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How best to monetize my website?

What is the best way to monetize a niche based local search website /directory listing?

  • Planning to offer free membership as well as premium memberships. Premium listing appears on top and we help premium members grab more customers (bookings) though our website. Is this the right way?

  • Answer:

    I think this is a good strategy.  You want to have the free option to build your directory so that it is useful for users, but you certainly want to create an incentive for companies to pay via the premium placement option (much like Google's search platform).  You also may want to add lead forms and trackable phone extensions as a way to directly monetize leads.  Note, though, this strategy can be difficult in execution as it requires a constant sales effort and can see a lot of customer churn.

Matthew Ziser at Quora Visit the source

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Premium listings may not be quality listings.  It might be better to focus on quality of results and identify any premium ones with a tag.  What might be a bigger challenge is what differentiating factors do you have that will draw users to use your search.

Sripathi Ramadurai

If premium listings appear on top , how different it is from a online ad campagin ( faebook , adsense etc..) from a businesses stand point of view . If in reality you are looking to charge for listings to appear on top , then your site or service be a dman good one , one with loyal visitors .. ex checkout http://campusfood.com , while they do not have premium listings , sell ad space on their website.. while they do send orders they take a huge commission and restaurants while pay high commissions do get a good number of orders ..

Lavisha Mirpuri

If you're confident that you can offer value to advertisers why not offer the first month at a discount to encourage them to trial your directory? Other than just servicing a niche I'd be trying to find some other value add for users and advertisers. Your booking system might be a good area to look at.

Steve Willats

Pol Tajani

Niches can be hard to monetize, but a good way to do it is to offer a free listing and then market an upgraded listing (a paid listing) that includes more marketing options and additional features.If you find that you're not selling much of those paid listings, though, you could monetize through niche ads using Google AdWords.If you want some ideas of what to offer, we have some in a recent blog we wrote: http://businessdirectoryplugin.com/marketing-strategies/paid-or-free-how-to-determine-your-directorys-setup/

Dave Rodenbaugh

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