A Local Business Directory.. Your Thoughts?

Hi

So I am currently setting up a local directory for the town near me, this directory will be for all businesses and services in and around the town. It will have free listings and premium listings.

A free listing will be just the business name, address and phone number.

A premium listing will have a lot of added benefits, such as pictures, website link, email link, discription box where they can post their sales pitch or about their business. twitter/facebook links. Able to post special offers or what not in the news section, also able to add info in the newsletter.

This directory will aim to get customers and businesses to interact with each other, customers can rate and review services and businesses they have used. And business can post special offers/sales they have going on.

Now I plan to rank on the first page for the search phrase "town" being the town of the directory, also some of the categories of services e.g. "restaurants town".

Now I'm wondering would any of you pay for a premium listing in your local towns directory? I plan to ask £10 per month so £120 per year for the first 10-20 business who sign up, and then going up to £300 per year.

That's a lot of money for a directory. Unless you are a site botw o yahoo directory, I would not pay those rates.

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MLS charges £60 lifetime. After reading your thread Steve might be tempted to increase his prices. Anyway, £300 per year(even Yahoo does £199 I guess) is a lot of money to pay for a directory listing. As a new directory very few people would think about that even at £120. Just a thought, offer premium listings for a very small fee for first year that businesses will want to pay/try. Then try hard to beat big guns to rank for the term you are after. If businesses get results advertising in your directory, they will surely be renewing even if you put the premium up provided you served them at their expectations.

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...which includes VAT lol

Seriously James, take it from someone who knows this market inside out, your price point is way off.

The directory market is saturated, mainly with nasty downloaded directory scripts, and 99% end up as abandoned unloved projects or the owner realized it's not a quick fix to instant money.

The one absolute thing you need if you want to be a paid directory is traffic. A directory is a marketing tool, so if the directory can't market itself, then its a non starter.

Monthly and Annual charges are yesteryear. That's why we moved to one off price Lifetime Listings, and other people are now following suit.

We launched My Local Services in the US a couple of years ago, it's growing nicely, but is 100% free for all listings. It is now starting to get a decent amount of traffic, is generating revenue from that traffic, and we are approaching the point where we can justify actually charging people.

If you crack it, and can confidently rank well in any given towns as you plan, then traffic will be literally pouring through the doors giving you a multitude of monetization options. When you do start generating serious traffic, people and advertisers will come to you and offer you all sorts of weird and wonderful deals.

Charging your customers £300 a year though isn't one of them

Best of luck, I live and breathe directories, so will be watching with interest

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cheers Steve
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Great advice offerent by those above, it does seem rather pricey for a directory listing. Let us know how it goes.

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Ok thanks for the input, I will explain how I came up with the prices. There are businesses who pay £800+ to have an advert in the local newspaper on thursdays or sundays for 4 weeks.

So I figured that if people are willing to spend that much for a little advert in the middle of the newspaper for 4 weeks. Then they wouldn't have much problem paying £300 for a year for that specific town.

Im not trying to be copy yell or MLS which covers the whole of the UK, thats way to broad and I understand that the £300 a year would be way over priced. I'm talking really specific to 1 town. This makes it a lot easier to rank on the first page for "town + service".

But the first thing for me to do is get a few Restaurants a free premium listing and ask for them to send some of their customers to their page to rate and review them.

I am pretty confident I can rank for most of the phrase I want with in 4-6 weeks.

I did a test site, a plumber which is currently in top 3 for all the phrases, and I have stopped seoing until I can find someone who wants it. But I was able to rank that site pretty quickly.

But another thought, if you see your competitor advertising on a website, would you consider advertising there as well?

Yup definitely, we see it everyday.

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cheers Steve
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You'd have to think carefully about which categories of business to target too, James. Some of them have regional or national markets and the locations close to them aren't necessarily their best sources of customers.

In our experience, for example, we get lots of customers from SE England but fewer from Leicestershire.

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That works but what it needs is the perfect location and few useful directories can work a lot.

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Good luck getting people to sign up. If your still a new site and havent built up a brand as of yet then its not a good idea charging rip off prices. Maybe you should look into charging very cheap and then raising the price every few months by a little

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