bla.st : 11 tips for growing large scale websites from nothing

UPDATE: the sites mentioned below have improved

Today I stumbled across a new site called jobfavors.com and thought it was a good example of the problems faced when starting a large scope, directory style site.

It's a couple of months old, and it has hardly any content, and very few visitors. Unfortunately visitors won't come without content, and people won't bother advertising on it without any visitors! It's a classic catch 22 style problem that almost all new directory sites face.

The other little problem is the scope of the site, it is divided into 123 "metro areas", and has 36 categories, which means there are over 4400 possible pages! Even if there were a 100 ads on the site, most pages would still look completely empty.

Here are 11 tips and ideas that could help kick things off:

Get Specific Narrow your categories down initially and plan to add more as the site grows.
Get Local Target your town, city, or country first before trying to tackle the world.
OR get global Target content that is global, like software or websites
Only show categories that have things in them Listing 100 categories that have nothing in them is pretty useless for visitors.
Show how many items in each category Make it obvious how much content is in each category or section
Put actual content on the front page If you only have 10 items in your site, put them all on the front page. Once it fills up a bit, show new items on the front page. This shows people are using the site, and makes it more obvious what the site is about.
You have to get it started Make ads for people and offer to do stuff for free - anything to get that front page looking busy and kick things off. People won't understand the idea until it is already working.
Get initial content from somewhere else This isn't always possible and can be expensive, but might make things easier.
Target advertisers first There's no point spending time and money attracting general users to an empty site.
Give advertisers a reason to try your site This is tricky when you don't have any visitors :) Initially you are selling the potential of the site. Be careful not to over promise and under deliver.
Make it free It's hard enough attracting advertisers to use a free site let alone one that costs money.
Bonus tip: Plan to Scale There is heaps of info online about how to scale your site. Read up before starting your project

Many of those ideas are how we started bla.st, although it's got a long way to go. Initially we put on lots of cards for everyone we knew. We made free cards for companies and targeted specific categories. The site only shows most popular categories on the front page, we don't show any empty categories, and it's obvious how many cards in each category. Although bla.st is divided into countries, we targeted lots of global products, like mac software so all the countries have content. The front page of each country is full.

Some rather successful sites:
trademe.co.nz - sold recently for $700 million NZDD, see how they grew at archive.org
Craigslist - also read how they started
finda.co.nz - Good example of showing how many items in each section and category

Some sites that could improve:
workboot.co.nz - a New Zealand advertising directory
jobfavors.com - Couldn't find a single listing

Hopefully these ideas are useful to people, get in touch or leave comments at dzone.

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11 tips for growing large scale websites from nothing