You're about to discover why local websites are among the quickest and easiest ways to create a real online business, and how to get one started successfully in less time, and for far less money, than you might think.

From: Paul Myers
Publisher, TalkBiz News

Welcome!

If you follow any of the online business discussion boards, you've probably seen the buzz about local business portals. Even if you haven't, you've probably seen your share of local web sites, and thought that it might be interesting to create one.

That's a very good idea. In fact, the odds are you don't know the half of it. Let me tell you...

My first online business efforts were in 1995. (They tell me that makes me an old-timer.)

One was a direct response campaign for a national company that had a lot of competition. It did okay, but it wasn't anything to get excited about. These days we'd call it an affiliate deal, with a mediocre payout and conversion rate.

Like I said: no big deal, but it was profitable. Then the company dropped their online business.

*Poof* - So much for that income stream.

Ever been there?

The other deal I was working on at the same time was different. It was local. I set it up myself, in a conversation that took less than 10 minutes. Creating the web page and the form to promote it took less than an evening.

That one didn't generate a lot of sales every day either, but the conversion rate was high and the payout was $75 per sale. And it took just about no time at all, once it was set up.

That one worked out very well, but the best part wasn't the money. It was knowing that if that deal went away, I could easily create more just like it. The formula is simple, and the pitch is as close to a no-pressure, no-brainer deal as you can offer a business. It's a true "No Lose" proposition.

When I tell that story today, I hear the same thing from almost everyone: "That was okay for 1995, but competition now would make it a lot harder!"

Maybe. If you try and do it like everyone else does, it probably would be tough. But do it with a local audience, and it's as easy to make that deal work as it ever was.

That's one of the things I'd like to show you.

It's one of the reasons I believe that having a local component to your business, even if you focus primarily on global niches or larger markets, is a must these days.

And if you're just getting started online, it may be the answer to your prayers.

I'm not going to say it's the only option, mind you. If you have the skills and resources to deal with more complicated markets and promotional methods, and really enjoy the challenges involved with them, those are probably your best choice.

On the other hand, if you're looking more for something that's straightforward, inexpensive, fun and profitable, local is the way to go.

Let's look at a few of the advantages...

• Less Expensive: Local sites, especially in the beginning stages, don't usually require dedicated servers, fancy graphics, or staff to handle them. They can often be started with nothing but an inexpensive shared hosting account, a cheap (or free) website template, and off-the-shelf software.

  The reason for this is simple. Since you're local yourself, you're not seen as a "Big Company," unless that's the image you want to portray. You're not an outsider who has to prove yourself.

  You're "one of us." A neighbor. That's a huge advantage.

• Less Competition: In most cases, you will be the only person in your market running the type (or types) of site you choose to set up. What little competition there might be will rarely have any serious degree of marketing skills, so even a basic grasp of online marketing will put you way ahead of everyone else in your market.

  Combined with a low-key approach, this can put you in a nearly unbeatable position.

• Easier Promotion: Getting links to your site, optimizing for natural search engine traffic and building a membership are all much easier when you're dealing with a local audience.

  Along with that, it's easier to get word of mouth and develop viral campaigns when you're giving people something that's "close to home." Most people are more comfortable with the familiar, and that's a core part of the appeal of local sites.

• Better Response and Retention Rates: It's a lot easier to get people to take advantage of a special offer from a business they know than one off in some distant part of the country.

  Credibility is a major part of making any sale. A large part of that concern goes away when people know they're going to be dealing with someone they can pick up the phone and call, or who they may even have already done business with.

  Also, since your offers will invoke that sense of familiarity, you'll find that your unsubscribe rates will be lower.

• More Visitor Loyalty: Since you're all part of the same community, your visitors will be more comfortable interacting with you and with each other. That develops a sense of belonging more quickly than with distributed communities, and leads to a deeper connection with the group or the site.

  It's the old sales adage: People do business with people they know, like and trust. Being nearby makes it easier to develop all three of those qualifications.

• Access to Higher Paying Deals: There are a lot of deals you can set up with local businesspeople that will pay much better than most affiliate programs or online CPA deals.

  In the main book, I explain not only what kinds of deals you can arrange like this, but just how to do it so you get the best response.

  As you build up traffic and visibility, you'll find people coming to you, looking to get access to your audience. Knowing how to set those deals up for maximum profit for both sides is going to give you a big advantage over folks who don't know the tricks.

