Premium Listings and all that Jazz
From The Southern Highlands Online blog. So what's this I keep hearing about premium listings?
So we've added something new to the site, say hello to "Premium Listings". We don't really know what we'll do with them yet (or if we'll give them a quirky name), but it looks like they will most likely end up as some sort of paid subscription service. You know, the usual $20 to $200 a year and you get loads of extra features over the free listings.
Since we've started the site, we've had a regular stream of requests for paid listings/advertising, etc. So far we've knocked them back as it wasn't a goal of the site, but as the requests don't seem to stop coming, we thought we'd trial the "enhanced listing". If in a couple months we can live with the idea, we'll go ahead with it. If not, we'll scrap it! Most people would say we'd be stupid to knock back all the blank cheques that will undoubtly come our way, but sometimes integrity really does matter (and you'd have to feel all dirty taking advantage of people).
For the moment we're choosing a few select businesses (people we've worked with or know personally) to trial the idea. We'll also accept decent link exchanges (ie. you link to us from your currently indexed site, and we'll give you a premium listing).
Anyway, as we basically decided to implement the test last night, there are no real "extra features" as of yet, but we've got a couple months to start implementing stuff to see how it all goes. We also need to have some sort of limit, say 3 to 5 businesses per category as it'd make no sense having 50% of a category "premium" listed.
We've also put up Google Adsense to see how it'd perform, and to be honest, I was surprised that people do actually click on ads. In the couple weeks we've had Adsense on the site, we've already made more than enough to pay for our server costs and a little bit more. I thought that was pretty cool, especially as the site still doesn't rank for anything too competitive yet.
Well that's about it for now!
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