While visiting one of my favorite forums, there was a discussion I was reading about starting a local directory for the town you live in. A sort of local yellow pages. Were they worth putting together?

Coincidently, in an email from Dave Vallieres (his newsletter), he pointed me to a resource regarding setting up local directories. He highly recommends doing them.

In as much as I have a great deal of respect for Dave - let’s face it, he is very successful at what he does - I felt the need to “chew” on this one for a bit.

A week or two later, my wife and I were lamenting on the rapid growth of our little town. It’s not as little as it used to be. Statistics show that it has more than doubled in the past 10 years. And driving around, there are no less than THREE new developments going in - as well as a new Target store.

With that in mind I went back to the local directory idea. I did some digging on Google and found that there was only one or two local directories listed that included our town, and one that is dedicated to our town, but poorly built and laid out.

Further in my research, a directory site was pointed out to me that was put up by a retired gentleman down in Tennesee somewhere. It is basically a one-long-page list of businesses grouped in categories. The site to ME is an eyesore. But get this . . . he has like 235 listings each one sending him $15.00 per month!

That’s over $3,000.00 per month!

I think that’s what sold me. Now, I don’t design sites very well - but I knew I could do better than what I was seeing. So I came up with this: MonroeShops.com

I basically finished it over the weekend, using Duncan Carver’s Link Management Assistant (which is free). Now I just need to get the word out locally.

I will be attacking that this coming weekend. I plan to do three things:

That’s my next step(s). I will track what my results are and post them here.

Thanks for reading.
Mike