Blog - indianClassifieds.com

One click to post and one click to search!

2007-01-06T06:30:00.000-08:00

We have updated all our pages over the weekend to make it easy for you to find and share information quickly. No login, username or password is required. Just one click is all it takes to post your listing and search for anything using keyword search, we guarantee you its fast, easy and simple!

We have now introduced the capability for you to provide feedback on individual listings, notify your friend about a specific listing, be able to contact our advertisers easily, along with an updated notification format when your receive replies to your listings.

We have updated all the content pages to reflect "city based" listings on the left and right side of the pages instead of the category based listings that we had earlier. For example you can easily click on one of the city based listings for e.g. Delhi classifieds to get all listings for Delhi. If you are looking for specific listings such as "rental" for Delhi - select "Delhi" from the pull down menu and search for rentals from any of the pages.

We hope you find this useful.

Year in review - 2006

2006-12-16T05:50:00.000-08:00

2006 was a good year for us with more users using our classifieds listing service than any of the previous years. We also went live with 6 new international sites, Australia, China, New Zealand, South Africa and UK, this year. More than 50% of the listings received were for Indian real estate property listings - which includes a combination of rental, paying guest accommodation listings, residential land, and commercial land listings. Listings from Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Mumbai topped again this year compared to other cities in India.

We also released lots of new features to enhance the user experience while keeping our site open viz. without requiring logins or registrations to post, view listings at our site.

We now offer 24 hour guaranteed sticky listing in our homepage for all premium ads for maximum visibility. Some of the key features introduced this year includes the ability to manage (edit/delete) your listing without registration, ability to post mobile classifieds from wap capable mobile phones to get your listing published, hourly delivery of our site content through RSS feeds across all categories and cities, and some key backend system management capabilities to weed out spam.

Approximately 25% of the listings that we receive are spam but the good news is it does not make it through our spam management system - though it consumes lots of our time trying to figure out ways to weed them out.

We are continually working to expand our service offerings with new features for you to list and connect with other users quickly and easily. Watch out for more new features coming out in the first quarter of 2007 and as always please keep those new feature requests coming. We look at each and everyone one of them very closely and include them in future releases should we determine that it will be of use to a larger audience. We hope you find our service useful and we wish you happy holidays and the very best for 2007.

The Team
indianClassifieds.com

New feature - Listing rating system

2006-12-09T06:49:00.000-08:00

We are in the final stages of testing a "listing rating system". For every listing that is posted at indianClassifieds.com, users can rate and review each of the listings. This feature can be used both for new listings as well as previously posted listings. This will enable us to not only identify good/bad listings but will also enable us to dynamically assign appropriate ranking and exposure to each of those listings.

We are expecting this new rating system to be fully tested and should be online in the next few weeks. Happy holidays!

Premium classifieds - new rates for 2007

2006-11-18T06:14:00.000-08:00

We will be rolling-out a simplified program with additional features for the premium classified listings beginning of 2007. Currently, we offer six premium classifieds options for you to choose from to get more exposure for your classifieds listing. We also offer a guaranteed 24 hour priority homepage placement for any premium classifieds listings.

The cost for a premium listing today starts from $1.00 to $6.00 for 30 days depending upon the premium options you choose for your listings. Our STATS consistently show that Premium Classifieds receive more clicks than free classisfieds. Stay tuned.. and we hope you will find our new program very useful.

The basic listing service for our classifieds will always be free.

Monthly stats for Nov. published now

2006-12-02T05:47:00.000-08:00

Each month we publish the top 10 most viewed ad listings from our actual web logs. We publish the following monthly:

most viewed individual ad listings,
most popular categories and
the most widely searched region at our site.

We have published the stats for November and you can see them all here.

Why are my listings not showing up - Part III

2006-11-25T05:07:00.000-08:00

When a new listing is posted we send a confirmation email with instructions to activate your listing. The faster you activate the listing the more likely it is to appear on our homepage. This is applicable to all listings irrespective of free or paid listings. In case of paid premium listings we guarantee that your listing will be on the homepage for atleast 24 hours. As always please keep your questions coming.

Ad campaign - live

2006-10-10T19:23:00.000-07:00

Here is one of the creatives for our new ad campaign that was released to our partner networks.

Mobile classifieds - posting your ads

2006-11-04T05:45:00.000-08:00

As a follow on to the recent release of our mobile classifieds (for india classifieds), we are introducing today the classifieds posting capability right from your mobile. You can reach millions - it's fast, easy, and free!

Using any WAP capable (net browsable) mobile phone, you can post your classified listings in less than 60 seconds from anywhere in the world to reach millions of internet users without having to touch a computer. No registration, login, password is needed.

