Classified ads aren’t just for Craig’s List. If you run a club, community organization, lodge, or other membership-based group then they could be perfect for you. Read on to find out how they can help you.

How Can Classified Ads Help Your Website?

Adding Classified Ads to your website can give you a new revenue stream, increase engagement with your visitors, help you get found on search engines, and in general give your community a boost!

Fundraising

You can use classified ads to get more revenue. For example, by requiring visitors to pay a fee to post an ad, or requiring a fee to make an ad featured with top billing. Another great example, if you run a non-profit you could use ads to raise donations & perform fundraisers. Finally, you could even sell subscriptions, allow certain customers to pay a regular fee to post ads on the site on others behalf.

As you can see there are a multitude of ways to leverage classifieds for fundraising. We can help with all of them, if you have a WordPress site, or want to build a site with us. We can help you setup for classified ads.

Remember, all of the ads are managed through an easy-to-use online interface. Visitors can even create accounts & if you allow it, review & comment on listings.

Engagement

An important factor for any website is engagement. That is, are visitors actually sticking around, and getting what they want or need out of the site? Classified ads can help here, by giving users a reason to stick around, and even getting them engaged with things they didn’t know they needed!

As well, you can enable community-building by allowing folks to comment & talk back and forth. Giving them more of a reason to come back later. These little touches & added value can really boost member retention for your club, community center, etc.

Search Engine Optimization

Get more visitors, who think like your members. By having classifieds on your site, you’ll build search engine presence by having a variety of fresh & interesting new content. This means if someone is searching for a product or service being offered through a classified on your site, they’re more likely to find you. That’s great for your members, and might even earn you a new member!

If you have a website with us, you’ll be able to see this in your monthly ranking report.

Is It Right For You?

Classifieds do take some work. If you allow members to post their own ads, you’ll have to moderate those posts. As well, if your members are less tech-literate, you may even need to post ads on their behalf. If you’re willing to put in the work however, the results can be huge!

We think, that especially for community groups, non-profits, clubs, and lodges, classifieds could be perfect. If you want to know more, just contact us!

Concrete Example

We actually have an awesome concrete example of this working. We developed the New River Valley Sheep & Goat Club’s first ever website. As part of this process we built them a classified ads system, and were able to see the awesome results this had for SEO & engagement.

The NRV SGC was founded in 2014, and with over 500 individual members are growing fast! They came to us because they needed a site for their club, and wanted classifieds with it. We built the design, got the pages put together, setup the classifieds system, and trained them on it.

In just a few short months we saw them getting a healthy number of visitors & ranking for some impressively BIG keywords.

One example we’re proud of, is that they rank alongside Farms.com & Farmia.com for Sheeps for Sale. (Currently with an avg. ranking of 5.6)