Great list of items. One thing left off was hiring the right talent. While downsizing is going to be the reality, the management and sales people who are left have to be top notch and that means paying classified reps more than $10 an hour. I am also seeing some newspapers drop the classified manager position and dumping half the duties/staff on the internet manager and the other half on the retail manager further watering down the category.

Instead of Classifieds taking a front seat at the head table, it seems many newspapers are pushing it further back, outsourcing call centers, canceling job fairs, stopping classified promotions, and ignoring basic problems with their websites. Instead of putting in the hard work to reinvent them selves, they have just watered classifieds down even more. The continuing battle between print and online sectors at newspapers keep them from creating the strongest classifieds in the world, a strong print/online/mobile system that no other media could touch.

Classifieds needs dedicated talented, creative, and market savvy managers to plan and initiate new ideas, always thinking three, six, nine months ahead of time. It simply does not happen by itself any longer. Sales reps have to be trained to go after new business in very specific ways using very local strategies and the tools to close sales. Making 50 random outbound calls a day is not a strategy, it’s in fact, a waste of time.

Getting back classifieds is the easiest thing in the world. Take a look at http://www.KSL.com, a radio station with online classifieds that put Craigslist to shame. This took some marketing savvy and some hard work, but they own the market in Salt Lake City classifieds.

Investing in classifieds means the print product, the online product, the management and the sales people. Just buying a better wheel won’t make money. Just joining a consortium doesn’t mean you have addressed and met the needs of your local market. Sometimes, the opposite happens.

Craigslist is not the problem. Newspapers have been warned for over 10 years to put more resources in their classified efforts and most have ignored the warnings. Now is the time to put more resources and efforts into classifieds. The market is bigger than ever. Getting back your market share takes hard work and focused effort but is in fact, a very simple formula. Getting back market share is a fight, a process, a strategy. But it is an easy formula to follow if you have the right resources in place.

The one thing we know for sure, the classified market is not going to come back on its own. But it is right there, stronger than ever, right in front of your eyes. The newspapers print/online model is the perfect format to get it back if you focus on a strategy and work hard at it.

Or you can water it down, outsource, and pretend it was never there to begin with. The choice is yours.

Janet DeGeorge http://www.ClassifiedExecutiveTraining.com

And I especially agree with Number 11 regarding video. I run a site called Listasaurus.com, where one of our key features is video classifieds…we also recently implemented video in our auction ads, which no one else is doing yet that I know of. We at Listasaurus believe that video is only going to continue to grow online, and it’s a fantastic tool for showing detail in classifieds, auctions, and in our Business Directory.

We’re also the first site to offer revenue sharing, in that we pay our users simply to list their ads, even if they don’t sell their items. How’s that for reinventing classifieds?

Thanks again and Happy New Year!

Melanie Heywood
Founder and CEO
Listasaurus.com