Test it out, from your mobile just visit http://indianClassifieds.com/m (or http://in.ohho.com/m). Your classifieds listing will be syndicated in various formats such as RSS, flash, mobile, web, etc to reach a wider audience.

Alternate search interface

2006-11-11T05:52:00.000-08:00

We have had some requests recently to provide an alternate interface to do quick searches at our site, to search our classifieds quickly. We thought about it and well here it is, the search function is based on *keywords* and it is super fast. This keyword search page is integrated into our mainsite along with other classified listings.

You should be able to find any information from our site pretty quick, all it takes is 1 click. Select the city from the pull down menu and enter a keyword, for e.g. rentals, real estate, click on go and you will be presented with the 10 most recent listings at our site for that specific search and obviously you can scroll through other pages..

To access this page, please either click on the image or visit http://indianclassifieds.com/q.

3 easy steps to post your classifieds

2006-11-01T05:33:00.000-08:00

Listing your classifieds at indianClassifieds.com is easy. Just follow these easy steps:

Post your classifieds (no registration required!)
Activate your classifieds
Reach millions

Your classifieds listing will appear on our homepage and will be delivered in various formats viz, via the Web, via Mobile, via RSS. Try it now!

Mobile Classifieds - How to view it?

2006-10-21T04:37:00.000-07:00

As discussed in our previous blog, you could view the mobile indian classifieds from any WAP capable mobile, mobile phones that are capable of surfing the web, from any provider (aircel, airtel, bsnl, hutch, etc). The classifieds are updated every hour.

By using your WAP capable mobile phone go to http://in.ohho.com/m (easy to type) or http://indianClassifieds.com/m to view the classifieds listing for the following cities for automobile, jobs, matrimony, real estate and rentals:

Bangalore
Chennai
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kolkata
Mumbai
Pune
Trivandrum

If you do not see our page on your mobile, check with your wirless service provider to see if you have WAP enabled as a service for your mobile. We do not charge you for this service but your provider may charge you for the bandwidth to access our mobile listings.

Introducing Mobile Classifieds - Beta

2006-10-15T07:27:00.000-07:00

Today we have released the beta version of mobile indian classifieds. We will be covering 8 cities for automobile classifieds, jobs classifieds, matrimony classifieds, real estate and rental classfieds. The cities covered for mobile classifieds include Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune and Trivandrum. We will be expanding the coverage to more cities with additional catgeories shortly.

Accessing the mobile classifieds is very simple. All you need is a WAP capable mobile phone that can access web pages. You can access the mobile classifieds by going to http://indianClassifieds.com/m or using our alias http://in.ohho.com/m which is easier to type on your mobile.

We are also working on introducing key search features that will enable you to get the information that you are looking for quickly with additional capabilities.

Stay tuned!

Why are my listings not showing up - Part II

2006-10-07T06:00:00.000-07:00

We get a lots of questions on this and here is a brief explanation. All the listings posted should confirm to our editorial guide lines. When a listing is posted you will be sent a confirmation email immediately with links to manage your listing - activate, edit, or delete listing. Please save this email as it is the only way you can manage your listing.

Your listing needs to be activated from that confirmation email before it can appear in our homepage. The longer you wait to activate the less likely it will be for your listing to appear on our homepage as we publish them on a First In First Out (FIFO) basis. That's one good reason to activate your listing right away.

Also if you think you have not received a confirmation email from us right after you post your listing, you might want to check your email setup to make sure it is not pushed into either a delete or a spam folder.

When you edit a listing it will be offline temporarily before it will be back online again.

The basics - Posting/Editing/Deleting your listings

2006-09-16T10:55:00.000-07:00

Ok.. it's simple. You click on "Post" to post your listing from anywhere in indianClassifieds.com and the listing will appear on our homepage. The order of the listings displayed will be First In First Out (FIFO) in our homepage.

No registration, username or password is necessary to post or view the listings.

When you post the listings, the content will get into a buffer, checked against few metrics (spams, in-appropriate listings, editorial, etc) and gets released into our homepage. There might be a delay between the time you post and when the listing appears on the homepage.

Here are few key items to consider:

Post your listings with concise title, clear description and in the right category
Complete well written listings will at times have higher listing ranking compared to other listings, plus it will be syndicated via RSS, Mobile, etc
Listings with EXCESSIVE capitalization will be ignored
Repeat listings for the same items and MLM listings will be ignored

We will be introducing a new feature in the coming weeks for you to manage your own content in your listing. When you post a listing you will get a confirmation email which you can use it to Publish, Edit, Delete your listing. We will officially make an announcement here when it is available.

