Here in the VIP lounge I started a post about local domains and the sole reason I posted it privately was I did not want to tip every visitor to the niches I have been looking into. Now back to a more generalised topic I thought I would move back into the public forums.
I am not going to discuss the potential of a local niche site as one can find out about that easily enough. I am not going to go into how to pin down a great localised domain, again plenty of resources but what I am going to touch on is how to make a local domain work for you.
I recently agreed to set-up a local online magazine for a friend and was astounded in one morning she had more content than I could get up in two days. She just phoned local business and said free links and advertising if you submit an article. Well now you have my attention a site that generates its own original content, I'll take that. The great thing is that the world is getting smaller and a local site is more than ever likely to attract searches and traffic from neighbouring states/counties and countries.
The problem is the idea is sound but the planning is often lacking, I can find you 100 sites aimed at a local niche that simply do not perform as they were never planned they just sort of happened. In fact the internet is littered with such sites. So I always ask myself the following....
What do I want from this site. How will it become of value to me and an eventual asset....
The most common answer is usually advertising revenue and its certainly doable, however its an over done concept and you need to draw significant traffic to successfully monetize a name-area-site unless you happen to be sitting on NYC.com or London.com in which case stop reading this and go drive your porsche around. Jokes aside unless your site is converting clicks its going to be hard to turn into money unless you feel like chasing the local barber for his $5 a month.
In my case its a simple answer for this site, expose people to the internet as an advertising media and encourage them to expand their hopeful success with luck using my products. For you it may ultimately be to sell a product, resell a service or build up a decent mailing list. The ideas are infinite and I can nearly guarantee that any idea you have will work better than paid ads for your area these days.
How will the site work for me instead of me working for the site?
No such thing as a free lunch fair enough but if I have to spend hours daily working this site, is it the best use of time? I could be pushing high conversion aff products or my ecom sites for that amount of effort. So how can I generate content and visitors without doing to much myself?
So I want people to promote my site and people to contribute to my site in a nearly automated fashion. Here my goal is to pick the winners look for established and successful local ventures and make them a decent offer. In my case I am spending X amount on promotion and here is my marketing plan. I am offering premium advertising space to business who are willing to offer something in return. So in essence you supply me X amount of content and a special offer to entice people to join the mailing list and in exchange I will run you as featured for X time frame. Most places are happy to give away a 15% coupon or a free glass of wine with a pizza. Prove its successful and you can eventually mitigate your costs by having them help pay for the necessary advertising.
I love charity, I love it for the good will it creates and good work it does and so I love to be involved with it in any way possible. Similarly you could offer people a donate X to this charity and we will place your banner. It gets tongues wagging and the charity will begin to push you in turn.
Next step what's popular? Find a unique way to put a spin on this news and gain some public appreciation. Know a great artisan in town, give him a 200 word article, he is good at what he does he probably knows hundreds of people.
So we have covered the winners now we just need to syndicate the losers. You know that crummy local on-line magazine that always seems to spin the local rags articles. Offer to feature their article in exchange for a link on the top of their article. Then customize it with a fascinating counter point of view.
What's my end goal....
Do you want to become authority on an area?
Do you want to become the marketing blog for your town?
Do you want to become the next freebay classified for local users?
Do you want to catch outside traffic for you area long tail keyword?
Does not matter what that goal is but have it in mind and keep heading for it. Too many directions at once usually creates a knot, so set a goal and aim high.
There are a million more ideas out there but this is a starting point and if your inventive many work for nearly any site. Once again I am not good at imparting the deep secrets of on-line success but I really feel if people plan and implement a few good ideas. Be it from here or from some other source that is 80% of success, building a site is the easy part making a site work for you is the goal we all aim for.
I will probably pop in and add more ideas to this post and if I remember I will eventually post the site utilizing these ideas once they are properly implemented.
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