How would you monetize local sites?

I believe, the good idea is to start a youtube channel and Instargram account. If you are in an "event" niche, these tools will help you a lot. If I wanted to get an information in my city, I would be willing to spend time while watching a video or browsing the photoes.

The world changes ))

Just my opinion.

If I were in your shoes, I would think of creating a forum website. Once you get a good number of active members, you can monetize it through ads. Just an idea though. Hope this helps!

If you are in event planning, you can monetise your site by targeting a specific demographics in your location for example for weddings or birthdays in (name of your city), then create a registration form for those who are interested for this event planning and create a funnel in order for you to improve your monthly sales.

Following are some ways online services can be making money that I can think of,

1. LinkedIn design : Record for free. Pay and update to "Premium Account" for seeing full information, calling, finding opinions, e-mail address, contact information, etc.

2. Quora Model : Group centered zazzle corporation. The more you write opinions, correct outcomes on the web page, the more attributes you get, which can be used by your organization / sold to other organization to "promote" their outcomes, put ads, etc. Credits can be bought for real cash (Farmville Model)

3. Google Model : Offer online look for engine to discover the right organization for you. Generate income from your chance pages using "Adsense" and "Adwords" design. You can also monetize the online look for engine outcomes using "Sponsored Links" and "Related Searches".

4. Facebook or myspace Model : Gain as much as possible details about the customer using his public network, and offer "relevant" organization outcomes using Chart Search - for customers to discover the right organization for them. To get a job Social Ads, Special offers, etc.

5. Foursquare Model : Use the person's location to discover required companies close by, provide genuine opinions by those who have "checked in" at the workplaces of these organization, and generate income by integrating with the listed companies and offer daily deals to the customer, asking for a fee from the deal.

6. Wikipedia Model : Create the details easily available to everyone by nice participation of a separate community. Functional costs to be brought up through Non-profit contributions.

Now that you've read all the above, most of the features ARE current in a well known web-based organization listing called Howl.

Coming to your question, creativeness actually can be found is the way the service is sent to the customer, who should be willing to easily eat the data with minimum possible persistence.

In order to do so what you need to try is non-traditional way of data distribution. Generally individuals leap on to, "Oh I can certainly make an App for it" too quickly, without recognizing that so many applications are competitive for customer's attention on a smart phone.

The thing which is commonly neglected is that even today, the greatest organization marketing is recommendations. And the effect of actually hearing out a stranger's opinion in a industry is still much larger than reading a stranger's evaluation online. You can try and accomplish such "Word of Mouth" transactions between customers in some way - maybe audio opinions, to start with, or by linking potential customers to previous customers of the organization who are willing to share their evaluation via a call, and maybe get paid for it.

Why not create a page promoting different types of products/services that people need in your community and focus on ranking it and USING PPC so you can provide social proof to the businesses in your area that it's getting traffic.

For example <your city> dentist

Contact the dentists who aren't on the first page of Google in your community and see if one of them would pay you $X per lead you generate.

Do that with a couple of niches in your community it sounds like you have relationships with business in your town so I'd start with them first.

You also wouldn't have to limit it to a web site could generate leads with social media ads too.

offer a service to make a youtube video and embed it for a monthly fee. charge upfront for the video, (you can shoot it on your phone, and edit it on your computer very easily), and charge a monthly hosting fee for keeping it on your site.

rank for the general term
mylocalwebsite.com/rhinoplasty/los-angeles

and then call all rhinoplsty surgeons and get them to purchase a featured listing for that particular ranking. If they are mentioned as the best surgeon in all of LA. They will get business, they will pay allot. I;m actually working on this right now.