I'm not actually looking for a review, rather advice about where to go with this web site. I started a web site on the little town I live in. My idea was that I could get local businesses to advertise their business on my site. Charge a small annual fee. Here's a sample of what the business owner would get...I did this page for free for a local nursery. The jerk didn't even say...thank you! http://www.grenada-ms-business-directory.com/cedar-creek-nursery.html Here's my business listing pitch page... http://www.grenada-ms-business-directory.com/businessdirectory.html I've spent the last six months personally contacting business owners in town about listing their business in my local business directory. I don't know where to start...except to say, the majority of business owners were rude, uninformed and generally didn't see any purpose in advertising their business on my site. They had rather pay $1500 a year for a little rectangle ad in the Yellow Pages. The last few months I've been offering local business owners a free full page listing. FREE, I said. Only to be rudely told "I'm Not Interested" OK, I can see these morons around here are still living in the "Ice Age". So what now. I invested all this work for nothing. I need desperately to salvage this site. I though about rewriting the home page and broaden my business directory statewide. Redo my nav bar and group all the general content on my hometown into one section on the nav bar. Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated.
Thats a shame, no businesses are interested. It's a nice looking site. if you could show businesses it was getting a lot of visitors maybe that would persaude them.
These folks don't care. I'm telling you they are narrow minded, rude, uppity with a small town mentality that they don't like to see anyone succeed or prosper except themselves. I did a free page for a lady who is "president of the retail association" here in town. I asked here to write up a description and information on her business. She took a yellow piece of legal pad paper and wrote down the business name and listed about 30 individual products. I had to write all the "Copy"myself. I called her and told her I had her listing done and asked her to review her listing and let me know if everything was ok....I never heard back from her!
There are too many advertising choices out there and most small business owners are always being solicited for advertising. Many of those are pressure sold. I don't know that there is an answer. . You could let the site sit and move on to another project with a different domain name and host it in the same hosting account. Maybe in time the locals will catch up to your thinking. No matter what you choose you are only going to get a very small % of buyers for all the people you pitch. The wider you cast the net, the more likely you will catch a fish or two.