Running your own local website is not an easy thing to do unless you have the right business partners to complement your skill sets. There was an article on EditorandPublisher.com that describes how to run a localized site perfectly and it complements what LocalUp provides to its licensees. Their articles focuses more on local news sites, but the points that are made in the article apply to running a local food portal site as well. Many of us are too underfunded to start a local website in our community and make it successful. It requires technology, sales & marketing, support, analytics and so on. LocalUp’s white-label Software Solution and business opportunity makes starting a local site in your area possible. The value that you can bring to your community with LocalUp is a fully customizable & branded real time restaurant search portal where they can find all the local restaurants...

tl;dr – With LocalUp, the content is the ad, and keeps things authentic. 20% CTR. Yeah, that’s right. Integration with online ordering makes the whole experience seamless. In a post on TC by Mark Suster from GRP Partners titled “The Future of Advertising Will be Integrated” found here, Mark makes the case that he believes the future of advertising (especially online) is one that helps make advertisements more authentic and integrated. As pointed out in the post, simple banner ads get a measly .2% CTR, and CTRs for social media banner ads are just .008%. Clearly the traditional banner ad is not effective, and Mark blames this on “banner blindness” – meaning that our eyes are trained to quickly look at what is most relevant on the page, skipping over the rest – “the content we want to see” as he puts it. Mark then goes on to claim that the future of online advertising and...

There was a great article about building a startup on Hacker News over the weekend. It caught my eye, not because of the startup part, but because of the robust defense of .NET.

There was some talk a little while back about how .NET killed MySpace. An interesting theory, but a little hard for me to swallow. MySpace has misstepped in a lot of ways, but using .NET wasn't one of them.

Ruby and Django are definitely the sexy languages du jour, but remember that we started laying the groundwork for the LocalUp online ordering and restaurant guide advertising platform back when Django was still a jazz guitarist, and Ruby was just an expensive red rock. .NET was the choice when we were first building the site out, and it remains a good choice, even for companies just starting up. In terms of scalability and speed,...

Online food ordering has gathered a lot of media attention recently, thanks to an increasing number of players in the space, strong growth trends, and the amount of money that has been raised by several companies in the industry.I'm going to take a quick look at a couple of the companies in the space – GrubHub, which has recently raised a lot of money and has decent momentum, and CampusFood which is our biggest competitor in the collegiate niche – and see how the numbers add up.GrubHub recently raised $20 million, just four months after raising $11 million. I it looks like they’re going to be using that money to try to expand their reach in the 26 largest US markets, hoping to take a significant and leading position in those markets.CampusFood is owned by Dotmenu, which also has the allmenus brand. They’ve been around since the late 90s and have raised a few million dollars over the years. With the launch of Allmenus.com, they seem to be more of a content play with online ordering capabilities, and have done a...

This past week, we conducted a training week at our offices in Baltimore and it went very well. One discussion went particularly well and I learned a lot from the new class of LocalUp licensees. The discussion I'm referring to had to do with marketing a brand and how to do it in a hyper-local market and why tailoring the marketing plan to each market is key.While discussing different marketing strategies that have worked in the past with LocalUp company-owned sites and licensed sites, it dawned on me that not only have we seen success with our hyper-local approach from a CRM perspective (and the ability to sell high-priced ads), but also in marketing and deep penetration. We believe the latter is due to one key factor: each marketing plan executed is a bit different based on the hyper-local market and the uniqueness of each local market.This local approach was discussed in detail last week, and after putting some thought into it after work on Thursday, I realized that the hyper-local approach LocalUp is taking...

We were talking about this article in the office the other day –http://tcrn.ch/9612eX – it's from the summer, but just as relevant asever.The article discusses exactly what we here at LocalUp, and our locallicensees, have been taking advantage of for quite some time...connecting consumers with local restaurants through the internet, andsubsequently capitalizing on those online purchases and localcommerce.However, the LocalUp model puts a unique spin on the traditionalapproach. Instead of trying to buy market share through a traditional"top down" approach to sales and marketing, we partner with localentrepreneurs, enabling them to build a brand and manage local salesand market specific marketing initiatives. That's why we call it"local up" and not "top down." ;-) (more clearly defined here)The key to this business model and the subsequent monetization of themodel is to be the...

Since starting to work with media companies, I have learned a lot about what these companies do well and what they don't do well.  It's unique in that I have never had the opportunity to work in a corporate environment and I see things from strictly an entrepreneurs perspective.  With this said, my thoughts and ideas shared in this post are from an entrepreneurs perspective.  I surely don't know how these media companies operate inside and out, but what I do know is that I have been on the other side of the spectrum for quite some time and see the LocalUp product taking market share from these media companies at a feverish pace.   I do believe most of the traditional, local media companies have the opportunity to leverage their existing products to advertise their newly launched digital products and this is the reason why LocalUp Solutions has started working with them and licensing the product to them.  The traditional media outlets (newspapers, radio stations, etc.) have the capacity to build brand awareness...

So how much money can you make with the LocalUp product and business opportunity?  It depends.  Some sites do under $75k and some generate revenues north of $700k, on an annualized basis.  LocalUp provides you with the blueprint, but you need to take the opportunity seriously and follow our blueprint for success.