We have found from experience that for an ad to be really effective, you should include a picture of the pet you are advertising. People want to see what the pet will look like. A close-up of the pet works best. Do not include the surroundings. A well edited picture will help you tremendously. Prepare your picture before you upload. This is so important.

A digital camera and picture editing software are must haves. Any digital camera above 2 or 3 megapixels will make pictures that look great. Be sure to run the camera in standard mode at 1280 X 960 pixels. Or the closest range your camera has. Don't try to go larger or smaller. You don't need fine mode either. The web browser will only show 72 to 110 pixels, so considerable clarity could potentially be lost. You must start out with a very sharp picture to end up with a sharp picture on the web. We have found somewhere in the range of 1280 X 960 before editing is adequate. This gives you room to work on the picture, and produce a nice looking finished product. You can crop and resize the picture with your editing software, and take out things that you don't want to show in the background. If you don't have picture editing software, there are plenty of free programs on the internet available for download. Go to http://www.irfanview.com and download their free editing software. IrFanView will run on just about anything, and will easily do the job. You could also do a search for free picture editing software.

You should write the text portion of the ad on your computer locally, before you upload it to the website. This gives you time to think the ad out, and spell check everything. You already have software on you computer that can do that. It's called Notepad. It can be found under Accessories on most windows machines. Write a text file describing your pet, and save it to your hard drive when you are satisfied. Once you have these essential tools you need it's very easy to make up a really nice looking ad.

First, process several pictures and select the best one. Then resize it down to less than 50K. Our upload scripts are set up to allow you to upload one picture with your ad placement, and the picture file size limit is set at 50K. A good .jpg picture file size would be 550 X 400 pixels, with a total file size of 45K or so. Our server will not allow a larger file upload than the 50K preset limit. Next, copy and paste the text file you created into the window on the classified ads web site. You can always go back and fine turn it later if need be.

If you follow these few simple guidelines, you will be amazed at the results you will soon be getting. Good luck....