Local Sites

[MPC]

Are you conisdering .ca domains or sticking with .com's?

[Graham]

Are you conisdering .ca domains or sticking with .com's?

So far just TLDs. May look into some ccTLDs also.

[Mark]

Let's say you buy CityHomesForSale.com or CityDating.com etc, etc. How are you adding content? Just manually or some type of automated thing? How are you monetizing?

Mark

[jdwanchalk]

Let's say you buy CityHomesForSale.com or CityDating.com etc, etc. How are you adding content? Just manually or some type of automated thing? How are you monetizing?

Mark

I personally will be manually adding content. I will monetize with affiliate ads that correlate with the topic.

[Spry]

The idea of local sites is really interesting.

I mean how hard is it to rank for Cityname Mechanic or Cityname Chiropractor or all of these variations... the ranking is going to be the easy part for us. The challenge, imo is how to go about monetizing the rankings.

Do we try and contact all the mechanics and let them know that they could be listed on our page which ranks well in google for people looking for the best mechanic in cityname and this gets xxx amounts per search... Sell the mechanics or whomever the add on the page or lease them the page for x months?

It seems like it would be a fairly intensive sales process to sell, manage and keep the inventory sold... Has anyone thought through this process farther and have some solutions or ideas on how to monetize this traffic by direct sales??

[Randy Ray]

Lodging is a really big niche in the local market. I used to be an affiliate manager for Hotels.com, and I had some affiliates making really nice monthly checks in the niche. Contrary to what a lot of "experts" say, the niche is still pretty non-competitive if you know what you're doing, too. The trick is launching a real site that offers real value to the visitor, rather than launching just another thin affiliate site.

Of course, the location matters a lot too. A lot more people want lodging in Manhattan, New York than Brenham, Texas.

[Ozpoker]

Lodging is a really big niche in the local market. I used to be an affiliate manager for Hotels.com, and I had some affiliates making really nice monthly checks in the niche. Contrary to what a lot of "experts" say, the niche is still pretty non-competitive if you know what you're doing, too. The trick is launching a real site that offers real value to the visitor, rather than launching just another thin affiliate site.

Of course, the location matters a lot too. A lot more people want lodging in Manhattan, New York than Brenham, Texas.

Just about to start a few of these "local" sites.

Randy, when you say "offer value" do you mean some kind of integrated booking script or reviews and testimonials?

I always stumble when faced with finding coders to do this kind of stuff - a. the right guys for the job always seem hard to find and b. trying to get them to understand what you want always seems near impossible.

[Pinkpoker]

April issue of net ( netmag.co.uk) have a few pages about local tourism sites. More on the lines of the design side but might be of some interest. Article is in their magazine and doesnt seem to be on their site .

[KevinMcC]

I've got two sites up in local niche's, and it's a little harder to rank than I thought... but I don't really have many quality links pointing to the pages (harder to find quality links for me so far.. although I haven't tried to hard), and I don't have much content up at all.

London Ontario Car Dealerships
London Ontario Real Estate Agent

Once some more PAL members start up local sites I will add a "partners" type page if anyone is interested in trading links.

[ih82lose]

My biggest problem with local sites is monetizing.

I was working with a friend with an auto glass repair company.
I laid out a plan to purchase auto glass domains for each city he serviced. Then I would build a mini-site for each domain. The plan would be to SEO each domain, and send google adwords traffic. I assumed the adwords would be very targeted, keeping there cost minimal. In time the hope would be free traffic from search engines would be the only lead source needed.

My other thought would be to build a local directory of service providers(ie dentist or accountants) and create a web design company. Offer to build sites and marketing plans for these industries.

It leads me to believe one would be best to couple local sites with an actual brick and mortar business.

Other sources for monetization would be:

'hit the pavement' and solicit advertisers.
This would require having provable rankings and traffic. Requiring an investment before you know for sure you have clients.

Google adsence
This is an ok option, but of course you are leaving half your money in Google's pocket.