4 ms·

I posted an article from SAI the other day. Only 25% of local businesses are advertising online. Mostly because it's complicated and scary as shit to them. O

I posted an article from SAI the other day. Only 25% of local businesses are advertising online. Mostly because it's complicated and scary as shit to them. Of those 25%, 60-80% churn. That's because the companies doing this are so bloated that they only spend 50-60% on the actual ad buy and the rest on admin expenses. So yeah, the performance sucks. I also read 91% of local businesses are unhappy with their online marketing efforts (i NEED to find the link for this again). If 91% of a population is unhappy with something, you probably have an opportunity. Go fuck shit up. You can do it, and you'll make your money.

acgourley 17y ago
From time to time I see this as a real market need and wonder how to generalize and scale such a service oriented business. Seems like you could throw a lot of tech at it but still need a lot of feet on the ground at the end of the day.
- nrao123 17y ago
  Yes, scaling local businesses are not easy. My research on this topic... http://www.nikhileshrao.com/post/9824/links-on-local-internet-local-advertising-market/ http://www.nikhileshrao.com/post/9824/links-on-local-interne...
- aaronblohowiak 17y ago
  Yelp
- jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
  the BIGGEST problem is scaling it (at any scale). All these companies have enormous sales forces running around. That does two things: a) causes less % of media buy to go to actual media b) causes the companies to have to raise tons of capital. If someone can figure out a unique way to scale sales without adding more human capital,they will do very well. On the flip side, most of these people don't want to "do it themselves". You can outsource most of the actual service work at a scaleable expense. I look at it this way, sure anyone can learn accounting, but you want an accountant to do your taxes. Same thing with local businesses and web advertising- yes they could learn it themselves, but they'd rather have a pro do it. They just want to run their business.
mikeyur 17y ago
My friend made a healthy full time income dealing with just local advertising and building a network of sites for his city (some place in Pennsylvania). Businesses spend a ridiculous amount of money on offline advertising (ie. Yellowpages), so much that when you come to them offering online advertising for ridiculously low prices ($50-100/mo.) they just go for it most of the time. A Yellowpages ad can cost $500-1500/mo. for a tiny little placement. My friend essentially built a network of niche sites for his city, so {cityname}furniture.com, {cityname}dentists, {cityname}antiques etc. The sites were just simple directories with some content, a contact/request a quote form and a list of local businesses. He'd gather a list of businesses and contact them all explaining the site and how it would cost them $50/mo. for a listing, it would help their search rankings, bring traffic, generate leads and new business, etc. He said his best money was actually made off dentists and he had to break the site up into {neighbourhood}dentists because there were so many in the city interested. A typical site would feature 3-4 banner ads that cost $100/mo. (little 125x125 squares for each dental firm), and then around 10 or so $50/mo. business listings (custom page, images of office, testimonials, etc). It's fair to say a single site would net him $800/mo - of course this varies on the type of business being targeted, but there are so many kinds of businesses to target that you won't be able to capture every market in the city. On top of things, he made money generating leads for the businesses. For the dentist example, he had a "request a quote" form that basically got people to explain what they wanted done, budget, their contact info, etc. He sold leads for ~$20 each (would make the different dentists bid on them). This is nothing for most places as a lead can turn into $1000 worth of business in the first appointment, and thousands more over the years as that patient returns. If you can create a value added service locally and get people onboard for next to nothing (as they see it, $50 is nothing), then you have a real opportunity to make some cash. Take this to the next level and start managing their PPC campaigns and managing ad deals and you have yourself a healthy local market - most of which you can find someone cheap to handle (around the cost of a secretary, anyone with a bit of technical know-how will do). Bringing all this stuff up again kind of makes me want to go back into it.. hmm. weekend project perhaps?
- lacerus 17y ago
  Can you provide a link to one of these sites or similar? I was so inspired by this model, that I actually generated a list of all cities in pennsylvania and the corresponding {cityname}furniture.com, {cityname}dentists.com, {cityname}antiques.com, only to find that almost all of the registered domains were just parked on GoDaddy or AdSense spam sites :( I'm not trying to be a dick - the domain names your friend used probably follow a different pattern - but I'd really love to see an example of this. Thanks a lot for an inspiring post!

acgourley 17y ago

From time to time I see this as a real market need and wonder how to generalize and scale such a service oriented business. Seems like you could throw a lot of tech at it but still need a lot of feet on the ground at the end of the day.

nrao123 17y ago
Yes, scaling local businesses are not easy. My research on this topic... http://www.nikhileshrao.com/post/9824/links-on-local-internet-local-advertising-market/ http://www.nikhileshrao.com/post/9824/links-on-local-interne...
aaronblohowiak 17y ago
Yelp
jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
the BIGGEST problem is scaling it (at any scale). All these companies have enormous sales forces running around. That does two things: a) causes less % of media buy to go to actual media b) causes the companies to have to raise tons of capital. If someone can figure out a unique way to scale sales without adding more human capital,they will do very well. On the flip side, most of these people don't want to "do it themselves". You can outsource most of the actual service work at a scaleable expense. I look at it this way, sure anyone can learn accounting, but you want an accountant to do your taxes. Same thing with local businesses and web advertising- yes they could learn it themselves, but they'd rather have a pro do it. They just want to run their business.

mikeyur 17y ago

My friend made a healthy full time income dealing with just local advertising and building a network of sites for his city (some place in Pennsylvania). Businesses spend a ridiculous amount of money on offline advertising (ie. Yellowpages), so much that when you come to them offering online advertising for ridiculously low prices ($50-100/mo.) they just go for it most of the time. A Yellowpages ad can cost $500-1500/mo. for a tiny little placement. My friend essentially built a network of niche sites for his city, so {cityname}furniture.com, {cityname}dentists, {cityname}antiques etc. The sites were just simple directories with some content, a contact/request a quote form and a list of local businesses. He'd gather a list of businesses and contact them all explaining the site and how it would cost them $50/mo. for a listing, it would help their search rankings, bring traffic, generate leads and new business, etc. He said his best money was actually made off dentists and he had to break the site up into {neighbourhood}dentists because there were so many in the city interested. A typical site would feature 3-4 banner ads that cost $100/mo. (little 125x125 squares for each dental firm), and then around 10 or so $50/mo. business listings (custom page, images of office, testimonials, etc). It's fair to say a single site would net him $800/mo - of course this varies on the type of business being targeted, but there are so many kinds of businesses to target that you won't be able to capture every market in the city. On top of things, he made money generating leads for the businesses. For the dentist example, he had a "request a quote" form that basically got people to explain what they wanted done, budget, their contact info, etc. He sold leads for ~$20 each (would make the different dentists bid on them). This is nothing for most places as a lead can turn into $1000 worth of business in the first appointment, and thousands more over the years as that patient returns. If you can create a value added service locally and get people onboard for next to nothing (as they see it, $50 is nothing), then you have a real opportunity to make some cash. Take this to the next level and start managing their PPC campaigns and managing ad deals and you have yourself a healthy local market - most of which you can find someone cheap to handle (around the cost of a secretary, anyone with a bit of technical know-how will do). Bringing all this stuff up again kind of makes me want to go back into it.. hmm. weekend project perhaps?

lacerus 17y ago
Can you provide a link to one of these sites or similar? I was so inspired by this model, that I actually generated a list of all cities in pennsylvania and the corresponding {cityname}furniture.com, {cityname}dentists.com, {cityname}antiques.com, only to find that almost all of the registered domains were just parked on GoDaddy or AdSense spam sites :( I'm not trying to be a dick - the domain names your friend used probably follow a different pattern - but I'd really love to see an example of this. Thanks a lot for an inspiring post!