Successfully implemented bearded idea

I live in a small town near Penza. I love my city and have long wanted to create something that can benefit the residents of the city. The population is about 60,000 people. City closed.

At different times, these were ideas of the city portal of organizations, a map (plan), and something else. As a result, they were temporarily postponed due to the lack of time and large initial costs.

When I returned to thinking over the city project, I began by going around the whole city on foot, noting to myself what was missing in the town.
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Idea

I found dozens of solutions that would be useful and at the same time could generate income. For example, a single billboard of events in the city, a small cinema, waste recycling, a project to save electricity at enterprises or billboards with advertisements in the courtyards. But most of these ideas require tangible investments and an army of people to keep them up-to-date.

The most obvious seemed to be the organization of an ad portal, convenient and covering most of the city’s audience.

I note: there is not a single Internet site with a sufficiently large traffic in the city. Why not occupy this niche? Judging by the fact that all the pillars in the city are drowning in the flow of ads, and the same people are often published in the newspapers from month to month, it is really relevant.

If such projects seem boring to someone, I assure you that there are interesting moments in any business. And getting experience in the development of a seemingly obvious project is very interesting. By the way, in any very innovative business there is a lot of boring moments.

For example, we began to know more about things that excite residents of the city. And we get constant feedback. And this is the most expensive.

Analytics

I found only 2 sites with noticeable traffic, on which this section is present.

Attendance of one of them - the local site of the television company - an average of about 200 people per day, the second - the urban newspaper - about 400 - with only 55% from the Penza region. This is despite the fact that sites exist for more than 3 years.

Undoubtedly, this is extremely small. As already said, the population of Zarechny is about 60,000 people. Not a little. The Internet is in almost every family. Circulation of newspapers - 9 000 - 24 000. Issued once a week. About 150 ads each, but the bulk of the information is news.

Who is interested in the news of a small town? But everyone at least once advertised in the newspaper!

I turned to statistics. More than 20 000 searches for Penza and the region with the name of the city. And this is only in Yandex, and there is still Google, Mail.ru. About 5,500 people over 18 years old VKontakte. And there are classmates. In general, everything is not as sad as it seemed at the beginning.


Good bulletin boards are distinguished by tough moderation, excellent functionality and the presence of a whole support team. Surprisingly, there are similar projects with a really high-quality audience.

In Penza, this site bazarpnz.ru .

About 400,000 people live in Penza, Bazar has 20,000 visitors per day. In principle, the most visited project of the city.

If we assume that the situation in my Zarechny will be similar, then the limit of dreams is about 3,000 visitors per day.

The creators of the "Bazaar" are my good colleagues. By the way, one of them is Sergey , habrauzer. And they agreed to the provision of technical parts and any assistance in the development of the similarity of the "franchise".

Content

So appeared zarbazar.ru .

The site is there, but it is empty. How to get people to post ads?
Filled out manually from the newspapers of the city. At the same time they called back to the people who published their proposals and reported that the announcement was posted on the site.

As a result, every week the site was replenished with those 150 ads from newspapers. Now, after 3 months, it is no longer necessary.

Advertising

Content is. Where to get visitors from?
To make the site popular in the city, you need to get used to it. For this, he must always be in sight.

On the Internet, as you remember, there are no purely urban sites for advertising.

What used:

• outdoor sports
• In contact with
• Classmates
• Yandex.Direct
• search engines
• Zarechny and Penza forums
• articles in the city’s newspapers
• small conference in the city
• radio advertising

The site has existed since May 2011. During this time we have invested in advertising about 70,000 rubles. Earned until only 10,000.

This is normal. We do not even attract advertisers yet. Earnings are the activity of the visitors themselves.

So far about 200 visitors come to the site. Now 10-20 ads are added per day (these are 100–120 ads per week, and as you remember, there are only 150 in the weekly newspapers).

Our main task now is to gain an audience and regular visitors. It's nice that there is a feedback in the form of a reaction to our advertising and “thanks” from those who sold the apartment, bought the car ... In general, I solved my problem.

Earnings

Each visitor on average browses at least 10 pages of the site.

On average, the cost of 1,000 banner impressions costs about 30 rubles. Banner placement on the portal - 9.

In addition to the usual possibilities of banner advertising and the function of raising for a fee, select an ad, there are "shop windows" - this is an opportunity for companies to conduct their own section of ads that stand out favorably from other publications and have a more convenient interface for mass work with ads.

With an average of 200 people, the zarbazar gives 540,000 ad impressions per month on zarbazar.ru. Those. while only 16 000 rubles in money equivalent.

We have so far not attracted attention to the "shop windows". First we get the audience. This is more important.

We are sure that to achieve attendance of 2,000 people per day is real in the coming year. The estimated income of the project is about 120,000 rubles per month with the attendance indicated.

It is quite good, considering the really modest investment of money and the fact that the project is “parochial”.

By the way, well, it is very curious to engage in the development and advertising of such a mini-project.