The site itself is fine. It’s doing the same things in the same way as bendunne.com or donedeal.ie. It’s all about cost and return. People are reluctant to spend time & money posting an ad if not enough people are going to see it. I can spend €3 with Donedeal.ie and get on a site with 110m pageviews per month (see http://www.irelandmetrix.ie/topsites.html) or spend €1 to get on sellmix.com which does 1/5500 the traffic. That makes it 1833 times more expensive in like for like terms to advertise on sellmix.com.

If you want to get this type of site off the ground you need to shrink this multiplier, by either reducing the cost or increasing the volume of the traffic. Even reducing the cost can only go so far, because the seller still needs to take the time to write the ad.

When it comes to building volume, unless you have a USP you can either do it slow and cheap or throw money at it to build traffic fast. I have no concrete numbers but my gut feeling is that donedeal.ie aren’t relying on search engines for a huge amount of their traffic. The valuable visitors are those that visit regularly and/or subscribe to the newsletter/RSS feed. These visitors are gained the old fashioned way, through advertising (expensive) and word of mouth (slow).

Given what I’ve seen with sellmix.com and getabuilder.ie, I think the only way to compete is to be disruptive. Copying the market leaders isn’t good enough. Ben Dunne tried that and threw a ton of money at it and he’s only turning over €100 a day. Sorry, but that’s the way I see it.

Gary

I would also like some feedback on my site http:// http://www.sellmix.com ,which is basically a site offering free advertisement for business and a place to sell or buy goods.
I am in the process of introducing a trade section (www.trade.sellmix.com open to all sections of business large and small. I have 20,000 page hits so far this month double last months total for the whole month.
I am a one man band and have secured a top 10 google spot re. buy & sell Ireland enquiries but still finding it difficult getting people to post their adverts.
Any advice? limited budget to work with here..

Regards,

Mairead.

Tenderme.ie was a bust because tradesmen were having to pay to submit each bid without a guarantee (or even a good chance) of the resulting business. this structure is very like madbid.com, where you pay a fee before you make a bid. What you don’t realise to start with is the site are making a ton of money out of all the bidders, not just the winning one. It’s more of a lottery than an auction.

A more logical way to operate would be for the winning tradesman to pay a fee (possibly a small percentage of the contract value), on completion of the work. Obviously this would require a bit more of a formal structure, but it’s fair on all concerned and actually incentivises tradesmen to bid on more jobs as they only incur a fee on business they actually win.

Seen your comments regarding bendunne.com and I would like to introduce my website to you and maybe get your feedback. The website is called http://www.getabuilder.ie/ maybe you could give me your honest opinion.
Currently I receive about 30,000 page hits a month and I am about to launch our advertising campaign.
Any tips

Regards
Daniel