Has anyone done well with regional/geo sites?

[DomainAngel]

Haha only registered last week no uk, but I guess another feature site that will do well.

If you can sell a link or banner which they used to to a business why not have the same marketing company sell to another web site that runs off it. Could see one advertiser paying for several links easily.

Like anything the key is to just do it.

Any geo holders that want an office set up, staff recruited let me know lol

 

[wonder_lander]

Hi @TallBloke can you explain your setup for this?

I also use mailchimp (free on my current volume of activity - 711 subscribers) to email out the RSS feed from my site - quite a few readers like to receive updates that way. That's currently a full feed - maybe that should use snippets instead? 60% open rate is average over last few months.

We've done a few manual monthly newsletters but a nice RSS roundabout would be useful I think.

 

[TallBloke]

@wonder_lander Been a while since I set one up but it's pretty straightforward. One thought for you though with a relatively high follower count is that you'll possibly hit the mailchimp limit of free emails sent. From memory it's 12,000/month so 1 email a month to 12,000 subscribers; 2 a month to 6,000 etc

You setup a subscriber list(s) within mailchimp and create a campaign that uses your RSS feed from your site. If you've got an existing email list you can import that of course. You can create multiple campaigns based upon filters applied to a subscriber list.

Design your email layout from one of the templates. Configure it to push to the subscriber list on a set frequency 1/day or 1/week etc and it'll push the RSS feed out in email format. Check, but I don't think mailchimp likes affiliate adverts within emails.

Add a form on your site to get more names & email addresses. I use studiopress and there's a specific plugin but there'll be others for woocommerce etc I'd imagine.

Competing services such as campaignmonitor will no doubt offer similar features.

Hope that helps.

John

 

[Edwin]

Aweber is another possibility when you're evaluating email newletter distribution services. Especially if you'd have to pay anyway with the anticipated number of subscribers, because you wouldn't be comparing free to paid.

 

[wonder_lander]

Thanks, we've only got about 1500 on our email address list though it's not difficult for us to build that with a little push.

Will certainly evaluate the costs of each when it becomes a paid service!

 

[martin-s]

Have a look at Sendy. Self hosted, emails through Amazon SES - cheap as chips.
https://sendy.co/

Our mailing list is ~40k and costs are about $5-10 each month. Will handle much greater volumes than that though.

 

[martin-s]

Deliverability is good - assuming your email template is.

 

[dog]

So it's better to do a tourist travel site with a killer Geo?

I used to own malta.com. I earned virtually no money off the local market - it all came from affiliates via car hire and hotel bookings, and foreign adverts. If I was living those years again I wouldn't even try to cater for the people actually in the geolocation (not worth the time and staff) I'd just have information about the place and make money from people outside the area coming into the area. That also had natural traffic so not much work was needed. I guess it would depend on the strength of your geodomain and traffic flow as well as the type of location - eg sheffield is going to be harder to monetise than london.

 

[RobM]

I think tourist sites are better in that you have more to write about and people you can affiliate with.