Classifieds Portal

First of all, you need to find a niche that isn't already saturated. There are tons of classifieds websites online that very popular, and it will a monumental task to compete with them.

Once you have found a niche that isn't saturated and which you think would appeal to some visitors, I would visit websites that target to your audience and advertise there.

$30/day is good if you can make the most of it. Facebook ads are cheap and can drive some traffic to your website. I would also look into bing ads. $30/day won't get you very far with Google Adwords.

Best of luck!

Thanks BrotherZ!
How is bing ads different from Adwords, in terms of pricing? I assume both are SEM?

it's more of an egg or chicken problem, what most of them does is they first populate with enough content themselves so when new visitors come they can see that the site is active so they would also post

You could try PPC, but I'm not sure how much it will cost, if it's a micro-niche then the CPC shouldn't be too high. Or you could try advertising from buysellads.

As a classified site owner, I can give you a few tips on how to start out a classified site.

1. Make the ads stay on the site for at least 90 days (initially).
2. Invite all your FB friends to check out your new classifieds and post at least one ad per person.
3. Promote your own gigs (if you have other sites or projects you're running).
4. Start a Bing PPC advertising campaign. Bing ads are cheaper. If done right you will only spend 5 cents per click. It should give additional 20-300 visits per day, depending on how many countries you choose to advertise in. Make sure you choose Bing and Yahoo search engines only (no search partners).
5. Utilize Twitter as much as you can. Twitter will send you a lot of traffic. However, the Twitter's visitors are reluctant to post, but they will stop by your classifieds nonetheless.
6. Make sure your site is responsive. Capturing the cell phone users is essential these days.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

We started a classified website for a country with a population of 2 million. We had someone to copy ads from newspapers directly into the site - if you start out almost with no ads it's very difficult for the site to pick up.

Have people found it harder creating these kinds of websites because of the recent google updates and people being scared of placing links on classifieds?

This is a saturated market.

Spending money on ppc alone might not be enough. You may wanna utilize guerrilla marketing techniques as much as possible to keep the cost down.

One major challenge is utilizing AdSense. Since most general classified sites have a personal section, it might contribute lot of adult ad which will get the site banned on AdSense.