Starting a classifieds site

Hi all,

I'm about ready to launch my classified ads site and almost ready to move from my setup phase to my marketing phase. Once I get visitors, how do I get people to post? I know if I came to a blank ads site, I wouldn't want to post.

Thanks.

populate your website by fake ads, you can pay the freelancer to do that.

scrape craigslist, ebay, etc? .

Assuming you're building something you want around long-term, I'd recommend starting within a certain metro area, like Miami.

Focus all your efforts on building ads there, in fact, reach out to people and offer to post ads for them. Once you have a respectable position in Miami, the rest of Florida will follow, then the southeast, etc.

I've got several thousand real ads that I use on classified sites, PM me if you'd like to upload my feed to your site.

Good luck!

best bet is to scrape ads.... there are so many places to do it. I would recommend that you write a little scraping script that will autoupdate content for you for a period of time. It can be quite a timely business getting people to put ad's up.

Great suggestions. I do want this thing to be as legit as possible so this might be the way I want to go. I'm borderline clinically retarded so building a script for me would be my equivalance to landing on the moon. Does anyone have a suggestion on where to swipe or buy a program that could do this for me?