Posted by I’ve got a friend who is making a killing with small local websites. And because of the nature of this business, it’s likely to never saturate, leaving plenty of room for you to copy his business and make it your own.
This is really simple — so simple, you might want to dismiss it. But it works really well.
The one caveat is you’ve got to be able to rank a small local type of website on page 1 of Google. But if you’re not an SEO person, you can hire someone to rank it for you. Or you can learn SEO and make a killing, your choice.
First you pick a town or city, one that is big enough to have competing carpenters, dentists, lawyers, plumbers and so forth. But you probably don’t want too big of a city, because then it will be more difficult to rank your website on page one.
Once you’re picked your town, get a URL for that town. If your town’s name is Boise, for example, then you might buy BoiseServices.com or some such.
Next you’ll get your website ranked for all sorts of terms, such as Boise Plumber, Boise Mortgage, Boise Massage and so forth.
Competition in small to medium sized towns tends to be small, so getting your site ranked for these terms is going to be easier than you think.
Now then, you’re going to contact businesses and rent out ad space on your site to them for each service your site is ranked for.
You can charge more for some businesses than others. For example, you might charge the massage therapist $100 a month and the dentist $300 a month. What you charge will depend, frankly, on what you can get. One new patient for a dentist could easily be worth $300, whereas it might only be worth $100 to the massage therapist.
Only take one ad per service, because you don’t want to create competition between your clients.
Selling the ads is easy. You show them that you rank on page 1 for the corresponding search term, and you let them know you’re only taking one business per niche.
If they want the new customers and clients you can bring them, great. If not, you’ll go to their competition. It just about sells itself this way.
If one of your advertisers doesn’t renew, contact that advertiser’s competition and sell the space to one of them. Often it only takes a couple of phone calls to do this.
Bill for the ads via Paypal on a recurring basis, so they renew automatically. Or if you prefer, you can use a shopping cart.
Have an outsourcer at the ready to design ads as well. You won’t make much money on the ad design, but it’s important to offer the service. You’ll find it’s easier to sign up new clients if they don’t have to worry about designing the ad themselves. You could even throw in ad design to each new client for free if you want.
You can figure on selling 10 or maybe 20 ads per site. If each advertiser is paying on average $200 a month, that’s $2,000 to $4,000 in monthly revenue.
And you can do this in as many towns and cities as you like.
You might want to incorporate some great content into the site as well. Articles such as, “How to choose a plumber in Boise” will work well.
And if you post events going on in the town, that can bring in repeat traffic and make it even easier to sell the ad space.
Outsource the content or write it yourself, it’s up to you. If you’re ambitious, you can also capture leads and sell them to the businesses. You might also promote some products on the site as well for additional income.
Once you’ve done this in one city, it’s extremely easy to duplicate in other cities.
If you don’t want to sell the advertising yourself, you can always use the services of a call center.
And here’s the real kicker — each website you build is an asset you can sell for good money, if and when you want to. Tons of people would love to have a turnkey business like this, and they’ll pay you premium dollar for it, too.