Next week we will cover the basics on our Premium listings
Week after that we will cover indian Classifieds for your Mobile^new!

New version (IC 3.0) of the classifieds platform released!

2006-10-01T05:42:00.000-07:00

Today we released a new version of classifieds platform (IC 3.0) with some key features. This platform will enable us to offer key features in the coming months such as mobile ad delivery, video ads, etc.

You now have the ability to activate/edit/delete listing from the confirmation email that we send after you post your listing. You have to activate your listing from the confirmation email before your listing will appear on our site. Also, whenever you edit your listing it will be offline temporarily and after system validation checks the listing will be back online. From the confirmation email you can delete your listing whenever you want.

We also have some additional features enabled in the backend to help us with system house keeping. Please do let us know if you have any comments or if you bump into any technical issues (bug!).

How to gain better exposure to my listings?

2006-09-24T06:31:00.000-07:00

Well, the answer is Premium listings. Premium listings are a great way to showcase your listing to hundreds of thousands of customers visiting our site. Ofcourse it does cost a little money (starting at $1, see rate card below), fraction of what you would typically spend on a newspaper listings or other indian classifieds sites that charge an arm and a leg.

All premium listings are run for 30 days with a guaranteed priority "sticky" listing in our homepage for 24 hours.

Rate card for premium listings:

1) Premium listings with Bold, Border and Highlight - $1
The adtype, item title and location are highlighted.

2) Picture - $2
In addition to the above you can include a picture with your listing.

3) Picture slide show - $3
You can add upto 5 pictures and we will have them in a slide show format.

4) Homepage featured (Basic) - $4
This gives you the ultimate exposure. Under the "Featured Classifieds" section of the homepage your listing will be rotated at the top and botton of the homepage and in all search pages.

5) Homepage featured (with picture) - $5
In addition to the above you can include a picture.

6) Homepage featured (with picture slide show) - $6
This option includes homepage featured listing with picture slide show.

Our stats consistently show that premium listings receive more response compared to the free listings. It's no surprise 50% of our total listings are "Real Estate" listings. Folks, you can't get a better deal than this, give it a try.

How to post a premium listing?

It's very simple. Click on "Post" to list and follow the instructions to make payment, upload any pictures and you are done.

For additional information click on "Premium".

Why are my listings not showing up?

2006-09-26T18:53:00.000-07:00

One of our main objectives is to offer complete and relevant listings to enhance our user experience. When a user is looking for something specific, say "real estate in Mumbai", our search results for those listings should be relevant without any spam, repeat or incomplete listings.

To accomplish that we have a list ranking system in place that weeds out bad listings with a score set below a certain threshold. A listing could also be rejected if it is incomplete, inappropriate, repeat listings (within a specific time period), MLM listings, get rich quick schemes, listings for ad clicking services, etc. The listing that you post should confirm to our "editorial guidelines".

When you post your listing, please make sure it is complete with clear title, adequate description and it's in the right category with your correct email address (we validate the email!).

The beginning - first innings

2006-09-09T12:04:00.000-07:00

A little history.

We started IC (our acronym for "indian Classifieds") in late 2001 to dabble with Java and ASP. The idea was to learn these languages and the first application that we created was a simple classifieds service that is easy to use. We ran the entire site with just three key files - post, index, and search.

We officially launched the site in early 2002 with some basic features to list classifieds. Soon we realized we needed a decent domain name for our site. All the good one's were already taken (duh!) and when we saw indianClassifieds.net was available we picked it up for around $9.

We also bought the indianClassifieds.com domain but we had to pay a few grand. Looking at the web analytics for organic searches today buying the indianClassifieds.com domain name seems like a good investment.

We have added number of features over the past year based on user feedback. We have a number of new exiting features in our plan of record that is actively being worked on and we will be releasing them shortly. We are in the process of testing several key features, more on those in the coming weeks. Our search engine is based on keyword search - though no Google, it works very well, check it out.

We will be using this blog to communicate and to get feedback on new features, marketing ideas, etc. We have lots of fun doing this and putting our creative energy to work.

Until next week, good bye!

New ad campaign - what do you think?

2006-09-18T18:28:00.000-07:00

Our new ad campaign is set to start by the end of next month. We are considering the following image ads for our new ad campaign across our partner sites. The idea is to keep the ad clean, simple and to the point! Just like our site. :)

The new ad campaign (above) will be replacing our current advertsing campaign (below) that we have been running for the past 6 months...

Please let us know your thoughts.. good, bad, any fresh ideas!