50 States Classifieds offers both fee-based business ads and free classified advertising serving the United States. We offer ads to small businesses, individuals, charities, Missing Persons advocates, and many others. We cater to small businesses, "mom and pop" businesses, craftspersons, artists, FSBO home sellers, and individual people. Our website is intended to be a local marketplace

The programmer/creator/owner of this website has been designing websites since 1995. I have been in the Online Classifieds business since 2002, when my father had the idea for AdvertiseWisconsin.com. Soon after that, he also started CMclassifieds.com, to serve the Chicago Metro area of Illinois. Around the same time, i began MidwestRummage.com, for people who wanted to advertise their garage sales, yard sales, estate sales, and related events in the Midwestern US. We printed business cards for the websites, and the two of us drove all over Wisconsin and Illinois talking to business owners and leaving our cards.

We later branched out to running a website for each of the 50 States, as well as several specialized websites like equipads.com and subcontractorlist.com for the construction and equipment industries. As our websites grew, it became much harder to maintain them separately. In 2005, we decided to combine all 50 states into one easy to use website, rather than trying to maintain 60+ individual classifieds websites. 50StatesClassifieds.com is the result.

50 States Classifieds is dedicated to providing an easy shopping experience, as well as affordable and effective online classified advertising, for small businesses and individuals. I am quite proud of my website, and hope you'll look around to see why!

Some Quick Statistics about 50 States Classifieds

50 States Classifieds and our related family of websites receive approximately 42,000 unique visitors per month and approximately 121,130 page views per month. (source: QuantCast, an independent, 3rd party statistics provider - information cited on 6-10-2009)

Consider This:

Have a paypal account? Put a "Buy it Now" button in your ad, and you can receive payments directly from buyers. Great for Dutch auctions or selling multiple items!

A professionally designed, SSL enabled eCommerce website can cost thousands of dollars. 50 States Classifieds offers an affordable alternative! You don't need an expensive website to have an online store anymore. Use our website instead!

What we're selling:

Browse products and services listed by ordinary people and small businesses from all around the United States. The items they are selling include: homes for sale by owner, used cars, computers, machinery, contractors, and more. Shop for furniture, clothing, jewelry, beauty products, toys, and other items. Check out the authors, musicians, and other talented artists in the books and music categories. If that's not your thing, try the Games category! There are many other types of individuals and organizations who offer quality products and professional services through our website. Look around and see what treasures you find!

With the easy to use WYSIWYG ad editor, you can post a really fabulous ad with full color, and even HTML if you desire - no programming knowledge needed. Some people even use their ads and featured storefronts as an alternative to getting their own website, which would cost alot more. Because you can add PayPal 'buy it now" buttons to your ads, people can pay you for your product directly through your ad - something very few classifieds sites offer.

To the shoppers and sellers alike, I would like to thank you for using my website, and would like to encourage you to tell me what features you'd like to see in the future. I would love to hear your suggestions, questions, and comments.

Jessica
Owner, 50StatesClassifieds.com & GreenWebDesign.com

A (not very) Brief History of 50 States Classifieds

50 States Classifieds was created, and is constantly updated, by Jessica Franke, who also owns Green Web Design, a Wisconsin based Website Design and Online Marketing company. I never know whether I should refer to myself as "I" or in the third person when I am discussing my businesses, because I eat, sleep, and breathe my businesses, and I don't necessarily like talking about myself as an individual person. Nor do you, the reader, necessarily care about me as a person. After all, you didn't come here to learn more about me, you came here to learn more about my website. But nonetheless, I feel like I should say *something* about myself. So, here is a brief history of what I went through in the past, that resulted in you being here, reading this page, on my classifieds website.

I have been designing websites since 1995. I started Green Web Design in addition to my full time job. I was always looking for ideas for my web design clients to advertise their businesses. Since the majority of my clients were just like me - people running small businesses in addition to their full time jobs, or people who were just starting out in business in general - I particularly looked for low cost or free advertising ideas to pass along to them.

