Guides and Listings are closely related functions that provide a great opportunity to help local businesses get more recognition and rank better on Google.
Guides, which are a simple way of organizing listings into a key resource for the community, provide a great Sponsorships opportunity for advertisers to associate themselves with a given topic, i.e. a hotel sponsoring a Destination Guide.
Good prospects include hotels, event venues, museums, and restaurants among others.
We recommend that each guide sponsorship be sold for at least $100/month.
Your current traffic as well as growth overtime will affect your pricing.
Focus on the fact that local guides are important in helping people decide “what to do” and what you’ll do to promote it (Facebook, email, articles, etc.)
While we don't recommend that you charge businesses for inclusion in the guides, so you can be sure to curate a complete resource for your readers, there is still a great opportunity to up-sell them to a Featured Listing.
Unlike other directories like Yelp, as a publisher, you are uniquely able to provide more context by cross-linking articles to directory listings, sharing info on Facebook, and highlighting them in print which tends to mean their listing on your site ranks quite well in Google.
For a recommended $240/year, Featured Listings provide you with a more passive sales opportunity that can be included as an add-on for print advertisers and allows business to showcase themselves on your site (and for you to more easily promote them).
With the Community Content Engine, Featured Listings include:
