Local Business Directory Experiment Part 1
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?
Suggestion: To seek additional monetization, offer to build an online sales page for the customers (if it’s possible) and pull a 5%-10% commission of any sales. This works great if you’ve got a mid-to-high range niche that allows for that kind of commission.
How many businesses in your area and niche would you recommend having when trying to choose what to go with?
-the mole
Well this is an experiment, so I’d say use your judgement. 100-1000 seems about right to me =)
Can I have a review copy? I’ll take a review copy!