Classified Guru - An Update

5 July 2008

I had the opportunity to meet a friend of mine who introduced to me a nice website for Indian community called classified guru.

Classified Guru is a three year old website that caters to the need of the Indian Community. The needs of the Indian Community is specific in some sense. As an example, suppose some one wants to buy a used Cricket bat. It will be difficult, though not impossible, to look for it in general website. The role of the Classified Guru comes into play here. Also think of buying and selling Indian DVDs, Indian groceries and crockeries.

Registered users of Classified Guru has following benefits

1. You can send Free SMS

2. You can Send gifts to your relatives in India.

3. Watch Bollyywood Videos

4. Listen your favorite Hindi MP3.

Classified Guru is modeled on the pattern of the legendry craigslist website, but is however, tuned to the needs specifically - to the Indian Community. There is however, nothing that prevents it from being catering to the needs of the general mass.

Currently the website has a Page Rank of 1 and an Alexa Ranking of over 10,00,000. This is far below the capabilities that it promises. As one of the stakeholder, I am going to implemment the following to promote this website. We will have the opportunity to review the progress we made in the next few months. Here is the target that I have set out for Sept 1, 2008.

1. A page rank of 3 or better.

2. An Alexa ranking of 100,000 or better.

3. A 50% increase in the user base.

4. A 100% increase in the number of user.



Here are the steps being planned

1. Post the signature links in popular forums. It is planned to place links in at least 10 forums, with 100 posts in each forum.

2. We plan to get 10 inbound links with page rank 2 and at least 5 in bound links of page rank 3.

3. Article writing - At least 50 articles written about classified guru in blogger.com and wordpress.com4. Add a Forum for the website that will keep the persons joined.

If the above process seems to work we can take it next height using

1. Press Release - expense to the tune of $150.

2. Consult Indian groceries and provide $2 coupan off to anyone who registers, posts an ad and provides a valid usename. Budget $100 max for each groceries store.

Some concerns

1. There seems that prevents advertisers from spamming. All outgoing links are do follow.

2. By the nature of the website, it has to have a lot of outgoing links in each page. It will not help in getting higher pagerank in short term. Reducing the number of the links will detstroy the basic structure of the website,

3. It will be challenging to integrate Forum with the existing username password.