Need your comments on my website idea

testyy · Jul 27, 2014

I live in Edinburgh and I decided to create a website about this city that I enjoy living in. A lot of tourists come here especially at this time to see our festivals and explore our culture. It's a small town and I decided to create a website for everyone who needs any info on where to go etc.
So in the menu there could be things like Bars/Restaurants/Pubs and their ratings. I wanted to add hotels also but thought I would never outrank websites like trip advisor etc. These keywords only have 1k monthly searches so I think it's a bit hard to monetize it. How else can I monetize? Advertise products like "This is a great show -> Buy tickets now" and an article about it? I was also planning on contacting every nightclub in Edinburgh and asking them to pay me to increase their rating/position on my website?

If you needed an idea for your website, then there you go, make one about your city/town, as long as you don't live in Edinburgh

. So what do you think? How should I monetize it, what content should I have? ( I also considered adding different sports that you could do here) . And what do you think overall?

Gabri · Jul 27, 2014

I would do what you said. Write reviews of pubs, restaurants, hotels and get visits. Once you have some traffic contact that restaurants, pubs and hotels and show them your numbers. Ask them a fixed amount of $ to keep them in your website and make them understand you are bringing them clients.

I would like to do that just for hotels for my city

I already have domain name.

testyy · Jul 27, 2014

Gabri said:
I would do what you said. Write reviews of pubs, restaurants, hotels and get visits. Once you have some traffic contact that restaurants, pubs and hotels and show them your numbers. Ask them a fixed amount of $ to keep them in your website and make them understand you are bringing them clients.

I would like to do that just for hotels for my city I already have domain name.

Are you going to use wordpress? If so what theme would you recommend?

Duffers5000 · Jul 27, 2014

You build the site first. Use a yellow pages scraper to list every possible business/service in the city(you will soon find out Edinburgh is not that small !)

You then rank the site and select 3-5 business's in each category for a featured listing. You do this all free for a year or so until you are established and then you are in a position to monetise it.

rangerOH · Jul 27, 2014

what about adding traveling agency.
write a book about what best places to visit "like a torrist guide" and sell it in amazon
stop limiting your self, and stop fearing other websites.
just do your thing man
and then after u get some cash, buy seo service for a year or something

p.s: ik for a fact one the famous travel agency in Romania started this way

redrubies · Jul 28, 2014

You should also have a section on free things to do and keep the events calendar updated. Then you can have a form where people submit their events. Not only will you attract tourists, but residents also like to read events calendars to find free things to do.

qrazy · Jul 28, 2014

As others mentioned, you first have to build the site. And you'll have to do everything for free until the time your site actually adds any value to those businesses listed. When you reach that level, you can start charging the businesses to feature them on homepage or on the top of the category listings. Also check if there's any competitors who does this and try to do be different from them.

testyy · Jul 28, 2014

webmaze · Jul 28, 2014

testyy · Jul 28, 2014

Yeah I need to get to that stage first. Can anyone recomend any good wordpress themes/plugins for this? I found Atlas theme to be the best, can't post links. What do you guys think?

VoidITSolutions · Jul 28, 2014

Reach out to companies (bars, restaurants, etc) in your area and try to work out a deal where they pay you to have them advertised on your site to the tourists.

redrubies · Jul 29, 2014

Charliechuckles · Jul 29, 2014

Regarding content, how about a weekly 'top five things to do in Edinburgh this weekend', there is a Manchester site that does this well. I can imagine it attracts advertising from companies wanting to be featured and promote their event.

JournoNick · Jul 29, 2014

I've done this before. You need to put together a small marketing plan (just a basic one) that will outline your costs and an expected return on your investment. You will mainly make money by doing some PR work with local businesses and gaining advertising revenue from them. You need to have your site built already and ranking in Google before you even think about revenue, then build up a media kit as a proposal with average ranking positions, monthly impressions, monthly clicks, bounce rate and time on site.

m.rvs2141 · Jul 29, 2014

I have done something very similar, when any person going for vacation he is seaching for:
best restaurants + area name
taxi in "area name"
best hotel in "area name"
best hotel for family vacation in "area name"
night life in "area name"

You should give to visitors some valuable info, which they can not find on big oficial sites, you know secret places in your city for sure, basicly every human looking for food, sleep, sex and enterteiment, just find keywords around(hope you know how to do kw research)

You can monetize it with group trips (just need to find partner with low net price for you)
You can offer taxi and transfer services (resell them again)
Individual trips (You can try your self as a guide if you want)
Sell tickets to events, parties and whatever you have in your city

I had very shity looking blog about famous toristik city but with very well written valuable info and I was selling trips better than some big agency's in same area

testyy · Jul 29, 2014

Thank you all for your advices, this really gave a good overall idea of the website.

cherub · Jul 30, 2014

I'm Edinburgh based too. There are quite a few websites similar to what you are planning already active, but they're pretty dated eg leithlinks.co.uk
If you think you can give these existing sites a kick up the arse then go for it!

redrubies · Jul 31, 2014

One thing I noticed when I look around at sites like this is that a good domain name is xxxcentral.com They seem to end up on page 1. Change xxx to the city. I didn't want to put it here in case you don't want your site associated with blackhat techniques.

Need your comments on my website idea

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