See all my posts on blogging at: Professional Blogging - Insights Into Professional Blogging With WordPress 

So, I had this idea. I am in the process of creating an interactive website for our local community. The idea is that everybody can submit news about upcoming events, opinions, or any kind of information that might be valuable to the community. It’s kind of an extended bulletin board that takes advantage of numerous WordPress plugins, including classifieds.

But you know how it is; people expect almost everything for free when it’s on the Internet, and, in addition, free content is always a good draw. The idea was to allow free posting of classifieds for 30 days. I found this really nice and effective WordPress plugin (see info below), and one of the numerous options enables you to allow free content for a limited time; everything beyond that would be subject to a charge.

And the success was vast – well, at least in my small world. Within shortest time I had roughly 70 entries, but the initial excitement was soon replaced by disappointment. ALL of the posted classifieds came from India, which was not the intended use. What to do? Yes, I am manually sifting all classifieds for validity, but I was also not willing to spend my valuable time on a daily basis just to remove entries. Also, I deem classifieds a great way to attract the attention of our community. After some research I found yet another plugin that blocks certain countries from your website, and since this is a local website I limited access to the United States only. It’s a sad thing to do, but in the end you need to protect your operation. See also my post WordPress Bloggers: Block India, Afghanistan, Russia From Your Blog.

Another WordPress Classifieds Plugin (AWPCP)

If you are thinking about incorporating classifieds into your WordPress blog or website, I do recommend the “Another WordPress Classifieds Plugin (AWPCP)” plugin.

Note: I am neither affiliated with the vendor of this plugin, nor do I receive any compensation for posting about it. This is just an honest opinion.

AWPCP – A plugin that provides the ability to run a free or paid classified ads service on your WordPress blog.

AWPCP is a feature-rich, highly-configurable, WordPress plugin that can put classified ads on your site, painlessly, in minutes!  Another WordPress Classifieds Plugin has rich ad features like:

• Ad Features
  1. Search ads by city, state, country, username, or keyword
  2. Allow AdSense ads to be displayed
  3. Control over HTML use in ads
  4. Limit the text size of ad postings
  5. Standard form fields can be enabled or disabled, depending on your needs (title, website, name, country, etc)
  6. Allow or disallow image posting with ads
  7. Automatic expiration of ads (free or paid)
  8. Configurable ad display for AdSense placement

AWPCP allows you to be notified of events happening on your classified ads:

• Notification Features
  1. Allow posters to be notified of expiring ads
  2. Allow admin to be notified when new ads are posted
  3. Classified ad users can contact the ad poster without exposing the poster’s email (blind email system, similar to Craigslist)

AWPCP has excellent payment options:

• Payment Features
  1. Allows for paid or free ads
  2. Supports PayPal and 2Checkout for paid ads
  3. Google Checkout support for paid ads also through a Premium Module
  4. Allow for image posting limits higher than free ads
  5. Multiple fee scales for posting ads (allows you to have longer ad postings with higher fees)
  6. Variable ad expiration lengths connected to fee scale (e.g. allow ads to run for 30 days for $10, 60 days for $15, etc)

AWPCP gives you ultimate control over your ads:

• Ad Posting Controls
  1. Allow admin to approve ads prior to posting
  2. Allow admin to approve images prior to posting
  3. Users can edit or delete their own ads
  4. Admin can edit or delete all ads in the system
  5. Secure system gives users a unique editing key to administer their own ads
  6. Allows for limiting image posting (by image size, height, width and total count if desired)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, AWPCP lets you write Shakespeare with lots of image options:

• Image Features
1. Allow image posting or shut it off completely
2. Control the number, filesize, height and width of images posted
3. Allow for different numbers of images to be posted with paid ads vs. free ads
4. Allow for image approval prior to posting

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