Shuhaib Shariff

In the first part of this series, I’ve touched upon why the current geodomain development model is flawed and doesn’t really maximize the returns on high quality geodomains.
Before suggesting a better model, let us first understand who our target audience in a geodomain business is: I’d say it’s primarily the residents of the city.

Reason:
Take the example of Denver.com. Who do you think cares more about the city … tourists / travellers OR Denverites? Who needs regular updates on stuff happening in and around the city … tourists / travelers OR Denverites? Who has the ALL important: emotional connect with the city … tourists / travellers OR Denverites?
Clearly, it makes business sense to focus on local residents, because it’s easier to engage them on a long term basis … the emotional connect is difficult to achieve with anybody else.

Local residents are looking for commercial content on city portals. They’re looking to discover & explore local businesses online. Don’t believe it? Check this:

“Research shows that consumers typically spend about 80 percent of their income within 50 miles of their homes, and that about 30 percent of all Internet searches are commercial in nature. In fact, fully one quarter of all searches on the Internet are for both local and commercial content. These consumers are the crown jewel of search because they typically convert into buyers at a higher rate than any other type of online search traffic. As a result, advertisers often pay a premium to place their ads in front of consumers conducting local searches. Researchers forecast that a growing number of local businesses will begin to advertise their products and services through online search in order to reach these highly valuable consumers.”
– Source: Local.com

Next, we need to understand the needs & content consumption patterns of local residents. What do they expect from their local city portal? What will bring them back every day? How do you differentiate your offering from the BIG boys: Yahoo!, Yelp, AOL OR the city’s local newspaper website? How do you monetize?

One can categorize Local CONTENT into TWO types:

1) Content for everyday / frequent consumption
Local News, Reviews, Events, Alerts, Weather, Photos & Videos.

2) Content for Need-based consumption
Local Classifieds, Real Estate, Movie Listings, City Offers, Jobs, Yellow Pages, Online Shopping, Forums, Flight Status, etc.

It is important that content on a geodomain / city portal is highly localized. By including national or international content you will end up competing for eyeballs with Yahoo!, AOL, etc.  By all means that is a losing proposition! Stick to your niche: LOCAL

Monetization:
Geodomains need out-of-the-box thinking. Slapping together Adsense & generic banners (credit cards, insurance, web hosting, etc.) doesn’t help (unless you get millions of impressions each day) Considering that the traffic to geodomains may be significant but not gigantic, generic CPC/CPM advertising is generally a bad idea.

In the next part of this series, I will share some monetization ideas and divulge the secret of building high quality content on geodomains at very low costs.

PLUG! – Platform for building local (city) portals: http://doublespring.com/localengine/