I remember when the internet first got started. For product companies, the conventional wisdom was this - now you can sell to anybody. What they didn't consider was now everyone can sell to everyone. So you have the advantage of a global marketplace offset by the disadvantage of a highly, highly, highly competitive marketplace.
Lets come back to local for a second.
Send out a mailing to local businesses saying paying $500 a year - the message, I will list you in our directory. Most local business gets 100s of these mailings each year.
We have more traffic than most people on this board. 170K uniques a month. Not some BD guy telling you they have 1M, when they have 10K uniques - as most BD people over inflate their numbers by a factor of 10X.
http://www.quantcast.com/p-2coUlW7v6dBfI
I have 600 advertisers paying a flat fee and 2800 paying for the schtick stuff.
In fact, I have people pay for the flat fee and then 48 hours call and say, "I want the schtick. I thought I was getting the schtick".
We have real traffic and we can't make the flat fee model work.
If you have no traffic, you have very little shot.
Back to the marketplace reference at the beginning at this post. Go copy what 100s of local sites are doing. The same economic principle comes into play. You are faced with a highly, highly competitive market. Zero product differentation.
Your chance of success, slim to none.
And don't fall into a false sense of comfort due to a great brand/domain
Rock. Paper. Scissors.
Good schtick crushes great brand every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Fact, you don't deliver results to advertisers, they won't pay beyond year one.
