The recipe for a $200K per year job

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Interesting idea. Although when I look at various serps I see a google maps with restaurants in the area. Now you could maybe get in there using smaxors local search idea to break into that but if I was a business I would hope to be ranekd first. From all the test searches I did there aren't any "pages" that rank above google maps.
 


bubbles said:
Interesting idea. Although when I look at various serps I see a google maps with restaurants in the area. Now you could maybe get in there using smaxors local search idea to break into that but if I was a business I would hope to be ranekd first. From all the test searches I did there aren't any "pages" that rank above google maps.
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If you want to be on the very top for your example "West-Lafayette IN chinese restaurant" then use PPC ... noboby else is and it will only cost you .05c a click. You can charge the business a PPC management fee.
 
pretty sweet idea. I'd been putting something together similar to this, and you posted just enough for me to go ahead and launch.
 
Wicked Ice said:
900 is too cheap, you fool! don't fucking spoil the market.
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Eloquently put Ice. The market can't be spoiled here, at least it's not reasonably feasible. A niche might though. I don't recommend you all run out and do the restaurants. I was using that as a case study. Pick something else. Auto dealerships might pay $3,997 for such a service, since they can recoup that cost with ONE new customer they get.

I've experimented with a variety of pricing, from $100 on up to several thousand. I have found $900 or $897 to be more precise, to be the magical number for most things. It's far enough away that people don't think it's a $1,000 which is a killing point for a lot of businesses.

Certainly you are welcomed to charge anything you think you can get. Larger cities may allow you to bump the price up.

I wouldn't go too much lower then, only because it cheapens your value. You want people to perceive what you offer as high value. You could even offer it at $1897 with a HOLIDAY rate of $897.

But the best selling tool of all is the scarcity tactic. "If you don't pick it up, one of your competitors will, and they'll get all this traffic. Everybody is switching over from the phone book to Google. Blah Blah Blah"
 
I played in the local space for a long time in the Minneapolis market. It's tough stuff. Perhaps, as the marketer and not the merchant, I didn't realize the full benefits, but my major road blocks were this:

It's very hard to rank better than the authoritative sites in the local search space. CitySearch, Yahoo Local, InsiderPages, etc., all rank very well for all sorts of terms.

More importantly though was the fact that you are competing with Google itself. Do a search for Chinese Restaurant Minneapolis and you'll see that the first half of the page is dominated by Google; this happened on thousands of phrases that I was trying to rank for. Getting into the top 5 wasn't generally a problem, but Google's proprietary result (whatever you want to call it) is always on top.

Either way, I think you've given a great example on how to make some money with Local, which as I stated is pretty hard if you're not the merchant.
 
aim said:
I played in the local space for a long time in the Minneapolis market. It's tough stuff. Perhaps, as the marketer and not the merchant, I didn't realize the full benefits, but my major road blocks were this:

It's very hard to rank better than the authoritative sites in the local search space. CitySearch, Yahoo Local, InsiderPages, etc., all rank very well for all sorts of terms.

More importantly though was the fact that you are competing with Google itself. Do a search for Chinese Restaurant Minneapolis and you'll see that the first half of the page is dominated by Google; this happened on thousands of phrases that I was trying to rank for. Getting into the top 5 wasn't generally a problem, but Google's proprietary result (whatever you want to call it) is always on top.
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Well, like I stated above you can get them to the very top with PPC... charge them a PPC managment fee per month.

How happy do you think a restaurant owner would be to see themselves ranked at the very top?

For just .05c a click you can drive more customers and more $$ into their business. These are results you can "guarantee" ;)
 
The son of one of my friends works for a company that sell "get your real estate website on the first page of google" for $3000. His kid sells 3 a day. One guy in their office does 5-10. From the way he described it, their company gets a #1 listing and then you go to their website, do a search for the city or zip code. I was amazed that people were paying for this but they are. Big company, several phone salesmen.

It will be interesting to see how many of the people "who had the same idea" actually do anything with it.
 
posted by aim
More importantly though was the fact that you are competing with Google itself. Do a search for Chinese Restaurant Minneapolis and you'll see that the first half of the page is dominated by Google; this happened on thousands of phrases that I was trying to rank for. Getting into the top 5 wasn't generally a problem, but Google's proprietary result (whatever you want to call it) is always on top.
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You could always think of something to offer those guys in the top Google-owned slot. Also: larger metros like the Twin Cities may be a bad example for going to the direct local results (eg. "Minneapolis") but what about all those smaller cities and towns around it? "chinese restaurant bloomington" for example, pulls up Google Local results for Bloomington, Indiana, but in the regular search it has both IN and MN results. Getting at the top of the regular search results there could be useful to a restaurant or business in Bloomington MN (of course, I pulled Bloomington as the first place I saw on the map - for all I know it's a giant golf course with six houses around it, but simply using it as an arbitrary example here.) Taking the idea out further: Brooklyn Park does bring up GL results for that city in MN, but most of the regular results are for Brooklyn NY ... Plymouth brings up results for Plymouth, England ... Eagan and Burnsville do hit the right GL results ... so just using a few cities around the Twins its a mixed bag of results, but opportunity to hit the Bloomington and Plymouth areas in particular seem to be abundant. Frank
 
Nice post. I have a site with restaurant listings and it brings in 200-800$. I just target an area with some shopping malls and corporate offices.

An owner wanted to do a promotion with coupons on my site. I set it all up, but the owner felt it did not work since not many turned up with his coupons and he declined to pay my costs. Looking at my stats, I could see my coupon page was downloaded enough times.So, I ran the same promo, but this time asking the patrons to write a wacky code ("Redskins..all the way") behind the bill. This time , enough number of patrons wrote this code behind their bill for the owner to be convinced that the patrons were coming off my site and he renewed.

My hunch was right: people might decide to go to a restaurant on the spur, or might have forgotten they had a coupon etc etc.All I wanted was a way to let the owner realize his ad $$ were not being wasted.
 
Nice post. Can you give us a good reference or point us in the right direction for learning how to get top ranked listings on google?
 
I got tricked and thought the above comment was Sup3rnova and thought... would he really ask that??? Then I had to look at the name again.

Funny how my brain just subconsciously associated the name w/ his site.

uberaffiliate said:
Nice post. Can you give us a good reference or point us in the right direction for learning how to get top ranked listings on google?
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Wow, I can't believe I missed this the first time around. Thanks a lot for the post. Just another great idea to look into.
 
so do you create a site then sell the site to them and they can do what they want with the site+domain?
 
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