Well im setting up a directory use as local listing, my city has only a poor few quality websites to show information about turist attractions and local biz.. As always im setting up the site and asking myself if this is really worth it ? Anyone with a successfull experience on local listings ? Its kinda hard to find good content or history on successfull local listings on the web. Share your taughts
the problem is that you will start a website and then expect users to come to it and list their businesses themselves it doesnt' work that way, you need to promote it, offline in local businesses for ex - do pamphlets, hire a marketing guy who will only goto shops, and put in their listing for free or pay people on a per listing basis ( some users, justdial.com is an excellent example for it, he paid just 0.04 cents an address) in just a few hundred dollars, he got thousands of listing to start. there are a million ideas on how to market your site, cpc an cpm is probably not one on the top ( on cost/roi basis)
It will take you months or even years to fill it up with actual, user-generated posts. I assume you will want to charge for featured postings (or something similar) as well, but who would want to pay for posts that won't get them any traffic / business? Google or Yahoo don't particularly care for directories, since they want to dominate that area themselves, so again, the chances of getting organic traffic from them are pretty slim. I would encourage you against getting into this, UNLESS, you just want to have it as a hobby for the next few years without any high expectations. Just for fun.