what should I change in my new website

Neiras

Hi, I launched this new website AutoAds.ie, its free classifieds ads website only about Auto ads.

My problem is that its very hard for me to get people to place ads on the website, even its free to post, what yous think i should do ?

App for smart phone is going to be launched after 2 weeks, but im still thinking that will not help...

any suggestions are welcome, let me know what you think

smash

Can I ask what the motivation behind this was? There are classified ad sites that launch and fail at a rate of knots. Without major funding you can't compete with carzone and donedeal. Buy and sell failed, beepbeep.ie failed, adverts isn't much use either.

So what's your USP?

Neiras

thanks for reply

Well im not looking to make big amount of money out of this website as its free to post, it more like hobby. What im trying to do is only earn from advertising google ads, and for Featured Ads. Website it self does not cost me much to keep, and i dont have any people working for me, as i do everything my self, only what cost me now is smart phone app.

my unique selling point?

well I think this website stands out from other because has good name (AutoAds.ie) other good thing that category's are only about (Auto-Motor) type... Not as other websites has cars, vans only like (carzone) and (donedeal) have all type of ads.

Plus i will have smart phone app same as popular websites, but it will always be free to post

mrawkward

You are trying to serve a market that is already oversupplied... look at all the deadwood Smash pointed out. The better sites have a huge number of cars with both private and trade advertisers.. why would any buyer bother with yours? I think that train has long left the station....

Neiras

well i launched this website like a month ago so i cant have all the ads here, but in one month i have over 1700 likes on the facebook page and in the group i have 1500 people, and any ads on my website gets around 200 views per day, so i find this working well, just problem is that hard to get people to post as there many views but not many ads...

Another thing i came here not for judgment, came here to ask for ideas on how should i advertise, what should i change in the website and so on

nuckeythompson

Simple , invest in advertising. Invest it wisely.
First port of call is with garages.
With these type of sites you need a base load to get you rolling. Don't pay much attention to the above negatives.
You could target existing users on your competitors sites.
Best of luck

Oink

I don't have any experience in that area, but if I was an advertiser, I would want to know what I'm getting for my money.

It looks like you currently have less than 30 ads on the site. As advised above maybe you should go look for potential advertisers, but you will need some good arguments as to why they should bother.

If you don't have many ads, maybe you can show you get enough traffic to be of interest to them.

Best of luck!

-EDIT
Upon re-reading your post it looks like I misread you issue, so not sure if my post is of any use. Good luck anyway.

StupidLikeAFox

Neiras wrote: »

well i launched this website like a month ago so i cant have all the ads here, but in one month i have over 1700 likes on the facebook page and in the group i have 1500 people, and any ads on my website gets around 200 views per day, so i find this working well, just problem is that hard to get people to post as there many views but not many ads...

Another thing i came here not for judgment, came here to ask for ideas on how should i advertise, what should i change in the website and so on

Have a look at this thread: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=99187497

The biggest problem with marketplace websites will always be building an audience. If I am a motor trader, why would I invest my time in uploading my stock to this website? Sure, its free, but if you are not getting any viewers its a waste of my time. If I am a seller, and I am looking for a a car, I know that donedeal will probably have the largest selection of private sellers and carzone will prob have the largest selection of dealers, what will convince me to change to AutoAds.ie?

Number 1, i think you are going to have to work very hard to convince motor dealers that it is worth their while advertising on your site. The unique things about your site (the catchy name and more focused categories) aren't really big problems for the users of these sites, so it will take a bit more than that to get people to change their habits

mrawkward

I am not being negative, just realistic. These are issues that should be researched and teased out in the process of evaluating the opportunity and creating your business plan, not post launch.
Unless you have a significant six figure sum to spend on advertising and a goodly number of bodies to do the deals/marketing etc you are facing an uphill unrewarding battle. Look at the scale of your competition and their resources.

smash

nuckeythompson wrote: »

Simple , invest in advertising. Invest it wisely.
First port of call is with garages.
With these type of sites you need a base load to get you rolling. Don't pay much attention to the above negatives.
You could target existing users on your competitors sites.
Best of luck

I don't think you're aware of the services that garages use which are offered by the websites I mentioned previously. There's no way they'd manually enter stock on a site like this when they can bulk upload and edit stock to distribution service which also deals with lead management and trade sales.

gargargar

Could you ring garages and offer to upload their stock for free? Not a scalable solution but could get you over an initial hump of having no ads.

In general, I would take issue with the idea that your domain is good. autoads is what they are, but not what people search for. When searching for cars I might put in 'second hand cars sale' not really use the words auto (more of a US term?) or ads really.

Also your site wouldn't load in my firefox browser, it was just spinning it's wheels. Chrome loaded fine.

Trojan

AutoAds.ie:

1. Branding is ok, could be better
2. Homepage banner text is hard to read (needs more contrast - darken the image)
3. You are not using the language of the marketplace:
   • "Search and place auto ads easily with us" - "Buy and sell cars"
   • "Autoads.ie get your deal today" - "Find your new car today"
   • "Advertisement Title" - "???" ("Search"?)
   • "Categories & Makes" - "Make"
   • "Listing" - "Search for a car"
   • "Publish new" - "Advertise your car FREE"
4. All the business issues mentioned by others above. Being free and having an ok domain isn't good enough to get traction.

mrawkward

Interesting that OP ignores issues raised in post #9, I am out of this one as I hate to witness any car crash.

