Why you should use them to get local info, list your business with, and even own your own…
It started out as the World Wide Web. It was amazing the reach one could have, chatting to someone in Ireland, buying something from South Africa, emailing someone in New Zealand, all from your living room. Everything was about big, wide, and breaking down the invisible boarders of distance that have so long separated neighbors of the world.
Now, we are starting to see a trending back toward local and the community. Google, Yahoo, and AOL all have local portals and searches. Also, independent local portals are becoming big business in the web world. Why, because everyone wins. The people or companies that develop the site do so for branding, marketing, advertising, etc and the users get information on their local community quickly and easily, a service that even the biggest companies have a hard time providing. Why, because it is users of the local community portal that drive the content, and not even Google can keep up with real time information on every local community. It can be expensive to list with nationally based portals, so local small businesses can advertise for much less on a local, community based portal, sometime even for free.
At sites like UrbanaMD.info, a local Urbana Maryland community portal, all businesses can obtain their own webpage for free. This seem counterintuitive if the owner of the site hopes to make some cash, right?, Well, if you look at it, once again everyone wins. The more information listed on the site, the more end users, and the more revenue from advertising. Most of the time the owner of a site is a development company hoping to gain market share through branding - or a local real estate agent or mortgage broker hoping to gain community trust, appreciation, and recognition through providing a community service based application.
If it isn’t obvious by now, my company runs several of these sites, just recently releasing UrbanaMD.info. AT UrbanaMD Joining is FREE, Classified Ads are FREE and UNLIMITED, and basic Business Listings are FREE. Once you join, you will be able to post to the forums, add your business, check out our recipe Xchange, and even create your own "My Urbana Space" page much like MySpace.com. These are only a few of the things going on around here, and new things are being added daily. There are now over 160 local businesses and restaurants now listed under the "Our Urbana" Section
A site like this provides a public service and in using open source software such as Joomla, can be sold as a reasonable priced, pre-packaged application to anyone that is interested (contact us if you are). But this isn’t just a pitch; you should list your business with every local portal possible, getting your name out there as much as possible. But owning and operating a local portal can take your business to the next level.
Some more articles to mull over:
Promote Your Business through Local Web Portals
Local Portals Mean Big Business
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