Is This Something You Might Be Interested In?

Snooze

SallyUK wrote: »

Rob

I've not set out to be in competition against Ebay or Yell - these two sites have not once given me what I've been looking for whenever I've searched in the past. You cannot see at a glance what is available in each local area. Some sites give you a long list of unrelated rubbish when you do a search.

I'm not aware of Yell or Ebay, donating any % of their adverts to charity etiher or offering people the chance to earn some money for themselves??

So because YOU don't think it will work, and because YOU don't like the URL, does that mean that I should just give up! lol.

Remember I'm not allowed to give out the details of the website on MSE, but because you're an expert, you set out to find it all by yourself.

Because YOU don't like it, there's no reason to rubbish it.

I'm continuing to work on the site on a daily basis, so you never know, one of these days, it might just be to your liking, eh?

Thanks for your comments anyway.

Sally

I admire your intentions and determination but the odds are heavily stacked against you succeeding with your goals and I have tried to illustrate this in my previous posts. I just don't want to see you putting so much time and effort into something that isn't going to work unless you drastically alter your "business plan" and sink a HUGE amount of cash into marketing it and SEO in order to get you on the search engines' collective radars.

Rob

SallyUK

Thanks Rob

I have plans! lol

Sally
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Oliveru

SallyUK wrote: »

Now for the good part. I plan to donate 70% of each advert to charity, 20% to people who help me promote the site and get the adverts for it, and 10% will be used for the upkeep and maintenance, advertising, all the things that go with running a website. The people who pay to place the adverts can nominate the charity if they so wish.

I think you kind of missed the point of advertising. People want to advertise on a site which gets MILLIONS of visitors everyday.

So first of all no one is going to want to advertise on your website until you get those millions of visitors and secondly donating 70% of all your revenue to charity is silly because you already have the uphill battle of needing to spend millions of pounds on advertising to persuade people to want to visit your website in the first place.

There are already many websites which target adverts based on content, age, sex, area etc so what makes you think people will want to use yours?

I'm not being rude I'm just being completely honest with you as thats the only way you learn anything in business, if I was too busy being polite I wouldn't be able to make points like these!

There is a lot more to business than being able to sell on Ebay and the idea your proposing (whilst good in theory) is difficult to implement as it's own vehicle and really only something that can be added to an existing site which gets lots of traffic like Google. Not to mention this particular market is cut throat, but then many are these days.

Even though I think your site idea is a lost cause, if you really really have to do it then at least make it free to use otherwise no one will want to advertise on it anyway. It's pretty much a glorified directory site (there is tons of those). So make it free and you can get income from advertising revenue with google Adsense etc.

ali-t

sally, I would like some information regarding advertising and also recruiting others to the site. Thanks.

save-a-lot

Snooze wrote: »

I don't even know why I'm even bothering to waste my time replying to this but your argument is so flawed it's beyond belief.

You say that you've never seen such a website where you can search by region and Sally's is the first of its kind. !!!!!!?! If you truly believe that then you have absolutely no idea of how to use the internet. To use your own example about Yell, there is a very clear box at the top of the page that you type your location in to or all or part of your postcode which, when you click the search button brings up all the businesses in your area. :rolleyes: And so does every other e-directory out there (all 10,000+ of them :rotfl: ). I mean, have you even looked on google to see what the competition is? Type in "business directory" and watch google churn out 111 million results.

If you disagree, please show me which of the major directories that people know about do not let you search by location. I am waiting...

I'm all for supporting great ideas and helping them along but as mentioned before, this one just won't work because of the existing competition. Furthermore, the site looks like it's been designed by a 2 year old and URL is far too long. Do you really think people would type in blah-blah-blah.com when looking for something or ebay.com or yell.com? The URL is short and easy to remember for a reason...

I've been in the eCommerce business for nearly 10 years and see this kind of idea on a near-daily basis; believe me it won't work.

Rob

Hi

I agree with Snooze, the idea is by no means new, there are national, regional versions of this, also niche and wide appeal versions and lots of free places to advertise too - see "directory critic" for lists of every type of directory.

Also, savvy advertisers will take everything into consideration and design is one of them. Advertisers want to be associated with websites with a presence and that are well designed and get LOTS of visitors. It will be an uphill struggle and a vicious circle so why not consider using something like phpmydirectory whilst you are at these early days of your business to give yourself a bit more of an edge. A professional directory such as myphpdirectory has SEO friendly URLs, is database driven, has Locations, Categories, sub-categories, sub-sub-categories etc etc etc, levels of membership, basic advertiser, bronze, silver, gold (and any other levels of membership you choose to add), it has the option to show google or yahoo maps that show the location of the business and does this by using their post code, reviews, ratings etc etc etc... all for not alot of money. It would make the whole site more interactive, I believe there is a hack for voucher codes too, and this could be your way of tracking the promoters you are paying. But remember, the cost of the off the shelf developed directory is not mega-bucks, so that is an indication that EVERYONE is having a go at doing similar things which means they can sell their script cheap.

A good thing to do is try ukbusinessforums or teneric.co.uk/forums or aardvarkbusiness forums for some UK focussed feedback on the business idea and get some feedback on the website itself.

Some feedback I have is, one link states 'regions' whereas the page shows 'places'. In my opinion it would have been better to show counties on this page linking out to pages on their own /index.htm page, i.e.
yourdomainname.com/cheshire/index.html
yourdomainname.com/derbyshire/index.html
then on these pages listing out the towns and villages per county. It is not extensive enough for interested advertisers as most towns are missing. Nobody knows that extra towns can be added, so potential advertisers by navigate away as there is no place or category to list in.

I am not wanting to come across over-critical but I am trying to offer some advice based on what I know from experience of doing similar.

SallyUK

ali-t wrote: »

sally, I would like some information regarding advertising and also recruiting others to the site. Thanks.

Hi Ali

PM on it's way to you too.

All other comments duly noted, thanks.

Sally
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mizmir

Like the charity angle. Please pm me more details.

Former_MSE_Andrea

Hi

While it's a bit late, just so the Board Guides know, SallyUK does have permission.

Andrea

skintmostofthetime

Remember - nothing ventured - nothing gained. What have you to lose?
Go for it girl. !!

SallyUK

mattafc wrote: »

I'd be interested to have a look, can you drop me the details

Hi Mattafc,

I've sent you a PM, hope you got it ok.

Sally
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