• More Income Streams: A local site has access to every revenue stream that's open to sites with a wider audience. It also makes certain income possibilities available that you might not have with those less-focused markets.

• Easier Growth Curve: It's easy to control the growth of a local site. You can slow it down if you like. You can also speed things up much more easily. And local audiences are more forgiving of glitches caused by rapid growth. They see it as something to be proud of.

  "Local boy (or girl) makes good" is a story they can all enjoy and support.

• Tons of Offline Benefits: If local sites had no other advantages over more distributed markets, this one alone would make them worth spending time on.

  Running a local site puts you in direct contact with people in your community. Those people will either share the same interests, or be in businesses which cater to or run along side those interests in some way. This can (and will, unless you deliberately avoid it) result in your making all sorts of useful connections with people in your community.

  Some types of sites, especially discussion sites and business portals, will give you personal access to people in every business and every walk of life in your area. This can give you an insider's edge in just about anything you choose.

  It's hard to overstate the advantages of that kind of access and personal interaction.

The big talk on the discussion boards is about city business portals. There's excellent money to be made with those, if that's the route you pick. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

You may want to focus on a special interest, or local culture or politics, or tourism and entertainment or... Well, pretty much anything that interests you.

In the book, I cover over 3 dozen different types of profitable sites you can start, with explanations of the advantages and revenue streams each makes possible.

Most of these sites can be started easily and built to profitability very quickly. That leaves you the option of creating networks of different sites, focusing on all sorts of aspects of your local community. This not only gives you more variety, it builds an unusual degree of stability into your business.

Local communities are also perfect for "Web 2.0" properties. When people already have a connection, expanding and strengthening it is easy. And the uses for a "MySpace"-type site where everyone lives in the same area are more direct and personal.

In such sites, the "groups" that form in more familiar social networking sites take on more of the aspect of a club. That takes the interaction and feeling of belonging to a whole different level. And that's just the beginning.

The book is called...

The book is designed to give you what you need to get started making money quickly, without a lot of hype or ridiculous promises. It's 96 pages of practical "how to," and 28 pages of resources you can use to cut your learning time, and your costs, to the bone.

It covers the whole process, including:

• Local vs Niche Sites: The pros and cons of each. They're very closely related, and everything in the book relates nearly as well to more traditional niche sites. There are differences that matter. I'll explain them briefly, so you can make the right choice for yourself and your success.

• Choosing a site type: You'll find out the real decision-making factors. There is no one answer that's right for everyone. Choose wisely, and you're good to go. Choose poorly, and you might as well go home.

• Developing loyalty: You'll discover a number of ways to take the natural tendency of people to be loyal to local businesses and expand that to the point that they become crazy evangelists for you and your site.

• Setting goals for your new site: You need to have benchmarks to measure your progress. I'll show you how to set them... and get them.

• What is the real value in any web property?: There's one thing that pretty much guarantees success for any web business. Focus on that, and the money will be there. Miss it, and you might as well be giving a speech in an empty room.

• The main features of a local site: What the options are, and how to choose the right ones for your site.

• Finding and creating powerful content: Your visitors are looking for content or connections. If it's content they want, you'll learn a number of very effective ways to get it or create it. Including one very simple and almost never used approach that will surprise you.

• Fun gimmicks and other viral tactics: A handful of content types that your visitors will gleefully forward to each other and their friends, driving more people to your site all the time. You'll also get ideas for getting your visitors to actually create your viral elements for you!

• Revenue models for local sites: Where's the money? I'll show you a number of the easiest and most profitable revenue streams you can use in a local site.

• Volunteers, and other crazy people: Every community has its share of nutballs. You'll learn how to spot them and get rid of them quickly. You'll also learn how to find, or develop, volunteers who will happily help build and maintain the site for you. For free. (This is one of the coolest parts of running a local site.)

• Local traffic techniques: I start off by pointing you to two very effective, but general, traffic building courses that you can get for free. (We're talking about hundreds of pages of commercial quality information here, not some cheap report written by a newbie researcher.) You'll then get an outline of very specific techniques for generating qualified local traffic, fast.

• The basics of building a membership: In this one, I stuck to the "down and dirty" basics. There are two areas of online business where people fail most often. This is one of them, and the failure is in not starting. I made this so simple there's no way to get confused, and no reason not to get started immediately.

• Writing for a local site: In this section, I give you the SHEESH Formula. 6 of the most effective and popular types of articles, and the outline to use for each.