In 2002, my father had an idea: AdvertiseWisconsin.com. He created a free classifieds website that quickly became very popular not only with my web design clients, but with Wisconsinites in general. Inspired by his idea, I created MidwestRummage.com, where users could place a free rummage sale ad in the Midwestern US. At the same time, we also collaborated on several other websites: AdvertiseArizona.com, AdvertiseCalifornia.com, AdvertiseTexas.com, CMClassifieds.com (for the Chicago Metro area), and over a dozen others. We bought a domain name for every state, and several others such as RummageArizona.com, RummageHawaii.com, etc. We also had other ideas, but couldn't afford to do everything we dreamed of yet, since we were funding all of this with our regular jobs. Back then, domains were $35 per year or more each, no matter where you went. All in all, we bought over 100 domain names over several years. Some were up and running, and some were still in the process of being developed.

As the websites became more popular, we had a really hard time keeping up with deleting the spam. Things slipped by us. We would wake up each morning to find hundreds of spammy ads mixed in with the good ads, and if we didn't catch them all, we'd quickly lose sight of it in the next day's deluge of ads. I tried to find ways to stop them from posting in the first place, but the classifieds scripts were not standing the test of time - although I had originally paid $49 per licence, per website, for the classifieds script, it turns out that the company no longer provided support or updates. Because the websites were all free and we didn't receive a cent from them, and since we also had to pay for web hosting for the websites, it started to become a burden and even a liability to have each site running as a separate standalone website. There had to be a better way.

Eventually, I got the idea to combine all 50 websites into one giant website, while still keeping users from each state in their own category so they could find other locals more easily. This would also allow me to cut back on total maintenance time - who wants to log into 50 different websites, individually, several times a day? Not to mention only having to worry about spammers and hackers attacking 1 website, rather than 50 individual websites. So, I bought the domain name 50StatesClassifieds.com, and started the long, arduous process of not only designing and creating the new website that could handle thousands of categories, but I also had to combine the data from the original 50 websites into the new website and test it before each of the old websites could be disabled and forwarded to the appropriate page on the new website. It took several months. I decided to use PHP to create the new website, which is a much more efficient programming language than the PERL / CGI scripts I was running on the old sites.

I didn't want to lose any users who were still going to the old websites via their bookmarks, so I kept the individual domain names and used them to direct returning visitors to the appropriate state at 50StatesClassifieds.com. That way, users returning after not logging on for awhile would still be able to figure out where the site went. I never got rid of those domains in the end, and continue to pay for them each year. Not only because people were so used to using those websites in the past, but also because I think it's easier for shoppers to remember us if they have several domains to choose from. If you can't remember 50StatesClassifieds.com, then maybe you'll remember AdvertiseWisconsin.com, or AdvertiseMilwaukee.com. Or perhaps AdvertiseClothing.com will stick in your brain longer than the others. I also like to print up business cards for AdvertiseWisconsin.com that I can leave at any business I visit, and every time a friend or family member goes on vacation, I print up a batch of cards for them to distribute if they are willing. Just for example, my husband's grandpa took 1000 HawaiiClassAds.com business cards with him to Hawaii, and his brother in law, who is a taxi driver, hands them out to his fares. I have a friend who lives in Chicago, who hands out CMClassifieds.com and AdvertiseIllinois.com business cards for me. Many of my friends also hand out AdvertiseWisconsin.com cards, and I have also printed up MidwestRummage.com bumper stickers that I hand out at every rummage sale I have. With over 100 different website addresses to choose from, there are lots of ways to find this website!

