Hyper Local - More than Local Search

Sandy Springs Community.com Named Sandy Springs/Perimeter Chamber of Commerce Ambassador of the Month

2008-03-10T17:43:00.001-04:00

Monday, March 10, 2008– Sandy Springs Georgia – Sandy Springs Community.com, http://SandySpringsCommunity.com has been selected by local business owners as the Sandy Springs Ambassador of the Month. Sandy Springs Community.com is owned and operated by Katherine Fein. Katherine as been a member of the Sandy Springs community for 10 years. “I love the idea of serving my community with a community website. I have lived all over the world, but I just love Sandy Springs, it is my home.” Said Katherine. “It is a great honor to be selected to be the Ambassador of the Month.”

Sandy Springs Community.com http://SandySpringsCommunity.com launched in the Fall of 2007 and is part of the Mini Cities franchise system http://Mini-Cities.com. The site has been very well received by the community. The site includes local business and event information. Businesses have the opportunity to take advantage of free listings, free coupons, free event posting and very low cost advertising.

“Our strength is our knowledge of Google, Yahoo and MSN and how to get great results from the search engines. We optimize for our advertisers keywords, for much less than most advertising cost. Businesses can get quality leads online through Sandy Springs Community.com – people in Sandy Springs use the search engines, we make it easy to find Sandy Springs businesses in Google, MSN and Yahoo. It is a Win Win! I am happy to show any business what we can do for them, it is a very exciting process!” Katherine said Sandy Springs Community.com, http://SandySpringsCommunity.com also just went through a big renovation! We now offer business reviews, listing upgrades and great new features like TXT to mobile, email a friend and save to My Stuff.

“This honor for Katherine and http://SandySpringsCommunity.com is a testament to the value of hyper local websites. Communities need them and love them! We are very proud of the entire system.” Said Ana Abraham, CEO and Founder of Mini Cities, Inc. http://Mini-Cities.com

Sandy Springs Community.com is an online directory site offering free business listings, events, coupons and more for local businesses to advertise online. Sandy Springs Community is part of the Mini Cities, Inc. franchise company. For more information about Sandy Springs Community.com contact Katherine Fein at (678) 755-9036 For more information about Mini Cities, Inc http://Mini-Cities.com please contact Ana Abraham 813-300-6049.

NY POST “The major portals face competition” Mini Cities offers what others cannot

2007-07-09T10:27:00.000-04:00

LOCAL WEB AD FIRMS GO DOOR-TO-DOOR
By HOLLY M. SANDERS

July 9, 2007 — As more people turn to the Web to find a restaurant, barber shop or plumber, Internet firms big and small are vying to attract the millions of local merchants that have yet to advertise online.

Google, Yahoo! and IAC’s Ask.com are targeting small businesses by bulking up their local search services, adding information and listings to woo eyeballs and advertisers.

The major portals face competition from a number of upstarts that have sprouted in the last 18 months - Smalltown, http://Mini-Cities and CitySquares, to name a few - and are building local sales forces in some cases.

These smaller players are drilling down into communities with so-called “hyper-local” destination sites that supply ZIP-code level news, business listings, blogging, social networking and citizen journalism.

Their goal is to corral the huge but fragmented market for local advertising, which is estimated at more than $100 billion annually. Many small businesses have never advertised online and don’t have Web sites.

“It’s an untapped opportunity with so many local ad dollars and no clear winner,” said Mike Boland, a senior analyst with the Kelsey Group.

All the online firms are going up against newspapers and traditional yellow pages directories that have huge sales forces and strong relationships with local merchants.

“Newspapers and yellow pages have succeeded at this for decades, but they have lots of heavy overhead,” said Hal Zucker, CEO of Smalltown, which has set up sites for San Francisco Bay Area communities such as Millbrae and San Mateo. “Our overhead is really, really low.”
Providing more depth on local businesses, such as tidbits about the best bar in a specific neighborhood, remains a challenge for the big portals and is where “hyper-local” sites believe they have the inside track.

The “Right Feet on the Street” Solution - Franchising Meets HyperLocal Search

2007-06-21T12:36:00.000-04:00

No one is debating weather or not local / hyperlocal search is where its at. Also there is a consensus and research to back it up, that the local search industry is a multi billion dollar industry - virtually untapped. Everyone is trying to figure out the winning formula to capture the market and emerge as the leader - from Google to the guy down the street with a copy of Dreamweaver.

The truth is that the winning combination will be the company that brings what both those groups have to offer - Great Technology and Community Based “Feet on the Street.” Mini Cities http://Low-Cost-Franchise.com has created just that with the Hyper Local Search Franchise. Franchising has long been considered a great growth model and it offers entrepreneur people a way to have a business with a lot of support. The Mini Cities franchise offers all the infrastructure, training, and ongoing support.

The Mini Cities business was created for those with Ad Sales experience who can put their talents to work for themselves. The Hyper Local search industry is a perfect fit for franchising because the technology need is met by a centralized engine and the “feet on the street” need is met with motivated entrepreneurs with a vested interested in success. Mini Cities offers the winning combination.