• ... and tons more.

The brainstorming section, for example, includes 40 general examples of site types, along with lots of more specific types you can narrow down to. And there are cautions about things you have to watch out for in some of them.

There are explanations for types of deals and revenue streams that most people have never considered using for an online business.

I'm also going to include two separate resource directories. One is 18 pages of reviewed tools and services that can help get your product development efforts up and running fast, and for very little (if any) cash outlay. The other is 10 pages of resources specifically for the local site developer.

These two directories alone are worth the cost of this package. They'll save you hundreds, and possibly thousands, of dollars and untold hours of time, both of which are scarce enough for most beginning businesses.

They contain links to everything you'll need to design and build your site(s), create products, track your advertising, run your business, manage your contacts and much more.

And, of course, the obligatory, "Wait! There's more!" ...

One of the key elements of many local web sites is the use of blogs. I'm including two separate ebooks in this package designed to show you how to make your blogs more profitable, more quickly. By themselves, they're over 100 pages of tips from people making a killing with blogs.

Blogs and discussion forums and lists and a lot of other components of local sites are very database intensive. It's important to back up your sites, but most people never remember those databases - the most critical parts of their business.

To help with that, I'm including a copy of the "MySQL Database Backup Automator." This script can be used on as many sites as you own, and will automatically make backups of as many MySQL databases as you like, saving them as date-stamped zip files and emailing you links to download them.

Once you've set it up, making backups of your critical databases is as simple as clicking on the links and saving the files to your hard drive. If you've ever had a crash at your web host, you know just how valuable this sort of script is. It can literally be the difference between losing an entire business and turning potential disaster into a minor inconvenience.

This script normally sells, by itself, for as much as this whole package. And it's a steal at that price.

I mentioned building your membership as one of the two areas that are critically important and often ignored. The second is testing and tracking. I've got that covered, too. In this package, you'll find a program called Tracking Ace. This script is easy to install and use, and lets you track where your traffic comes from, what ads work and which don't, and more.

Along with those capabilities, Tracking Ace also lets you do split testing. You can direct people to a single URL and test two or three different pages from that traffic, to see which is the most effective. You won't have any reason at all to wonder if your pages are working as well as they could. Now you'll be able to keep improving them and building your business the smart way. By getting every bit of value you can from all your traffic.

Another challenge new folks have is keeping sites with different elements looking consistent. Other than plain web pages, the two most common scripts used in local sites are Joomla and Wordpress. So, I'm including a collection of 5 template packs, each with matching themes for HTML, Joomla and Wordpress pages.

You can easily customize or modify these templates by simply changing the header graphics used in them. You can use these to save a lot of time and money, as well as keeping your sites looking like they were all of one piece, rather than an assortment of different scripts and page layouts.

The final bonus is the "Simple 3-Step Membership Site System." This includes a clear, easy to follow explanation of how to set up simple membership sites, and the scripts needed to run them. (The script generator is Windows-Only. Sorry, Mac Folks.)

The scripts themselves allow you to run free memberships, single-payment memberships processed through Clickbank, or single or recurring payment memberships processed through PayPal.

This isn't an advanced membership system, but I know of people doing very well, running sites using nothing but this script and strategy to manage them.

If you know me, you know I don't like to pad my products with useless fluff and then charge a ton for the extra page count. I like to make sure people get their money's worth and then some. So...

You'll get the entire 124 page "Local Web Profits" system, plus the template packs, the blogging books, the testing and tracking script, the database backup automator, and the membership site system for only $47.

The bonus database backup script is worth more than that by itself.

This package is covered by my "100 Times The Value" guarantee. If at any time in the next 60 days you don't feel this package will make you at least 100 times your investment, let me know. I'll give you an immediate refund. Just that easy.

We all know that I can't guarantee how much money you'll make with this, if any. (Note the complete absence of specific dollar amounts or ranges anywhere in this page. You won't find them in the book, either.) I can't guarantee you won't lose money. That's business, and I don't know your skills or work ethic or any of the other things that can affect your results.

I absolutely do believe that any reasonably bright person who puts in a relatively little effort can do very well with this system. If you read it and you don't feel you can, or that you want to make the effort, you get your money back.

At this price, that's about as close to a no-risk situation as you're ever likely to see.

Get 'em while they're hot. And enjoy!

Paul Myers
paul@talkbiz.com