Unlike websites such as Craigslist or eBay, our ads are not automatically approved. One thing that I never liked about many websites I have tried in the past is how many obvious (and not so obvious) work from home scams, cash gifting scams, and other junk you have to dig through to find anything that is posted by a real person or business. Allowing spam to be freely posted not only detracts from the quality of the website hosting the ads, but it also distracts attention away from people who are legitimately trying to sell items locally in their communities. If potential buyers have to sift through 5,000 work from home ads in every single category in order to find the one thing they're looking for, then what's the point? Shoppers won't dig through all this junk, and won't come back to the site because they don't want to waste their time. Do you like to shop at websites where there is a lot of junk? I know I don't!

It's a lot of work to screen and approve every ad by hand, but I think it's worth it for two reasons. The first and obvious reason is that I am very proud of how hard I've worked to build not only this website, but the entire network that goes along with it - why would I want people to deface it by posting useless junk? The second reason is because there are a lot of trusting, naive people in the world, and I don't want one of them getting taken in by something that they found on my website. I know that I can't save the world, nor can I catch every scammer - but at least I can stop the obvious ones from getting through. The scams that seem obvious to me might not seem that obvious to grandma sally or cousin earl, so by not allowing the obvious and known scammers and spammers to post anything, I like to think that we are helping to keep people who are a bit less internet savvy safe. Or at least safer than they would be on a site that does not screen their ads.

We also don't offer any kind of adult services ads, escort ads, or related ads for similar reasons. It's no secret that websites like craigslist have encountered the exact same problem that has plagued print newspapers since the day they were first printed - dangerous, and even murderous people use newspaper personals to meet unsuspecting victims surprisingly often; pimps use newspaper and online ads to attract customers for prostitution rings and human sex trafficking rings; and a variety of other criminals have used them for a variety of reasons throughout recorded history. The majority of ads that users place are just ordinary ads. But if someone isn't paying attention, people can literally get away with murder. And that's one of the many reason that our website is rather special compared to others. We screen everything. If a free ad doesn't seem right to us, we can quickly delete it with no second thoughts. It was a free ad after all, and we tell you right up front that if we don't like it, we won't post it. But paid ads are also screened. We have, in the past, refunded payments from users who placed ads that were against our company policy or which violated our terms of use, as well as ads which we felt were scams based on the similarity to past scams that we have encountered. We are committed to having only high quality classified ads on our website in order to provide a high level of safety for our users.

We want our website to be family safe, as well as socially conscious. We have no way of knowing if anyone is who they say they are, and there are plenty of other websites where these types of services are offered already. We don't want the burden of deciding which personal ads are "safe" or not, and we never, ever want our website to have a body count, so we have chosen to not allow any types of adult service ads. We do allow ads for adult products if they are tasteful and non-explicit. But never any adult services that would lead to an in-person meeting of any type. This is not the place for that! We have chosen, instead, to create a business oriented website which also welcomes charities and individuals. We mostly cater to small mom-and-pop type businesses -

My father, my husband, myself, and several other people log in throughout the day and approve or disapprove new ads on the website. It doesn't matter if you put your ad up at 8am, 8pm, or 4am, it will usually be reviewed within 2-4 hours of being posted. If there are any questionable ads, the other editors leave them for me to have the final say on, and if I can't decide whether I think an ad is real or a scam, then I leave it sit for a few days and think about it before making my final decision.

I also research topics in Google, Yahoo, and other search engines, in order to see what others are saying about the product, service, or company. This helps me determine whether it is something that I want my website associated with. Especially for "Work at Home" ads, which might seem very attractive in this recession when so many have been laid off. If we are in doubt about whether or not to approve an ad, Google gets the final say, depending on what their search results bring up about the company or industry in question. Sometimes I spend hours reading about a specific company, or product, before making my decision. And then in the future, when I see an ad for that company or product, I can make my decision instantly, saving time in the long run.

Previously, when ads used to be approved automatically without any human review, I am sure that several "bad ads" slipped in. You might occasionally find one when looking through the older ads. However, as the older ads expire, those will become more and more rare. If you see any ads that you feel are "bad ads", please let us know so we can delete it!