Mini Cities Adds Google Maps for Hyperlocal Search Franchise

2007-06-11T10:37:00.000-04:00

Mini Cities added mapping to their franchise sites - http://newtampadirectory.com,/ http://townelakedirectory.com/ and http://lutzlandolakes.com/. Since the Mini Cities system runs from a single engine, each new franchise will have mapping integrated within their site. We are always growing the sites and will soon be adding additional revenue opportunities for each franchise. We are excited to add Google Maps and know it will enhance our user experience.

We have much more functionality on its way including click to call, classifieds, social networking, video and much more. We are also planning a redesign this summer.

Mini Cities is a home based low cost franchise system based in Tampa Florida. For more information contact Ana Abraham (813) 300-6049 or email ana@Mini-Cities.com

Others Offer Jobs In Hyperlocal Media. Mini Cities Offers an Opportunity for a Piece of the Billion Dollar Pie!

2007-06-07T12:04:00.001-04:00

There are several articles out now about online media companies hiring sales forces to sell local online advertising - Ad Age that says that online media hiring is up 15% - there are many reasons that is happening -
1) Overall online advertising is way up.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-thu_netads_0607jun07,1,4669367.story?coll=chi-technology-hed

2) Local Online Advertising is growing - fast! Local advertising is forecasted to be up 31.6 percent in 2007 - Borrell

3) There is a lot of money to be made in local online advertising. "U.S. local online advertising is forecast to reach $7.5 billion"- Borrell

U.S. employment at internet media companies in April topped 40,000 for the first time since 2001, according to an Ad Age DataCenter analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

What does this all mean.
1) there is a lot of money to be made in local online advertising

2) everyone is trying to figure out how to do it.

Mini Cities offers a unique opportunity for those potential "employees" - a piece of the billion dollar pie!

Mini Cities incorporates a business model of local franchising with adverting. Each Mini Cities franchisee is an important part of their community - just like local newspapers have been in the past. Google, Yahoo, MSN and the like are faceless giants. Mini Cities franchisees are part of the local business community, and an important resources for people. How does it work? Mini Cities franchisees own their piece of the pie. Our streamline user-friendly system allows anyone to operate a Mini Cities franchise. Technology has been a barrier to entry for local business owners. Mini Cities, Inc. http://Mini-Cities.com/ has brought togethervast experience in developing high level user friendly sites with a robust user-friendly administration system that allows franchise owners to dominate their area in online advertising. Mini Cities also has a proven system of sales, marketing and community integration that trains each franchisee how to make their site the recourse for community information. They also provide SEO and SEM services. This system has worked very well for franchises -

http://NewTampaDirectory.com
http://TowneLakeDirectory.com
http://lutzlandolakes.com/

Mini Cities is a low cost franchise with very reasonable royalty fees. For more information about the Mini Cities Franchise contact Ana Abraham – 813-300-6049 or ana@mini-cities.com

Tech Soap Box Reviews Mini Cities

2007-05-26T22:58:00.001-04:00

Interesting: Franchising Local
Posted by Ahmed as Local Search at 12:33 PM EDT
22/05/2007
http://www.techsoapbox.com/interesting-franchising-local/

I came across Mini Cities late yesterday, and it is an interesting model.
The basic gist is simple. Properly covering a large area of local is difficult - the manpower required is quite intensive. So - why not build a stable platform/system that allows a person to quickly setup a website for his/her local area?

The definition of local seems to be amorphous here, as ‘New Tampa’ is not really a city per se, more of an area/locale (if you live there, you know what it is). As such, this means it is exclusively geared for local residents (about 25% of our traffic on iBegin Toronto are tourists).
The sites themselves are not bad. They have made the urls fully search engine readable (though the actual url structure is odd - eg seems to include ‘restaurants’ and ‘coupons’ in all of them). The standard items of local interest are here - events, business listings, coupons.
The ads (where I expect most of the revenue will come from) are all on-site links to locations with coupons. I think of this as a shrewd move - having people using these coupons with local businesses proves to the business that there is viable traffic and leads - much easier to sell ads later.

I do wish the sites were more customized design-wise. I did notice that the logos are unique, but otherwise the designs are identical. I think it would be a great idea if they had a dozen or so templates - franchises will want a bit more control over the design, and being locked into one standardized one isn’t that. The events also need a calendar - a listing is nice, but I (along with many others I am sure) prefer a calendar-view.
Regardless - the question at the end is how well the company will be able to sell franchises (and for how much). I am sure people are itching to try their hand at making money from a website, and the ability to do it locally seems very appealing to me. Time will tell if they have the right ingredients.

What Michael Boland from the Kelsey Group has to say about Mini Cities.

2007-05-26T21:46:00.000-04:00

Vertical Search

Getting Hyper-Active in Local Search › › › Vertical Search By Michael Boland May 25, 2007

The term hyper-local continues to gain significance in the world of search. Newspapers are using it to describe their efforts to corral readers and advertisers around online communities that are built around interest in the high school box score or the new playground that was built down the street.

