very easy, but a message system or live chat is even easier. People don’t need to register first or give their email address. They can quickly send a message to the advertiser and get in contact faster. Check how the new message system of Open Classifieds and Yclas is working here: http://docs.yclas.com/how-to-use-messaging-system/
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