Town sites?

[monaghan]

I own the .org (the .co.uk is owned by the council and the .org.uk has had a simple holding page for years and the owner won't sell) for my home town and have a very simple site presently.

I'd thought of a simple local news site and perhaps a local trade directory.

Does this sort of thing generate much income / interest? Not expecting to get rich, but would be nice to generate a bit more than present

 

[Bluetram]

(the .org.uk has had a simple holding page for years and the owner won't sell)

I take it your interested in the .org.uk.
You say the owner won't sell. Judging by the holding page I presume you have made an offer that wasn't accepted.
If you did, maybe you should up the stakes a little. .org.uk is becoming next best thing to co.uk and .com in uk geo names...just take a look round the web.

 

[RSK3000]

The answer depends on the size of the town and where it is located. The best money is to be made by selling ad space on your site, or selling directory listings. If there is tourism, hotels/ b & bs might be your best bet.

I suggest you read this and this five part article starting here to get some tips about what others are doing.

Whats the town?

 

[namealot]

Depends a lot on what the town is really coastal, holiday resorts, commuter towns, industral town etc
E.g.
Eastbourne: Has some industrial trading estates, it is essentially a seaside resort and derives its main income from tourism.

Crawley: Large industrial area supports industries and services, many of which are connected with the airport and the commercial and retail sectors.

There populations are much the same but who you targeted for advertising would be quite different you can make a few k quite easy enough a lot will depend on your abilities sales skills etc.

Do research first if its out of UK tourist/business find out were there majority of the visitors/clients/customers come from if it were germans going to London you could also approach german coach firms etc ( which you may find easier as less people would be approaching them ?) which helps expand potential advertisers and does not just limit you to the town and also helps when approaching hotels, restraunt, bars clubs etc in the target town to say btw I have advertiser who brings in x number of potentail customers for them every week...? Also it does not matter so much about the cctld as germans it would be .de .com .eu .co.uk and is much the same for many european countries...

 

[monaghan]

Thanks guys, some food for thought, looks like it will be worth my efforts to finish what I started on this site a few years back.

 

[retired_member34]

Alex, there are a lot of people puzzling on this problem at the moment, I know of 7 people on this board (disclosure: this includes myself, in case my signature links did not give it away!) that are building or planning to build businesses on them, but they are unproven as yet.

If you are really interested search for #hyperlocal on Twitter. Most of the discussion involves news sites but the question is the same, how to make revenue from a local site? Also look out for Jeff Jarvis, the Talk About Local Unconference (TAL10), Philip John ...

 

[lwoody]

Town Sites

Hi monaghan

I invested in my first domain about 5 or 6 years ago...Mumbles.co.uk for £750, my mates thought i was mad but it's paid off. As a result of that domain i've developed www.Citys.info which is a tourism platform that can be run on any geo domain. Each site varies on revenue but it's the same old: the more you put in the more you get out. The adsense CTR is 1.5%+ (i managed to double it by improving the integration) and i average about £3.30-£4.00 eCPM. On top of that there's hotel commission on bookings and premium ad slots on the right of the pages.

Im in the middle of developing Whitelabelhotels.co.uk which is a white label hotel solution for existing or new urls. It's starting to generate a few bookings. If any of you have geo's and think might work on this or likewise citys.info let me know. All the white label hotel sites are fully functional they are just not styled yet.

Lee

 

[woopwoop]

I run Morecambe and I have a bunch of London Suburbs domains which the plan is to slowly roll out.

With somewhat minimal tweaking of a config file I should be able to completely rebrand the locations and still keep the main modules:
blog
forum
map
gallery
directory

Here are the two I've done so far:
Acton Town
Beckton Park

They could both probably do with some RSS feeds into the forum.

 

[springer]

I suppose the main elements that you could put on a local site are already covered in some way by the big players.

EG:

Get news: local newspaper sites, BBC
Buy/rent a house: RightMove
Get a job: Local newspaper sites, JCP, Monster, Job Site
Find a business: Yell, bestof, free index
Order Takeaway: Just-Eat
Somewhere to stay: Laterooms, cottages4u
Sell Locally: FreeAds, eBay, Gumtree

Having said that there have been reports of local sites doing well - if you get the right area and do the right thing.

 

[Edwin]

I'm going to be building a custom in-house platform later in the year to put on Maps.co.uk and Britain.co.uk

 

[retired_member34]

How not to do it lessons-from-a-com-geo-domain-hyperlocal-meltdown/ - a city site now closing that was set up by domainers (that own jobs.ca amongst others).

 

[retired_member34]

Some very local sites that launched this week:

http://kingsroad.co.uk/
http://fulhamroad.co.uk/

They have others too.

 

[doodlebug]

Are street name domains worth developing ?

 

[retired_member34]

Are street name domains worth developing ?

Well known street in London perhaps, the high street in Abercwmtwp probably not.

 

[doodlebug]

I would love to have had Oxfordstreet;co;uk

I could have regged Manchesterroad;co;uk 2 years ago but left it, that road in Manchester is several miles long.

Maybe I should have invested £7

Good luck with yours

I like your Geos, .com aswell, I think Cwmbran as a population of about 50k so a good audience, I own 2 Manchester towns on .com with populations 10k and 18k

 

[RSK3000]

You can't blame the failure of the newspaper in Kelowna on their choice of domain name.

I do think that geodomains can make good money, but you need to keep overheads low and be prepared to get out and get paying advertisers.

This article about .com geodomains is a bit old but still very interesting
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/060116thompson/

 

[WestHamFan]

There's also the potential of listing local eBay auctions too.

 

[monaghan]

There's also the potential of listing local eBay auctions too.

I'd thought of that, but my ebay affiliate account stopped working and I can't get any useful response and I'm unable to get signed up again - On the to-do list!

 

[kendalcottages]

I've run one or two town/village sites that have made in the region of £1-2K a year. http://www.grasmere.com would be an example.

 

[lwoody]

impressive

That's impressive revenue from that site. Are you charging hotels/bandb's to be on the website because i can't see any adsense.

over and out

Lee