For newspapers, this is one of the areas where they have a traditionally held competitive edge with local trust, newsroom resources, and a physical sales force to sell classifieds and other local advertising. The realization of this has caused some progressive publishers to build on these assets to develop competitive differentiation against the Google's, Yahoo's and other news aggregators of the world that are vying for eyeballs and advertisers in the local online space.
I've explored some of the dynamics of the hyper-local world in the past on the Search Engine Watch Blog, and Peter Krasilovsky recently looked at some of the more recent happenings of the hyper-local world on The Kelsey Group Blog.

At the same time, a few online hyper-local pure plays have sprouted up over the past 18 months, mostly led by ex-newspaper execs or ink-stained veterans. These include Smalltown, Backfence, Outside.in, and Citysquares to name a few. They have rallied around various models that include zip-code level news, listings, social media, and citizen journalism. Some have had trouble getting off the ground, and the jury is still out on the sustainability of others. Backfence, for example, has floundered in some respects while trying to scale the destination site strategy to many locales.
In some ways the need to scale nationally is at odds with the strategy to build appeal, trust, and true local flavor on a neighborhood level. Monetization has also proved to be a sizable challenge in appealing to a critical mass of advertisers that are interested in reaching hyper-local audiences.

This challenge is compounded by the lack of a sales force that can compete with other interests that are vying for the same ad dollars such as Yellow Pages publishers and newspapers. This same challenge is faced, to different degrees, by most online destinations seeking to tap into the wealth of small business local advertising historically owned by these traditional media.
Applying a New Model to Hyper-Local

New hyper-local destination http://Mini-Cities.com has an interesting proposition to overcome this challenge. The site licenses its brand and technology to allow franchisees across the country to start hyper-local destinations and act as local ad sales reps.
To do this, it has essentially created a starter kit for individuals in far-flung U.S. communities to build hyper-local destinations. In this way, the model is similar to private label platform licensing, but instead of serving the enterprise market, it operates on the individual proprietor level.

If you think about it, this is appropriate for a hyper-local strategy, given that an individual implanted within a given town is likely a better candidate than a remote startup, to run a community site there. This logically rings true with respect to acting as a local authority for editorial content on the site, as well as having many inroads to local advertisers to sell ad space.
Building A Virtual Sales Force

To find the local franchisees to plant the hyper-local stake, Mini-Cities doesn’t require any sales background, according to founder and president Ana Abraham, but rather looks for individuals that have strong ties within their communities.
Once they find these individuals and sign them on, remote crash courses are given in sales training, SEO and SEM – meant to enhance their abilities to run their new community sites successfully. The platform accommodates display ad units , featured placement, paid search, and classifieds, click-to-call, and mobile ad units are on the way. It also offers print directories in some communities.

Franchisees are involved in bi-weekly conference calls to ask questions and also share what they're learning.

"This is kind of like a private think tank that is giving us ideas all the time because they are out in the field doing the work," says Abraham. This is a nice feature, but it could reach scalability constraints depending on how many communities it reaches (a nice problem to have, right?).
And the cost for this local search site toolkit? It's an undisclosed one-time cost and an ongoing licensing fee. Abraham characterizes the cost as well under the $50K mark which is what Entrepreneur magazine defines as a "low-cost franchise," she says. It’s closer to the $20K range.
The Atlanta-based company currently has a handful of communities throughout the South, including towns in the greater Tampa area. Next up is a West Coast expansion to Redmond, Washington, where it just found a new franchisee. The target community, Abraham claims, is between 30k and 70k in population and has an average income level over $65k.
"These are the people who are online looking for local businesses and services, and we know that is true for these communities," she says. "There are so many of these communities out there that represent the undeserved population for information about their own area."
Many newspapers would disagree with Abraham, but she might have a point in the underserved opportunity to scale a compelling online hyper-local experience on a national level, while utilizing local feet on the street.

What Does the Future Hold in Hyper-LocalThe goal going forward is to have ten more franchises in next four months and 50 within the next 12 months, according to Abraham. She also hopes to integrate more functionality to combine Web 2.0 appeal and hyper-local search. These will involve social networking features, blogging, classifieds, mapping, click-to-call, and mobile search.
Most notable of these developments is video, in line with the growing trend in the local search space towards online video advertising. This was most recently seen in Citysearch's integration of small business video ads in its listings, and was examined in The Kelsey Group report out this week entitled "Online Video: A New Local Advertising Paradigm."

"We’ve talked about adding video to business listings," says Abraham. "A lot of businesses want to have commercials, show their products, and show their facilities, but they don’t want to go full TV."

Best of all, for Abraham, her 15-year history as a software product manager gives her an edge in being able to visualize and execute these new product integrations. This, for one, could give her an edge over the notoriously tech-averse newspaper industry.
Combine this with actual feet-on-the-street sales reps in the communities where her hyper-local platform is employed, and she could just have what it takes to scale this up to a sustainable level.
We'll see if this new formula can help her succeed where others have faltered.