I’ll do some backlinking for “mchenry firewood” and “firewood mchenry” over the next week or so and see what happens. Tom’s a great guy and delivers well seasoned firewood in the Mchenry, Illinois area. I purchased some firewood from him and he said business is down. So I offered a spot on my directory trying to help him out.

You can read more details on how I developed the listing at Mchenry Firewood Delivered.

I added a feature to the Best of Mchenry Local Business Portal. One feature could be a real money maker for you. As you can see from the screenshot below, there are 4 featured advertising spots across the top of the page that contain an image and are above the fold. Three smaller ads come first and then there is a larger featured ad that contains an image with some advertising text. See screenshot below.

Let’s look at the “Directory Featured Ad”. Currently on this site there are 3 ads that are randomly rotated with each page refresh and are visible on every page of the website. As you can see there is a 200 x150px image that is floated to the right. The title is a h3 tag and there isn’t any limit on the text but ideally you wouldn’t want to make it larger than the image.

If your xsitepro local business directory is getting some decent traffic the “Directory Featured Ad” becomes a hot property. I haven’t tested this, however, I would think that you would want to limit the number of these ads from 5 to 10 advertisers. Of course it all depends on the traffic. If you’re getting 10 or 20 visitors a day then 2 or 3 ads would be the max. If your traffic increases to 500 or 1000 uniques a day then 5 or 10 ads would work great. You could even charge from $100 to $500/month per advertiser.  You might even offer the space to a single advertiser for a premium price and turn off the rotation.

Take a quick look at the 3 small ads across the top of the pages. At this time they are fixed and don’t rotate. However, as traffic increases I will began to rotate ads in these spots also….. more on this latter.

For now the Mchenry Firewood ad will rotate with 2 other ads. Mchenry Firewood is a seasonal business and I’m sure the owner will want to shut the ad off for the warmer months. This brings up one more point. Pricing can be on a month per month basis but you can give discounts for purchasing 3 months, 6 months or 1 year at a time. This will guarantee your client a spot for future advertising. Another approach would be to include a links listing for some given purchase such as Firewood Mchenry.

Hope this gives you some idea how powerful Xsistepro is and can be. More will be coming on the Xsitepro Local Business Portal Templates!

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One thing to consider is that this site is brand new. There are only 5 local businesses from Mchenry, Illinois. I have a couple of blog posts going to the site, I submitted a RSS feed to some RSS directories and that’s it. No articles, no press release, no real program for backlinks. It’s important for you to realize that I haven’t put a big effort into building back links or any other traffic method……. because, Xsitepro does an excellent job of attracting search engine spiders and getting pages indexed! I need to mention this because I constantly see ill informed people saying that Xsitepro is just another website editor and if you really want traffic you should start using WordPress. That statement is completely false, while wordpress is awesome for all it does, it does not negate the strenghts and abilites of Xsitepro.

One of the big benefits of Xsitepro is that it uses templates, a system like Xsitepro Business Directory Template allows even the new user to simply use the template, fill in some content, save and upload. The google sitemaps and rss feeds are automatically updated. You can ping some of the services and you’ll start getting traffic. To prove the point check out the screen shot of the traffic stats….like I said, I didn’t do anything since I set the site up. You won’t see that kind of traffic or activity from a site made with Dreamweaver or any other html editor.

Xsitepro Directory Template will be ready soon, drop me your email and name
and I’ll let you know when it’s ready to go, plus you’ll get a prelaunch discount!

First 3 Days in Augst ….Awstats

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Two of the businesses on the site are flooring companies and both happen to do hardwood floors. I used Google to search for “hardwood flooring mchenry“ and the below screenshot gives you the result.

Much to my excitement the 2 businesses in www.BestofMchenry.com are in postion 1 and 2 on Google search results….and this is only after 2 weeks. Keep in mind, this could have happened much sooner, I really don’t know because I was very sick after putting the site up and didn’t pay much attention to it during the first 2 weeks.

So to recap. We have a Local Business Directory at www.BestofMchenry.com that has 6 local businesses, 2 of which are flooring companies.

When searching “hardwood flooring mchenry” both flooring companies have the top 2 positions in Google!

