How To Get Everyone In Your Town Making Money For You

I accidentally discovered an opportunity that was hiding right in the blind spot under my nose. I'm going to exploit it in the new year, and I'm going to explain how right here. First, a bit of background... (I just hope nobody in my town is reading this!)

Over the past couple of years I've grown my little web design business to the point where a lot of business people in my town know me as "the website guy". I get referrals from my existing clients every week, and I make a comfortable living from it. (By the way, I'm not a GREAT web designer, but I can put a decent site together that does the job.)

I build websites for a one-off fee, and then keep the client locked in with a hosting subscription. It's a nice little set up that will bring in a couple of grand next year just from maintaining the hosting, so long as I keep all my customers happy and give them no reason to go elsewhere.

However, I've found it almost impossible to get many of the smaller businesses in my town on board. The people here are very cynical, many of them are complete dinosaurs - They either think I'm up to no good, or they don't even know what a website is. Trying to sell to these people is like trying to sell sand to the Arabs (funnily enough a Pakistani friend of mine owns a builder's yard in a mostly Asian-populated area of the city and does exactly that)!

Anyway, earlier this year I registered a domain which is the name of my town ".net", and began creating a local directory site. I listed all my local takeaways (pizza, Indian, Chinese etc), just their names and phone numbers. Around this time, my t-shirt printing business really took off so I had to concentrate on that, so the directory site was just left with one or two pages including this list of food takeaways - that's as far as I got. Completely unfinished.

Checking the stats of the directory site recently, I noticed that over the past few months I've been getting lots of searches for people looking for the phone numbers of the specific businesses listed on my site. This really got me thinking...

A full-on directory site is a lot of hard work, and this is a small town so there's a limit on its' moneymaking potential. However I now have an opportunity which I'm going to grab by the balls and turn into something. A lot of the locals here like to eat takeaway. There are few restaurants, but there are LOTS of cafes (10 in the tiny town centre alone, plus all the cafes on the trading and industrial estates), and countless evening takeaways (fish n chips, kebabs, Chinese etc). Those are my main target. Forget the daytime cafes, nobody looks online for those.

Now, the local directory site thing has been done thousands of times before, but I wanted to explain how I'm going to tackle this and turn it into a money maker for me. If I inspire anybody out there to have a go too, then that's great!

Phase 1 - Laying the foundations.
I've developed my site a little more. Installed Wordpress, along with a few handy plugins such as a banner rotator, a free classified ads plugin, and a link directory plugin (by the way "WOW".) These made my job SO MUCH EASIER. No code to write, just one-click installs. I also installed the All-in-one SEO plugin, which I think is pretty important if you want to control how your site looks in the search engine listings. I found a train journey planner widget and a local weather widget, which are basically extra great reasons for people to keep coming back to my site.

I now have a useful site that's ready to be populated with content.

Phase 2 - Raise some funds!
I'm going to visit all of the takeaways in the area, and offer to scan their menus and make them available for people to view on my website, since their customers are already coming to my site to find their phone numbers anyway. These businesses are used to paying out to get their menus printed, and a fortune to get them inserted in the local newspapers and leaflet mailings. I'll find out exactly how much they pay to get their leaflets delivered, and then come up with an attractive price for their menu listing on my site. They know they have to spend money to get their phones to ring, so it shouldn't be too difficult to get them to pull out their chequebooks.

Phase 3 - The launch.
With the money raised from the takeaways, I'll get a few thousands flyers printed. I'll also print some A4 posters in-house on my colour laser printer. The flyers & posters will sell the fact that locals can advertise their stuff for free (classifieds), and find the numbers of local takeaways & other businesses etc. I'll sell it as the most important site to set as your homepage if you live in this town. The starting point. "Keep it local" and all that.

These posters and flyers will be distributed in all the right places. They'll be seen in the waiting rooms of every doctors and dentists surgery, in the windows of as many shops as will let me (more about this later), in every pub and club, and community centre and church.... you get the idea. I'll take care of this personally, as it will give me the opportunity to meet all the people I'll be coming back to later to sell advertising space to. Before I go out on my rounds I'll type up a letter introducing myself and the site to business owners, just a little "pre-seller" giving them hints about the opportunity that lies ahead for them. My colleague has a young nephew who is saving up to by a bike - he'll be my leaflet delivery guy - delivering the leaflets through the doors of as many houses in the area as possible - in other words the mundane stuff! He'll appreciate the money, as well as the chance to completely wear out his old bike!

This awareness campaign will start bringing traffic to my site, hopefully in healthy numbers.

Phase 4 - Selling advertising
After around 1 month, I'll have some stats. I'll be able to say to prospective advertisers "I have X number of people coming to this site every day, and all of those people live in this town, so all advertising on this site is highly geographically targeted". The pre-sell letter I sent round a month ago will have prepared them for my visit and put them in the picture of what this is all about, plus they will have seen my posters and flyers around the town - people tend to trust what they've already "heard of". You might even be considered some kind of "celebrity" by the time they finally get to meet the guy behind all these fancy ads around the town - they'll want to hear what you have to say.

I've got another head start with this. I already have local businesses as website clients, so I'll design banners for them, and add these to the banner rotation plugin on my directory site. I'll create a page within my site for each of my existing clients, a simple page with their logo, a couple of photos, and the essentials about their business (what they do, opening hours, contact details etc). I have a couple of specialist stores in the town that this works particularly well for (organic butchers, haberdashery etc). The banners will be linked to the corresponding page for each business. These are the "samples" I will show to business owners in the town that haven't yet signed up. The prospect of having their own page on this site where everyone in the town goes to get local takeaway numbers, train timetables, doctors phone numbers etc etc will be attractive, I'm certain - especially when all these other local businesses have signed up. It does help when you have friends who own small businesses in the town! The cost of placing an ad in just one edition of the local newspaper starts at about £70 for a tiny ad. I'm looking at charging about £100 for 6 months. Not sure yet, I'll have to test/survey/ask my business owner friends what they feel is reasonable. The trick here is not to undervalue what you are offering, while still keeping it in reach of as many small cynical business owners as possible.

I have a t-shirt printing business which can also print window stickers, caps, flyers, cards etc, so there's my branding sorted. (If anybody out there reading this is getting inspired by my post, please feel free to contact me if you need help with this kind of stuff.)

You'll obviously need a certain amount of web design skills (Wordpress does most of the hard work), and you'll need to be well presented (I'm going to shed my long-haired unshaven image for a month or two!) and articulate if you want to sell to people who have absolutely no idea about the internet or its potential. There's obviously a ton of extra detail I could go into, but this should be enough to get anyone interested and started on what could become a pretty lucrative project. It can be really difficult to sell advertising, so I've given some tips here on how to have something to impress your prospects with (i.e. existing traffic coming to your site).