LOCAL PORTALS
Local portals take a lot of work. It’s almost like you are running a newspaper so be warned. One of the best ways is to get a group of folks who are active in the community and “recruit” them to write for you (either paid or free). You are going to have to do the grunt work first.
Your job with a local portal is to run something like a newspaper for your town or region. You are also going to have to promote it — I’ll get into that.
Start off small – keep posting about community events. If you have kids pass out flyers to parents at their events. Ask (no beg) for everyone to take your e-mail address and send you info about upcoming things. Give people like church secretaries an account and show them how to post events.
Keep going. Keep growing e-mail list
Keep going. Keep growing e-mail list
Keep going. Keep growing e-mail list
After a large enough portion of the community knows about it – leverage it into ad space, ad swaps, etc..
What do you think the local store would pay to tell 500 people about their pizza special? Could you sell 10 ads and do a one post “ad sheet”? Could you print out 10000 flyers with said ad sheet and place them in all those businesses?
(hey while you are there – show them the number 1 ranked website you have about their industry – and offer for them to buy it)
The options are limitless if you can get this kind of thing going. It’s tough to get the momentum though – in my case it helps when you have 4 kids of different age groups and are their coach, their boyscout leader, the girlscout leader, etc…
Plus there are only a few thousand people in my town — I have no clue how to start something like this in a bigger town or city.
Once you get one up and running (even if it’s a “fake”) it’s so easy to plug in ads for your clients and increase the value of any site(s) you make for the area that you shouldn’t pass it up.
Don’t forget to look into SMS Marketing for this. If you are getting permission to send them cell phone text messages the pizza parlor will pay a nice chunk to text a coupon to them monthly.
So how do you go about building these portals? Well you’ve got to pick your area and just start posting about what’s going on there. I recommend wordpress as it will be easy for those you give access to post with to use as well.
Then you have to deal with building links to your site. Related REGIONAL links. That’s where a service like Local Domination could come in. You could build sites for the whole state and just go to town. OR even use it to populate your Local Site. Just enter in a bunch of keywords and only one city. Poof – everytime it runs it will list the businesses it finds for that keyword and some local news items.
It will certainly help get the ball rolling.
Don’t think that you can’t do something like this with out using any other service. You certainly can – and manual posting goes a long way to improving your credibility.
Good luck!
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