So…..you Xsitepro users, DO NOT think that WordPress is better than Xsitepro. Xsitepro gives WordPress a run for the money. These are two different forms of content mangement systems and wordpress will probably do some things better than Xsitepro, however, the reverse is true. Xsitepro is just as good if not better for greating local business portals and other content managment sites.

Not bad considering I haven’t done anything other than use Xsitepro to create a RSS file and then submitted the file to the rss directories.

This template is almost ready to go…make sure you sign up in the pre notification list and I’ll make sure you get a special pricing when it is finally released

Here’s a screenshot….check it out!

[tags]xsitepro versus wordpress, xsitepro business directory, xsitepro local business portal, xsitepro, local business directory[/tags]

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I started chronicling this new Xsitepro Offline Business Template, and you can see some of the details at this post.

Next I discussed some of the theory of the Xsitepro Business Directory Template.

I was in the hospital and been feeling like dirt…..so I haven’t been able to do much. I didn’t add any pages or do any marketing for the site, however, I was surprised to see 31 pages indexed in Google…..take a look:

Remember, these are the results simply from using Xsitepro. I created an rss feed from within Xsitepro and submitted to some rss directories. Other than that, nothing has been done to the site in 2 weeks. Next post I’ll show you some screen shots of how the pages rank in the Local Business Directory!

“Why should I use Xsitepro when WordPress can do everything better?” I see this question often, especially in the warrior forum. I’ll be the first to say that wordpress is awesome, however, there are circumstances that a static website such as one built with Xsitepro is better. I think this is the case when creating A Local Business Portal for your profit. It’s very easy to edit and gets indexed just as quick as wordpress. The built-in tools of Xsitepro allow for many of the special features of the site and give the webmaster a lot of control when it comes to optimizing each page. The Links Page is totally awesome for a business directory and I found the search engines grab these links pages first and the beauty behind Xsitepro is that you can configure the Links Pages in many different ways…….and without going into great detail, the Links Pages could be the bait that will help you draw in more clients than you can handle.

Next post I’ll give you some screen shots for the local businesses…..sneak preview…..all on page one! But don’t fool yourself, this isn’t going to happen unless you follow the strategies I will include with this template!

Here’s the 31 indexed pages.

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This xsitepro portal template is more advanced than the standard xsitepro template and will use all the panels in the Xsitepro version 2 setup. There will be a complete set of videos explaining how to set the template up and how to monetize the site. You could easily develop a $2,000 a month with one of these sites and with a little effort I can’t see why one site couldn’t generate $10,000 a month and lead into larger jobs. There are so many different ways to monetize this type of site! Of course, any claims of income are totally dependent upon your efforts and I do not mean to imply that you will make any specific amount with this template.

The header will be able to be edited in either photoshop or from within Xsitepro. In the header is a 3 celled table that will have 3 small image ads with appropiate ad copy. These ads will be on source of monetization and the final version will have the ability to rotate these 3 ads with different advertisements. So you could possibly sell 12 ads and rotate them at equal amounts…..if you charged $50 a month this could give you $600 a month!

The info bar has a dynamic linking system.

The main panel header would have a custom preminum space ad. Of course all ad prices will depend on the traffic you can get to the site. If you’re getting a good amount of traffic this space might be worth $300 to $600 per month. This ad like the 3 small ones appears on each page of the site.

The left navigational colum has yet to be finalized. You can see what I have so far, not sure I like the look but will play around with it. The nav bar will have simply links to pages, or categories and to a Links page, Sitemap Page and Major Categories.

The Categories will be in the form of a template. There could be a main category, sub-category and vendor page. The Vendor Page could be your clients main web page. If they already own a website then this page could serve as an additional traffic source.

Xsitepro  has a Links Page function and this would be included in a special way. I found by using the Links Page the spiders seem to grab these first.

I should be ready to launch in the next couple of weeks. If you want to be notified when this template is ready to go, please leave your name and email address below.

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I’m working on an Xsitepro Business Directory Template and set up an example on a new domain at www.BestofMchenry.com, unfortunatly I had one of my attacks and ended up in the hospital on the 19th, 20th and 21st so today July 22, 2009 is the first time I had a chance to check out the whether or not the site was indexed.

