Starting new website, need some help and ideas!

Hello, I'm starting a new classified website and I'd like to hear your guys view on the idea. I hope you'll take a minute to read the post and write a comment.

SOME INFO
So I'm living on an island with a population of around 41000 people. They are all using the same website for classified ads, and the website is like 5-10 years old, the script is definitely missing some key functions and the design is horrible. But the guy who own the website earn $2000+ /month from advertising. I'm making a new classified site, but of course it needs to be better than the old site, and I'm going to need some good advertising.

HOSTING (problem)
- I'm very worried about the speed of the website though! The old site is getting thousands of views each day.
- Every day 100-200 new classifieds are posted on the page (with pictures!)
- How good hosting will I need? I got a budget of course, but what would be the minimum hosting in order to make the site run smooth?

THE WEBSITE
- I'll use the open source script, OsClass (what's your thoughts on this?)
- I'll modify a template myself, to get a nice looking design.
- It'll of course be free like the old site, but also no ads at first.
- The page will be integrated with facebook (hopefully)
- More ideas for the website?

ADVERTISING
- SEO: I'll try to rank for the main keyword, but the old site have exact match domain and have been in the top for years, so I'm going for second spot.
- Facebook: I'll make a group for the page, make people share it, and pay for advertising. (got some good ideas here too)
- It's a little island, so I can probably get in the local news if I start to get some serious visitors.
- Again, it's a little island and stuff like this go viral fast, if it's a good product.
- Will maybe add some PPC advertising. Keyword is pretty cheap.
- More ideas on advertising?

Thank you!

I think you got a ok niche, but what do you offer that would make people switch over? Your budget will be your enemy, along with your sales copy and advertising. So now that you got these two terms in thought make a list of benefits, not features, that people will get from switching over. A feature is "faster loading time" and a benefit is "Spend more time doing what you love". Stuff like that should have a big list, and then you can start seeing where you could come up with ads and sales copy relevant to the people you are servicing. As for hosting, you might want to look at a few dedicated servers for this, at least to start off with. Look for unmetered internet, big storage capacity, and decent specs so your site isn't always down. I run a few multimillion user websites and I have a cluster of 17 or so dedicated hosts, but my main concern was bandwidth and storage for the first part.

If you're worried about the speed of your site growing too quickly then you are on the right track haha. Just because this main site has an exact match domain doesn't mean you can't out rank it. Especially with the google EMD update + the fact that the site probably won't have huge SEO efforts if they are used to being number 1 for all this time.

I say go for it

The key here is not about seo, it's especially the mouth to ear, it's going to be hard, you need some extremly original idea to make the buzz and make people talk about your site, aiming for simple advertising on local facebook fanpages isn't going to get you viral unless you have something unique to offer that your competitor doesn't.

Go with hostgator, they have unlimited HD and bandwidth, and speed is around 100MBps.

They charge around 8-20 a month.

therage said:

I think you got a ok niche, but what do you offer that would make people switch over? Your budget will be your enemy, along with your sales copy and advertising. So now that you got these two terms in thought make a list of benefits, not features, that people will get from switching over. A feature is "faster loading time" and a benefit is "Spend more time doing what you love". Stuff like that should have a big list, and then you can start seeing where you could come up with ads and sales copy relevant to the people you are servicing. As for hosting, you might want to look at a few dedicated servers for this, at least to start off with. Look for unmetered internet, big storage capacity, and decent specs so your site isn't always down. I run a few multimillion user websites and I have a cluster of 17 or so dedicated hosts, but my main concern was bandwidth and storage for the first part.

Click to expand...

Beven said:

If you're worried about the speed of your site growing too quickly then you are on the right track haha. Just because this main site has an exact match domain doesn't mean you can't out rank it. Especially with the google EMD update + the fact that the site probably won't have huge SEO efforts if they are used to being number 1 for all this time.

I say go for it

Click to expand...

Throm said:

The key here is not about seo, it's especially the mouth to ear, it's going to be hard, you need some extremly original idea to make the buzz and make people talk about your site, aiming for simple advertising on local facebook fanpages isn't going to get you viral unless you have something unique to offer that your competitor doesn't.

Click to expand...

royserpa said:

Go with hostgator, they have unlimited HD and bandwidth, and speed is around 100MBps.

They charge around 8-20 a month.

Click to expand...

Thanks, I'll try to get a lot new features for my website, and that's going to be one of the main concerns: being way better than the old website.

Beside the new and user-friendly design, OsClass comes with some functions that beats the competitor, like some more advanced search functions, a contact seller function, a search agent which will notify people when new ads in the category are posted, etc. Also I wont have the same limitations as the old site which has a cap on how many words you can put in your classified (which is WAY to low) and pictures can only be very small, so people have to crop/compress/scale their pictures in order to post them on the site.

I'll make a feature list like you talked about, and maybe even put it on the forntpage.

As for advertising I know SEO and Facebook is not going to make people switch, but it's going to help some people notice the website, and that's my goal, to raise awareness. As I said, it's a small island and rumours spread fast, so they'll hopefully tell their friends or family, if the new website is actually way better.

And that brings me back to:

Hosting. I need the site to have big storage capacity and run 100% smooth, otherwise I've already lost from the start. I might be geting a dedicated server for the project, but those are very expensive and will kill a lot of my budget for advertising within the first few months. Is there a "downgrade" from the dedicated server? Which is like 40 dollars and below? I already have hosting with hostgator, but do you think it'll be good enough for a website with potentially hundreds if not thousands of visitors a day? If I start to get serious traffic I could then switch to a dedicated. I've tried installing OsClass, and I don't think that it's running 100% smooth.

I would do a lot more off line promotion instead of just focusing online. Put up a flyer on the community notice board, at schools, at popular events etc. This type of site is meant to target those who are not as tech savy as others so you need to reach those types of people through off line promotion

Uppa839 said:

I would do a lot more off line promotion instead of just focusing online. Put up a flyer on the community notice board, at schools, at popular events etc. This type of site is meant to target those who are not as tech savy as others so you need to reach those types of people through off line promotion

Click to expand...

Great idea. You're right that the targets are not as tech savy as others, it's especially older people who uses the site. I'll definitely do that once the site gets up running. I have a lot of friends that would be interested in helping me with that.