So Nickycakes is almost finished building his local business directory site. The business database is populated, the template is almost finished, domain purchased, hosting taken care of. While taking a break and watching a few episodes of The Office (best show ever, besides seinfeld), some ideas came to mind about how to get in touch with local businesses.
Spamming all the businesses with emails telling them to come pay for a subscription may work, however, a) not even close to all the businesses have email addresses listed, or even a website b) spam laws are retarded these days. Probably shouldn’t bother with that.
Phone calls….that could work. But seriously, the only people Cakes wants to deal with on the phone are his family, his girlfriend (sometimes), and his AM telling him how much of an increase he’s going to give him on his best producing offer. Cold calling dickhead owners of local businesses is anti-interesting.
Mail. Mail seems like a good idea. Stuff an envelope or whatever, write up something about how you want them to update their information and then when they go to do that, the website will offer them a paid listing for $50 a year or something. Easy. Until you realize how much it costs to send mail. 41 cents a piece can really add up. So your best bet is probably postcards which only cost 26 cents. Postcards have the added benefit of delivering the message to the customer before they open it. Lots of people will see junky looking mail and just throw it out, but a postcard they can see before they throw it away to see if they’re interested.
All you have to do is export your listing database to excel (easy with phpmyadmin) so you can print out address labels, order some postcards for cheap, get postage, and send em. Where can you get postcards? Vistaprint has some 100 postcards free offer right now so Cakes will likely be ordering those when the time comes.
Published by nickycakes //
A thread was posted a while back on Wickedfire forums about building a local niche business directory. For those who don’t know, wickedfire is probably the best source of helpful internet marketing information available. The people there generally have a great sense of humor and are quick to flame idiots from digital point. Good stuff. Anyway, you can check the thread out here.
The basic idea is, make a local business directory for a small area with listings for local businesses. Really basic is fine. Business name, address, phone number, website, etc. Sort it into categories and set up a nice template for the whole thing. Optimize the whole thing for search engines and launch it. Once you get indexed, and start getting a little traffic, contact the local businesses and pitch a featured listing service that puts them at the top of their category for a yearly or monthly fee. Many businesses jump at the opportunity for cheap advertising so it shouldn’t be too difficult to rake in a decent income if you do it properly.
A few tips before you get started:
- Don’t pick a big city. Think smallish city or even town. The smaller you go, the less likely it is that someone else has already made a similar directory for the area.
- You will need to either write or buy a script to run your directory. Nickycakes will be making his own for this project (if it’s good, maybe it’ll be posted here or sold, dunno).
- If you don’t want to enter all the data by hand, you will want to make or buy scraping software to get data from a site like yellowpages.com.
- Optionally, pick a niche. There are quite a few niches with businesses that would love to pay money for paid listings.
- If you’re building your own listing script, make sure it’s easy to port to another city. Ideally you would only have to change a few variables and have your site up for another city minus the databases.
- Think of more ways to monetize it besides just sponsored listings. Obviously adsense is an option, but there are plenty of other things you can add. If you’re doing something real estate related, you could put affiliate links to loan companies. For example Neverblue has an offer for Lendingtree leads that converts up to $80 per lead. If your niche is pet related, you could put a pet meds offer. If it’s exercise related, there are a ton of health affiliate offers you could use. You get the picture.
In any case, focus on getting it up and running for starters. Grab a domain name first. When picking a domain name for any website, always go .com if possible. Pick a two word domain with one of the words being the area you’re focusing on and the other word related to your niche. Don’t avoid using a dash between the two. The best place nickycakes has found to register domain names is namecheap.com. Use coupon code WHITEXMAS (probably expires soon) for a few dollars off. For hosting, hostgator is great. For like $10 per month you can host as many domains as you want with pretty much everything standard like cpanel, php, mysql, all that. They give local shell access too if you fax them your ID. Use coupon code JURY to get like $10 off your order.
So go read up, and get to work. Plenty of more followups to come on this topic.
Anyone have any suggestions that may have been missed?
Published by nickycakes //
