surfin2u - 11:14 pm on Aug 13, 2004 (gmt 0)

Louis, thanks for the idea. I began by giving clients the option to build their own listing. Everyone gets a full-page, whether they're a freebie or paying. My initial strategy was that the listing were free, but you paid for better placement/display on category pages, and you could buy banner ads. Everything was done with templates of my own construction.

It was a real mess. People would choose a long list of categories that they didn't belong in, and then I'd was faced with taking them away...an unpleasant task. Also, the language skills of many out there are, well, ...lacking (to put it kindly). Correcting a client's bad grammar can also be a ticklish task.

I have stopped allowing people to build their own listings. I have also stopped giving away free listings. So options for new free listings are not something that I would want to pursue at this point. I no longer need to give away freebies, now that I've achieved a decent level of success and a large number of listings.

My clients are very busy and very non-technical. They want to pay and go away. They like to leave it all to me. It took me a while to figure that out, but it's been an important lesson for me. I built some cool functionality for them to use that I've since discarded.