Forum Moderators: skibum
Im setting up a directory/portal for a county, what is the best way to make money from this?
Should i add or let companies add themselves to the directory and then charge them after a while or charge them before submitting any details, how do other portals directories make money from this? Also what is a suitable price to charge each business?
thanks
the only thing that you can sell your advertisers is traffic so focus on maximising visitors. to do this you need content (critical mass?) and good SE rankings.
When should i start charging?
That depends on the value of each visitor and the likelihood that your advertiser will be able to convert him to a sale or achieve brand awareness.
>what is the best way to make money from this?
The only thing that I've found that works is to have a free, broadly categorized section and then paid specialty categories. I've disabled local search within the directory and make the visitors page through the upper-level specialty directories then fall through to the general directory which includes the free listings as backfill. Paid listings are allowed to have a logo and are listed under all categories that might apply, free listings get one text listing.
No, I use a highly customized version of Links2 (perl) from gossamer threads.
>directory/portal for a county
I don't want to dissuade you, Andrew, but I've been doing this for 7 years now and I can tell you that it's extremely rare to find anyone making money from regional directories.
Do you think its a waist of time then?
Personally, the blunt answer would be 'yes,' I've seen (conservatively) several hundred come and go. Since I might be biased, I hope you'll hear from others on this.
If you have particular knowledge and interest for a regional directory, and would enjoy building it, it could be a fun project that may or may not make money later. For sure, you want to do a little research first. See what kw traffic that region would have, and how much competition is out there.
To charge for submission to a directory, that directory needs traffic. To get traffic you need listings. So, to build it and get decent traffic for paid submissions is probably a slow build. No one will pay to be listed on a small or empty directory, nor will they pay later if they don't see traffic from it.
I would see it as a project with possible future potential, but in no way a sure bet. In other words, if it wouldn't be fun to do it, and you just want to make $$$ from it, I wouldn't waste the time.
If there lots of companies advertising there site and services i dont think £50 is a lot, but can soon mount up if there is a large Quantity of them.
So how do all these portals actully make money! or are they all done for fun?
I am talking about the US now. The Yellow Pages from the phone company is distributed for free to everyone with a phone. In the short term you could not be as all inclusive.
Local newspapers are also an entrenched competitor. If they don't already have a portal, they might make an excellent sponsor or partner.
The local library and the local radio stations in a certain way are also competitors. They could also be a potential partners or sponsors.
I think that if a portal is focused narrowly enough at first that it can succeed. To succeed it must do what it does very well.
I live in Bergen County, NJ across the river and just north of New York City. West Point is nearby in New York State a few miles north. The county and the state was a major scene of Revolutionary War activity.
A portal sponsored by a historical society or library association might work and attract history buffs. Local advertisers might be willing to sponsor topics: Hamilton-Burr Duel, Major Andre, the chain across the Hudson, West Points involvement, Benedict Arnold, Molly Pitcher, Washington Crossing the Deleware, etc.
Now none of this is local to you, but I am sure that you could come up with a narrowly focused portal. It might not be historically focused. It might be industry focused or ethnically or on auto racing or whatever. The trick is to do it well and to get others involved.
Profits are unlikely to be big at first but startup cost are small.
As it got more popular, my thoughts did turn to generating revenue mainly to cover costs. This has proved tricky. I have considered four ways of generating revenue
1) Paid Submissions
2) Banner Adverts
3) Affiliate Programmes
4) Direct Sales
Paid Submissions - This really has not picked up as I expected, but given the region my site focused on, it was not entirely unexpected.
Banner Adverts - This has generated a certain amount of revenue, covering some of my basic costs. Advertising on the net seems so cheap that you can only make real money out of this if you are a 'bulge-bracket' website e.g. Yahoo etc or a highly specialised website that dominates its sector.
Affiliate Programmes - Have had some mixed results with these, but with the right product and right affiliate there is some potential.
Direct Sales - Still working on this, but I think this is the area with the best potential. Just need to find out the right mix of product or serivces to sell.
I have only really looked into the revenue angle this year, but have already made more money in this period than the previous 2 years I have run the site(this doesn't really say a lot other than other than there is potential).
One significant problem Directories have is something called the 'click-thru' rate. If you imagine a user is looking for a site that deals for say "Brazillian Cooking" and you have a Brazillian website directory. As soon as the user finds the link he clicks and he gone - he has click right thru'.
To sell stuff or even generate money for ads, it helps to have a sticky site and directories (but not portals) are almost inherently unsticky, because of thier high click thru' rate.
Yahoo found this and this is one of the reasons there have dreamed up the myriad of services Yahoo now offers in addition to thier directory.
I hope this helps
Also other features like forums, local news, weather reports, etc. will keep the visitors on your site longer.
Frankly, I see topic specific directories as having a better chance at revenue than local directories (and I run both.) I just do not see how the average Joe/Jane can compete with the local newspaper or Yellow Pages and make money.
The attraction of the internet is that I can go world wide on any topic. I don't see that happening yet for local directories.
Now you could run one as a hobby, keep your costs very low, make it the best you can for your own self satisfaction.
If you have an area with good tourist opportunities you could create a local portal aimed, not at the local folks, but aimed at attracting tourists to your area.
No matter what you do you will have to attract traffic (and page views, ie. "stickiness") before anyone will advertise. No matter what you do -- expect it to take about as long as a bricks and mortar business to build an income producer online.
Of course this doesn't mean that you can not generate some revenue through some online affiliate partners, they key being that the affiliate stuff needs to be something of "value" to your local user. An example of that might be a job search affiliate program with the search being targeted to your local area. I guess I could go on here but this is my first post and I don't want you guys throwing darts at me ;)
No darts. Welcome to wmw, MJR. Tell us more.
thanks again
