I had this wild idea about hiring commissioned agents all over the country to sell
ad space in a new web directory and compete with the local Yellow Pages guys but offering services at a fraction of the price.

The only monetization I have seen in any forum is online promotion with total disregard to offline . Have I lost my marbles completely or am I so far "out of the box " as to be on the wrong planet ???

Comments anyone please ?

Great idea,

But first try to get seo for your directory and bring traffic towards it,then go for local hire commisioned.

If you have just started a directory,then it is wise to keep your expenses as low as possible.(avoid hiring local agents in this case.)

You can monetize your directory by putting google adsense in your directory

But,in the end,for any website monetization to be successful it depends on how much traffic you can bring towards your site.

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Ah , you are coming from an online perspective. My intention was to use the "directory" as a showcase and repository for the data only and worry about the seo , traffic later.

The intention being to harvest as many business's as possible in a short time from a particular business niche with the offer of minisites & other seemingly high value products and to promote those listings offline as well, so that clients see an immediate return for a small upfront investment.

Agents are on commission only so there is no cost and if sales are even marginal per agent the return is huge, with which one can buy expert services . Much like an affiliate system but offline.

Thanks for your input - I appreciate it. I launch Monday am - software or no software and then we will see where the speedbumps are in the plan

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Depends on how good you are with "commissioned agents". The problem we all have is the ablity to sell the web to people who work hard for the money they make. I hear what you are saying but we are taking a different tack in that we are localising our directories and building them into a word of mouth advertising network. Will it work? Who knows?

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