As you can see from the screen shot Google indexed 10 of the new sites pages in 3 days. I wish I could have checked on the second day because I’ve been able to get new sites indexed in google within 24 hours and I suspect this has been indexed under 24 hours according to my web logs. That’s pretty exciting!

I constantly read about people not getting any traffic or not being able to index their sites….Xsitepro owners included. Xsitepro has some pretty awesome tools that allow you to get your sites in the search engines quickly and I’ll give you a quick run down of what I did.

First I created the site from the Xsitepro Business Directory Template and added a couple of business listings by creating some pages. Then I created an XML file for the site from within Xsitepro, this is bestofmchenry rss feed. Next I created a Google Sitemap from within Xsitepro.

I submitted the google sitemap to Google and I submitted the RSS feed to some rss directories.

The only other thing I did was to link back to www.bestofmchenry.com from this site and from new blogger blog. That’s all I did and at least 10 pages have been indexed….pretty cool huh!

Now, the next thing to do is to start submitting some articles and press releases for keywords I want my clients pages to rank for. I’ll try to document my progress, I’m limited because of health reasons but hopefully I’ll get a few more clients and get this local business directory ramped up!

Here’s the screen shot of the pages indexed by Google.

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From that definition you can see how it would be possible to come up with a variety of different marketing schemes. It could be as simple as creating a Blogger Blog with an opt-in form for building a list or even a Squidoo page with an otp-in form for list building. You could make it as complex as desired offering many different options for driving foot traffic to the offline or brick and mortar business.

I’ve been working on a Xsitepro Offline Directory Template that is a little more complex than the standard Xsitepro Template and is designed for the offline marketer. The template can be used for a simple offline directory or offline portal to a very complex directory or portal. The below image is a sample Local Offline Directory in Mchenry, Illinois.

This template is designed to be used by the offline marketer to go from city to city or town to town with the intent of advertising and marketing local business operations….driving traffic to their websites, advertising their business through appropriate keywords and marketing their businesses by offering list building through optin forms.

The Xsitepro Offline Directory Template is designed to provide a multitude of monetization models. Across the top are 3 ads with images. These appear on each page and can be sold for $100 plus per month. The ads can be stationary or rotating.

Below the 3 ads across the top is a Xsitepro’s dynamic menu. I’m working out a few kinks but it should serve perfectly as an easy method of navigation.

The main panel is configured with a premium advertising space. The premium ad could start at $200 plus a month, of course it depends on the traffic you’re getting. The space would feature an image along with an advertising message which would contain a link back to the advertiser’s site.

I haven’t really developed the left navigation colum yet. I’m not sure I like the scrap paper look….but we’ll have to see how it works out. The Nav Column could feature more ads or banner space to advertise along with providing some standard nav links. A rotating banner space could work out well….something like special of the day or week. Again, this feature would be sold as an add on.

I think one of the most interesting features is the premium advertising page here’s an example for Forever Floors in Mchenry. Many small businesses don’t have a web presence, they do not have any type of web page and the thought of getting online scares the crap out of them. The Premium Advertising Page is basically a single one page website they can have. It includes their basic information along with an advertising message and a few images. Most importantly this page can be used to get them on Google Local. I have a few things to do on this page yet, but take a look and see how you might use this page.

There’s more but this will give you an idea of what Xsitepro Offline Marketing Template will offer. All pages will come with basic templates that you simply copy and paste. Of course Xsitepro’s full compliment of features will be able to be used on the entire site. This will give you, the offline marketer, tremendous flexibility and power.

I have to say the income potential with this type of template is unlimited. You are limited only to your imagination and ambition. You won’t get rich over night sending out a few emails….but if you approach this as a real business, get on the phone, knock on doors and figure out how to set up a local business directory in your own neighborhood, town or city…..you can then take this worldwide.

Keep an eye on Best of Mchenry Local Business Directory and watch for my lauch of the template very soon! Leave your name and email address in the form below and you’ll get the template at a very special and reduced price when I release it…..only if you sign up to the list though!

[tags]xsitepro business portal, xsitepro business directory, offline consulting, offline directory template, offline market, offline marketer,offline marketing, offline portal template, offline template[/tags]

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