Hi all,

Just found a link to Gossamer Threads, did a ton of reading.
Have a question hoping someone in the same position can share their experience.

I have a local community site, and sell advertising to local business, from a simple listing to a full web page. I focus on getting traffic to the site and pass it off to the advertisers. I would like to somewhat automate the process so I can cut my ad prices and allow businesses to update, change their info.

Recently looked at e-classifieds, buildacommunity.com, and NorthSky. Now it looks likes Links may be a possible addition or solution. However, I need a way to continue to make money. Would this be a simple thing to include in an automated response to the submitting business, maybe allow a 30 day free ad(listing or link) then invoice the customer or delete the listing.

The e-classifieds will do pretty much what Links will do, although not sure on having searchable keywords, and the like. But the e-classifieds allows for including pictures which is nice for the advertiser.

Northsky offers free co-branded web sites remotely hosted.
My advertisers could build their own templated site, multiple pages, then pay me to link to them on my site.
Or include them in my Links database.

Anyone with local community advertising experience has probably been down this road and could suggest something.

Yes I know businesses can go to tripod then do their own promotion, that's not the concern. Most here aren't aware of that, nor do they have the time or money to learn to get their own traffic or hire search engine specialists. I get the traffic to my local site and pass that traffic to my advertisers. I'm just looking for a way to offer more for less, and ease my work load. Offering businesses "FREE" pages, or listings, then upping them to paid accounts may do wonders for my local marketing exposure.

Any thoughts/suggestions?
Thanks!

There are various EXPIRATION scripts for Links and DBMAN that would address this request. The scripts are linked in the Resources section of this site and also discussed in the Customization forums.

You can also include graphics/banners in Links as well by simply adding fields in the field definition file (links.def). There are Modifications like Pic Mod in the Resources section that outline how to add graphics to "links" listings.

With a little bit of hacking you can also do this in Links via the built-in DETAILED pages function.

I would highly recommend using the multiple user FileMan application located in this site coupled with Links to display the various business web pages. FileMan would allow more flexibility in creating their own "homepages" or advertisement pages.



Regards,

Eliot Lee

Greetings Pizza34

For my CLassified ads section I now run Activesuite.com classified ads program. For someone like you though the downfall is that it does not allow charging for Adverts. The author said it never will as he wrote it for the purpose of increasing traffic to the web site. Other than that I would think that it does pretty much what you would want it to do.

There is a lite version for free that you could use to test the program and if satisfied with it you could ask them to mod the program for you.

Hope that helps

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