Is this site rental package viable?

Definitely right. Sorry if I came across the wrong way here, but you're right in the end anyway - we can target the main cities here and do just fine.

You haven't given us enough information to let us know if that makes sense or not.

How many UV's a day is the site getting? What type of traffic can you expect?

If you're getting 10 UV's a day or 300 per month, and get a 5% conversion rate that means they get 15 leads per month. If they convert 25% of those leads that equals 4 new customers a month.

Now you have to figure out how much the lifetime value of that customer is to the customer. A roofer at $2,500 is quite a bit different than a nail technician at $200.

So without knowing your traffic figures, and without knowing your lifetime value I have no idea if $77/month makes perfect sense or it's too cheap or it's a complete rip off.

The biggest determining factor is the traffic the website gets. I rent sites that get as little as 2-3 UV's a day and still get $500/mo from the site(high transaction value customer) and have others that get around 70 UV's per day and only get around $300/mo for it.

You see there are a lot of variables.

A rule of thumb I use is I want them to get pay no more than 20% of their profit to rent my site. Profit is important rather than gross.

So let's look at a carpet installer. They might have a profit of $500 per install. And my site is going to get them 4 new clients a month. That means they are going to be making $2k per month profit. Which means my sweet spot needs to be around $400 a month. Make sense?

I have to revise downward with less traffic however. If the leads are less frequent, they might get po'ed if they spent the money and didn't get the results.

So again, a carpet installer, my site only gets them 2 new clients a month or $1k a month in profit. I need to probably be closer to $150 than $200. What I don't want to do is look for new clients very often, it's not the best use of my time. Keep in mind, I'm thinking of net profit, but I talk to them in gross. They probably are selling $2k of carpet and labor for that $500. So I talk to them about selling $8k of carpet a month for $400. They like those numbers.

It all comes down to ROI. If I can take a business owner and show them for every $20 they hand me, I'll give them $100 take home. They love that math. That's beautiful math to them. You have to be clear on your traffic, your conversion rates, their closing percentages and their gross and net numbers. Because I've had clients who couldn't close 10% of the calls I generated for them who quickly dropped out, and others who could close 75% of the leads. It makes for drastically different numbers.

So back to your question. I have no idea if $77/mo is a great rate, a crappy rate, or too cheap of a rate. I say it has less to do with the "services" you provide and more to do with the ROI you give them.

However with all of that said. I think $77/mo is pretty cheap too, and you might be able to get a business person to pay that regardless of whether they get the ROI or not. But if you're looking to maximize your return all the advice I gave above is vital. I personally don't bother renting for less than $200/mo. I still have some legacy clients at $75-$150, but it's not my bread and butter at the moment.

HTH,

Marcos

I disagree completely with having 1 page sites, for a bunch of reasons.

1. First off Google hates 1 page sites. They don't rank well, and it's pretty difficult to get it to rank for multiple phrases unless you're willing to do a lot of off-page SEO.
2. The clients don't have a lot of loyalty to the site. I build sites that look a heck of a lot better than their own site. So when I send them business cards with the new site on it, guess what they keep those cards and actually use them.
3. The effort to change the contact information on a website should cost you no more than $10 to get changed,even if the site is a 10 page site. I have ODesk employees that can get it done in about an hour at $2/hr.

Realistically it's all about client loyalty. I don't like to look for new clients, I like to keep the clients I already have. I want them to stay with me forever. I make sure they make money, love the site, love me and never want to go anywhere else. I treat it like giving them a turnkey method to bring customers in forever. I've had sites rented going on three years now, and I've doubled prices and not had them leave me.

And about renting them to restaurants, I don't think that's a viable model for a number of reasons. I think people either go looking for a specific restaurant name or they go looking for a type of restaurant but then want to find reviews about the restaurant. You'd have to build a very deep and complex site for it to have any value to a restaurant. You'd have to have it rank across many keywords, have the ability for customers to leave reviews. A one page restaurant site wouldn't rank, would provide negligible ROI. And lastly the profit margins on restaurants are usually very low. There are much more profitable things you can offer to a restaurant than a site rental. I'd prefer to focus on higher value customers.

I mean no offense my friend Dan, I just happen to disagree.

Marcos