you guys could give me some good advise in promoting my website, www.buezit.com. This is my very first project that I have completed and I know it has some flaws (desgin wise) and i'm slowly improving them. That being said, i have no experience what so ever in terms of marketing. I have read numerous threads in this forum and elsewhere and found them to be very helpful and have seen some improvement in traffic.

I need advise on how I can let visitors actually use my site. Maybe I am not getting the message across to my visitors. I like to think that the concept of my idea is unique. Buezit has classified similarties as the giant craigslist, although the concept is reverse. INstead of the usual users posting what they are selling, users of Buezit post what they are looking for, whether it be a need or want. I really need advise onto letting people know that such a website exists and I want them to start using it. Thank you very much and I hope you all a great weekend.

I would redo the text if you have time ... might even help more than a new design? ( Although you should check out open source web design, even if just for inspiration. ) I'd get rid of the text about whether it's a need or a want; people have super short attention spans, and it's pretty clear your site covers more than just emergency needs.

On the "content is king" note, since you have your site broken up by state, I think it would help you a great deal to do a page about each state, some text, a few photos, stuff like that. On the one hand, it will help you keep peoples' attention, it will endear you to people who are moving and trying to find whatever at their destination, and it will have SEO benefits. You'll turn up for words and phrases you wouldn't otherwise, you'll have different types of content ( sometimes they like short and sweet, sometimes long and wordy ), and it could get you some links. You could even incorporate Google Maps - this is very easy. Maybe I say this because geography fascinates me.

Still, it looks like you've got some ads, and your system built; you're actually ahead of some of the people who post here in the content department. So it would also help to raise your profile - collect some links. Submitting to the directories ( there's a list in another forum here ) will get you a small amount of exposure with Google - spend 20 minutes on it some time when you're bored. Create an AboutUs listing, like this. They have a "recent changes" link, and people must watch that because I got a positive review pretty quickly after adding myself. Mention it on forums you already belong to, people tend to like helping "one of their own."

Finally, your question about getting people to use the service ... if what I want is for people to hire me as an IT consultant or portrait photographer, is there a place I could run a listing about either of those? Put up some ads yourself, to eat your own dogfood, and also as examples of how your site works.

I'm not sure if this would bother anyone else, but there's a major flaw in the concept that I can see that would turn me off right away. Allow me to outline the flaw with a scenario:

1) I would like to buy a 42" plasma TV.
2) Person A has a 42" plasma TV and tells me that he wants to sell it to me for X dollars.

No problem so far, right? But wait...

3) Person B works for a promotional company whereby I can subscribe to at least 10 overpriced "promotional offers" and receive a 42" plasma TV for free. Not what I wanted.

4) Person C works for another promotional company where I can take a short survey for a 1 in a zillion chance to win the same TV. Also not what I wanted.

5) Person D wants to show me his eBay store full of products that may be tangentally related to a 42" plasma TV but don't actually include the TV.

And so on and so on. In other words, I get a whole bunch of unrelated or spammy offers that I want nothing whatsoever to do with.

So...my question to you is "how are you going to ensure that, when I post an ad, I'm not going to get a whole bunch of unrelated BS?" Don't answer me here...answer me on your site.

Some other problems with your idea:

- Craigslist DOES have a wanted section, although it's buried in their "for sale" section.

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/wan/

- You're limited to the US. I'm in Canada. Therefore, your site is of no use to me personally. And I won't be the only one.

- It looks like, rather than build your site to your specs, you bastardized a copy of phpBB and hacked it for your own purposes. This traditionally leads to issues with sites.

That's about all I can see, because I'm tired now.