Full-scale development like PalmSprings.com or PigeonForge.com can be very rewarding, but it is also time consuming. These are full businesses, and they should be treated like full businesses with developers, marketing specialists, sales staff and office staff – either on the payroll or in a freelance position depending on the website and management company. These sites are difficult to develop and grow, but they are certainly rewarding once the strong foundation is built.
Some people don’t want to have those responsibilities even though they have good domain names, and there are opportunities for geodomain development on a smaller scale. If you have a strong geodomain name (.com, .net, .info…etc) but an actual city name, I would like to recommend a few steps to launching a scaled down version of a geowebsite that will have less upfront costs, and it will be similar to what I did for Secaucus.com – which I continue to build out every day.
1) Do keyword research to see what people are looking for in the city (directions, weather, hotels, restaurants, homes…etc)
2) Contact a domain development service, find a nice free template, or create your own design template
3) Find photos of the city using a royalty-free stock photo site or Creative Commons site like Wikipedia
4) Write several articles targeting the keywords you found for your research
5) Place your articles in your template and add meta description, keywords, and titles to target those keywords and keyword variations
6) Add Adsense or other monetization option if desired
7) Add Google webmaster tools tag to your site and make sure it’s included in Google, Yahoo, MSN…etc.
8) Contact related websites asking for link exchanges
9) Contact local businesses offering inexpensive advertising placement
I’ve found that one of the biggest drivers to my geowebsites is mentioning local businesses. For example, if you add free listings for lawyers in the area, some people will find your site when searching for that lawyer. As I’ve been told, however, it’s much more difficult to get an advertiser to pay for a listing once they’ve received it for free. If you plan to build your site into a larger site down the road, this might not be a good option.
While I believe a fully developed site is of much more value, some smaller towns or non-touristy towns may not bring a huge return if they are fully developed. Building a mini-site can be a better option to build traffic to the site and bring a nice return – especially if you have a non-.com that wasn’t as expensive as the crown jewel .com. By adding pages daily, you are increasing the reach of your site at a convenient pace. Sometimes building a huge website can sound daunting, but if you do it slowly, it may be more rewarding.
