Classifieds!

Nobody is coming to my store.

Well, that's not exactly true ... there are a few passersby who seem to drop in. One of my pals, Emerist Begonia, runs a successful store selling articles for your SL home, so I asked her what to do. She suggested I post a classified ad - and she paid "more" to make it appear higher on the list. More means paying more than the default L$50.

Here's what I learned of how classifieds really work:

• You create a classified advert and submit it
• You are asked to specify how much to pay - the default being L$50
• You are cheap and take the L$50 default
• A user seeking your products types in some keywords in an attempt to find them
• ALL classifieds containing those keywords (actually, ANY of them) are found in Linden Lab's classified database
• The found ads are sorted - guess how? By the amount paid by the advertiser (that's you, remember?)
• The highest paying ads are shown first
• The user, impatient and desperate to find what ever they are looking for, selects a few ads FROM THE FIRST PAGE SHOWN
• The user inevitably fulfills their needs from the first page of search hits
• Meanwhile, your measly L$50 advert is positioned on page 26... AND IS NEVER SEEN

What's the lesson here?

• Pay an amount sufficient to get your ad onto the first page of listings, or for more popular keywords, at least the second page
• Pick good keywords! (More on this in a future post)

Wait a minute! How does one know the correct amount to pay? This is pretty easy... just do this:

• Search for the keywords you are focusing on
• Examine the results page and see where the price is at the page end
• Add a little bit to the page end price to "insert" your classified just before the end of the page
• If the prices are close, add a bit more to ensure you stay on the first page

Once I did this, visitors started arriving. Not lots, but some - and they were buying items. It's a start.