Ps try clinicing this over on the motors section here on boards.ie and see the responses!

Graham

Neiras wrote: »

any suggestions are welcome, let me know what you think

It's glacially slow.
Bland looking.
Has no adverts to attract buyers
Has no eyeballs to attract sellers
Offers nothing that donedeal/adverts don't already offer.
It's looking for my location information? WTF!

Ask yourself why would anyone go to the trouble of advertising on your site assuming they accidentally find it. Being free is nowhere enough of a reason (as you're discovering).

You've 2 main paths you can try from here:

1) offer something the other sites don't
2) find a 6 figure advertising budget

Cianos

Fair play for getting this off the ground yourself, for a one man show operation it looks like you've put in a good bit of effort which is always commendable.

To echo the responses here, unfortunately I think you might have chosen the wrong area to put your efforts in to.

This is not a 'build it and they will come' type of service, you have the classic chicken and egg problem where you need buyers to get sellers and sellers to get buyers.

Add to this the fact that it's already a saturated marketplace with bigger companies putting a lot of resources into advertising and driving people to their website.

So to answer your question of how to get activity on the site, you're going to find it very difficult indeed, and likely impossible without a big marketing budget, and if you want this to become anything more than a hobby it might be best to take the experience you've gained with this project and take on another, but this time look at the business prospects very closely to determine where you should apply your efforts and how best to utilise the resources you have to hand.

CelticRambler

All the negatives highlighted by Trojan. For this kind of search, I'll always use a desktop/laptop, and straightaway, the design of this site puts me off.
- wants to know my location - why??? A pop-up box that immediately annoys me and draws my attention away from your site;
- two clicks to get rid of that box and then ... WTF? three quarters of the visible page taken up with a picture of some bloke holding a key. I know what a key looks like, I know that cars used to use them in the olden days :rolleyes: why do I need to see that image? Now annoyed twice in the first five seconds.
- "Search and place auto ads easily with us" ... duh: it's an ad site for cars, of course you're going to be able to search and place ads. Wasting screen space shouting what I already know at me (now three times annoyed); and whether it easy or not is for me to decide in a minute (if I stick around that long)
- "Autoads.ie get your deal today" Autoads are getting my deal? Doesn't make sense, starting to think this is a scam site ...
- "Featured ads" - good job you told me, because I can't see any featured ad, it's lost off the bottom of the screen; and if I could see it, I don't need to be told that it's "featured", it should just be featured.
- and now I'm out of visible page, have been annoyed several times, can't see any vehicles for sale; your five seconds are up, I'm moving on to another site ...

Below the fold, you've got dozens of categories, so I clicked on one that interests me (campers) - nothing there. That's a "feck off" moment! Don't lead me to believe that you've got stock when you don't. :mad:
(On this point, you don't need a six-figure marketing budget, you need to get out and find at least one vehicle of each type for sale and get it listed)
OK, so let's try mobile catering - no quick link, have to go back to the previous page. More irritation

Searching: categories and makes lumped together - why? Too much scrolling, way too much scrolling. Now I'm looking for "motorhomes" - no entry in the list, I've forgotten that you've used the term "campers". You need both ...

"Latest Ads" - right down the bottom of the page! :eek: So I go to the trouble of creating an ad and uploading some photos, and no-one will see them. Another "feck off" moment.

Overall, for someone like me who knows how to look for stuff, there's way too much junk onscreen, too much white space, too much duplication ... and just not enough content presented in a way that I can see it.

If you built the site yourself, you need to start again; and if you got someone to do it for you, ask for your money back. :pac:

rainbow_beard

Hi Neiras,

Despite some of the negativity round here I think the site looks pretty good. Sure there are a few minor visual things which could do with improving but for a first iteration of your product I think you've done a really good job.

My 2 cents:

• Getting the user's location could be useful for showing them cars in their area but since you have so few right now people will just get annoyed so definitely remove it.
• I would also change the search area to 'make' & 'model'. If you could do an autocomplete for both these input boxes you'd be doing better than most of the other auto sites which typically use scroll-able selects.
• The suggestion to offer to upload garage's sales for them for free is a good one. While it is labour intensive you could easily outsource this work using a platform like amazon's Mechanical Turk for relatively little money.
• Building on this I would talk to the garages and find out what their major frustrations are with your competitors. I would be shocked if they didn't have usability issues which you (being small and nimble and without legacy systems holding you back) could help alleviate
• If you could come up with a unique feature which sets your site apart from competitors it would really help. Maybe cater to car enthusiasts by allowing them upload more high quality images than competitors or support video uploading.
• Look at car sales sites from all over the world and see if you can find useful features which aren't yet provided by your competitors.
• Use social media to attract users, I'm sure there are groups for Irish car enthusiasts on the facebook which you can join and post listings to. If there aren't maybe you can start one.

I wouldn't bother with ads yet either, concentrate on building a critical mass of buyers & sellers and worry about generating revenue later. If you don't start getting more listings don't worry too much about it, I'm sure you've learned a tonne with what you've done so far and it will look fantastic on your resume