The speculative Dot-Com Bubble of the late 1990′s was caused mainly because investors tried to trick companies too quickly to public funding.
Even if companies gain revenue from 100 people, they keep envisioning ideas that will benefit a 1000 people from it.
With this perspective, wouldn’t it be awesome to have a WordPress based social networking site which allows users to display classifieds with very little investment in programming and removing the hassles of common traditional way of posting classifieds?
To enhance this website, the following WordPress Plugins can be used-
BuddyPress:
Popularly known as social networking in a box, BuddyPress is a social community builder creating communities and has people around the world getting social. This plugin will enable the user to easily create and grown his profile, groups, activity streams and easily build a community for his company, school, sports team or any other niche community.
BbPress:
Although the popularity of social networking these days has no limits, Online forums still continue to remain a popular part of the internet. With the bbPress plugin you can create a discussion forum and integrate it into rest of your website. You can also manage users taking part in your discussion forums i.e. if you don’t want a particular user to take part in the discussion or want some piece of information to be hidden from some users you can change the status of the forum (Public/Private) accordingly.
Events Manager:
The Events Manager Plugin allows people to register for events and pay for them. This plugin also enables the website owner to add/modify/delete events right from the dashboard!
WP Classified:
General use of this plugin is adding classified page to your blog. This enables site visitors to create their own classified ads and also gives them an option to navigate through the list of classified ad categories.
s2Member Framework:
It is basically a membership plugin with excellent member management capabilities supporting an unlimited number of membership levels. These membership levels allow you to designate parts of your site that different member levels can enter, for example if I’m only a silver member on your site then I can’t access gold member stuff and so on. Moreover it also allows you to protect download links using it’s own protected url with in the plugin folders, as well as specifying a limit on the downloads for each member. Basically you could put a file on and only allow all members to download the file once. If someone tries to download the file again there taken to a restricted page which you can create in WordPress. Additionally, s2Member also allows you to customize the registration form in many ways and supports payment processing features too!
WP SEO:
The WP SEO helps you optimize your website’s posts and pages for Google and the other search engines in a better way! This plugin in cooperates everything from snippet preview and page analysis functionality to XML sitemaps with a lot optimization options! The snippet preview will enable you to see what your page and post will look like in the search results. The page analysis features checks for images in your post with an alt tag, length of your post, meta description within your post etc. The XML Sitemap mainly aids the search engine crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve information more effectively.
BackupBuddy:
BackupBuddy is an all-in-one solution for backups, restoration, and migration. Whether you’re an end user or a developer, this plug-in is sure to bring you peace of mind and added safety in the event of data loss. A great feature of this plug-in is the ability to restore the site to a new domain. What would be a huge project by any other means, the plug-in makes an automated, accurate and stress-free task!
Now if we want to make money out of all this, an additional feature of Subscriptions would be a must here !
Thus, with a Free Plan the following Paid Plans can be added
Basic
10 classifieds postings a month
5 event listings a month
2 featured events
10 messages to other users/ month
50 email notifications of activity
Subscribe
Premium
25 classifieds postings a month
10 event listings a month
4 featured events
30 messages to other users/ month
100 email notifications of activity
Subscribe
Pro
40 classifieds postings a month
20 event listings a month
8 featured events
50 messages to other users/ month
200 email notifications of activity
Subscribe
Featured
100 classifieds postings a month
100 event listings a month
100 featured events
100 messages to users a month
100 email notifications of activity
Subscribe
With these Plugins installed on the WordPress powered website; the following customization would be made:
1. The dashboard provides the admin with a ‘user’ menu from from where he can view the list of all Free Users. Only when the admin checks in the checkbox of a particular user, can the user profile be approved! This functionality is extremely important from the security aspect.
2. The admin might want to limit the number of posts and events being published per month for better content or some security reason wherein the admin might want only a specific category of users to add posts/events. So in order to limit the classified posting and event listings, the ‘Bainternet Posts Creation Limits’ plugin can be used. This plugin puts a limit on the number of posts/pages/custom post types each user can create on your site.
3. Suppose you like a particular event and you want the registered users to check out those events; You can make that particular event featured thus enabling the most trending and popular events or posts to be displayed at the top of the page! A meta box can be added on events creation/editing page to enable the users to make an event featured even! Additionally a limit can also be set on the number of featured events from the settings page!
4. Using BuddyPress, Members can message people on their friends list as well as forward and reply to received messages.Each Member will have his own inbox and also a screen where he can compose a message. Members will be notified on receiving a new message by a message count in their message tab.
5. There might be a possibility when the admin might want to limit the number of private messages a user can send in other to avoid traffic jam in the website. This can be achieved using the various hooks and plugins of BuddyPress. The plugin internally sets a limit, in the settings page, on the number of messages to be sent. So each time the user sends a message, that message is filtered. If the user exceeds the message limit set by BuddyPress, then that message is not sent. Incase if proper hooks and filters are not available we will need to make changes to the core of Buddypress to achieve the desired functionality.
6. In order for the users to receive email notifications of group activity, weekly or daily digests are available. Each user can choose how they want to subscribe to their groups. This can be achieved by using BuddyPress Group Email Subscription that notifies members of a group when other members post content. The notification is done by email, and is totally configurable.
Companies these days don’t just focus on web portals, advertising and websites to earn money but move in this direction with a concrete idea. Thus opting for a classifieds website is not only a valuable marketing strategy but also a powerful way to reach thousands of potential customers and generate incredible profit! With the customization stated above, you would be able to launch a full fledged revenue generating classifieds website.
To know more about such customizations feel free toContact Us
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