Jun 24

Written by:
6/24/2010 

I'm in charge of selling ads and monetizing the traffic at Louisville.com.  Since our content is centered on places where consumers spend time and money (attractions, museums, restaurants, hotels, etc.) it makes sense that I focus on advertisers in these categories to make us profitable.  Most, if not all of these ads will include a link to another website. 

But should they?

There are a million and one "city directory" websites that include information (accurate or not) on nearly every business in existence.  These sites have been set up for customer reviews, mapping, and basic contact information whether the business owner knows about the page or not - plus they're well optimized for search engines.  Some of these sites aggregate reviews and information from all the OTHER directory pages. 

All of this data is set up so the consumer has every piece of information they need to make a decision on where they're spending their hard-earned money.  Smart business owners will take control of those pages and address any feedback they receive on them. Most do not.  They prefer to either focus on their own usually poorly constructed website that nobody visits.

Our solution at Louisville.com is to borrow the concept from the Castello brothers who own and make a crapload of money with www.palmsprings.com.  Their system of building simple but informative pages is working so well that they're advertiser retention rate is off the hook.  They know that sometimes linking to a restaurants website goofs up the transaction so they hesitantly link if they do at all.

The gist of this is that independent local restaurants have plenty of alternatives to building and managing their own websites in a fraction of the time and effort they're expending on worrying about it. The bottom line is to get butts in the seats and mouths chewing on the food.

One well constructed and managed page living in Louisville.com or any other content focused website or in one of these city directory sites can easily do the trick.

Just food for thought.