This blog post serves two fold objective:

a) To get me back on track on blogging regularly (lets say its a new financial year resolution)

b) Try to answer a question that some of you may have. Essentially the post below is my answer to a Question asked on Linked In– which happened to get rated as the ‘Best Answer’. I share this as it is a low hanging fruit for me to re-start posting.

Here goes…

-Most new ‘data organization’ services start off by gathering data on their own and adding value by organizing the same. This is critical to overcome the chicken and egg scenario faced by the entrepreneurs who start such services (including classifieds): “Need content to attract traffic. Need traffic to attract advertisers, user generated content and Paid listers/advertisers.”
– Businesses are happy to let you post data on your site as long as you are promoting them and publishing the data in the standard formats that would not go against the said business in any way.

– Once you reach a critical mass in content organic traffic should reach a decent level. As the value for the end user keeps on increasing, the net usage of the site increases . This makes the site attractive first to other who can list and later to those who can sponsor.

– Must admit that the initial push is from the host to collate and organise data and add value for the user (while simultaneously promoting it to build outreach). From what I hear this is a resource intensive process if the site has a many categories/sections.

I’d like to hear your views on this one, especially if you’ve run/are running a classified website.