WordMouth - UK Local Recommended Businesses

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

Thank you for reading my message. I look forward to chatting to you all and will help others where I can. Please help me with my website, I appreciate any comments and support I can get... and also if you can spare five minutes to recommend your favourite local services I would be most grateful!

Where to start? Firstly please bere in mind I have never built a site before and have only been learning for a few months.

http://www.wordmouth.com
UK Word Of Mouth Business Recommendation and Review Service.


I came up with the idea for WordMouth last December. I am a programmer and long-time web user, but not a designer. I approached a friend to help build the site.. but by July he hadn't delivered, so I attempted to do it myself.

The concept is simple. I want a place where the general public can discuss and recommend the businesses, services, events, clubs and news in their local area. The Yellow Pages in great, but how do you know who is going to provide a good service?

In addition to this I wanted a place where companies could advertise for very low cost. Yellow Pages allows you to list a name, number and address for a lot of money. I thought it would be good to add images, weblinks etc etc to build a graphical billboard.

Essentially what I am trying to build is an "Amazon" for local business.

I chose phpBB because it is free and easy to install. You will see that I have used a large category hierarchy.. and ratings modifications. I have bolted in a payment system so that companies can add themselves to the directory. I have tried to strip out a lot of the forum elements that are unneccesary to streamline the display. The whole site only shows what it needs to.. no clutter.

The home page is simple too.. adopting the Google concept of minimalism! I am assuming that less clutter will make it easier to use.

Anyway I am open to any suggestions for design, content and SEO. I am listed on Google (pagerank 4 already.... not sure how!!), and have an Adwords campaign running from many keywords. I have attempted to optimise my homepage for "consumer reviews" with additional "local" and "UK" elements. You will also see that the titles of all my pages are dynamically generated

How do I get onto MSN... I can't find any way of submitting.

I think my concept is unique in the UK... (I am worried that Yahoo Local is catching me up rapidly!!).

Also check out the examples (linked from the header) for more idea about what I am trying to do. You can see the rating system, customer feedback, images etc etc.

This is all a protoytype... and I hope to pay someone to improve it once things start rolling faster. I have 100 members, but few post... and 9 paying customers so far

Please help me make my site better. I am finding marketing my idea very difficult.. and getting users to stick. After all, what is the incentive for them to post apart from feeling that they have helped others. ... and what is the incentive for a company to create a billboard - when there are so few posts!! Grr... chicken and egg!!!

Many thanks,

Al.

[Thais]

Hello Al - I expect you remember me :D

I must say your site is much easier to use now! Great improvement. I hope you get some takers on here :)

[Anonymous]

Thanks Thais!

I am doing the best I can. The take up rate has been a lot slower than I originally hoped it would be... but over the last 3 months I have learned a huge amount about site optimisation and marketing. I still have a long way to go though. Trying to inspire people to join the site and post messages in very difficult. Local newspaper reports and even national magazine articles are not really helping to bring people in. I am fast running out of new ideas... but I won't give up just yet ;-)

Getting a high ranking on the search engines and finding ways to get people to post some recommendations is now my biggest priorety for Wordmouth, and hopefully if I can get this right it will grow in the way I originally hoped :)

Cheers,

Alastair.

[MikeH]

Hi Alastair,

Welcome to the forum. MSN - Have you checked to see if you are listed? You should have a natural listing if you have links to your sight. See the following link-

http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=word+of+mouth+recommended+local+bus inesses&FORM=QBRE

This is from their soon to be launched new search engine.

Mike.

[Anonymous]

Hi Alastair,

Welcome to the forum. MSN - Have you checked to see if you are listed? You should have a natural listing if you have links to your sight. See the following link-

http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=word+of+mouth+recommended+local+bus inesses&FORM=QBRE

This is from their soon to be launched new search engine.

Mike.

Oh yes, I see it! I like the new MS Search it picks up the keywords which I optimised for my Google campaign, but didn't work with Google. How ironic ;-)

Any ideas on how I can spread the word about my site or any obvious way i improve my Google rankings? I suppose there are hundreds of people asking this all the time :(

Cheers,

Al.

[gj]

What budget have you set aside for marketing the directory?

If you keep it local you may be able to get a fair amount of interest by attending various networking events in the local area - Word of Mouth advertising goes digital - but maybe it needs to start by the traditional face to face word of mouth!

Good luck with it - you are coming at it from a better direction than most

Graham

[Anonymous]

What budget have you set aside for marketing the directory?

If you keep it local you may be able to get a fair amount of interest by attending various networking events in the local area - Word of Mouth advertising goes digital - but maybe it needs to start by the traditional face to face word of mouth!

Good luck with it - you are coming at it from a better direction than most

Graham

Thank you! It is great to have some positive feedback. I have done my research, and I know who my competitors are and I think I am offering something different and unique.

As for marketing budget, I have none. The site is a hobby at the moment and I aim to put any money I make from the billboards into marketing. It is all going a little slower than I initially anticipated though!

My next course of action will have to be some form of local networking. I have considered a BRE Breakfast meeting.. but they want £400 to join, and it all looks a bit 'American' for my tastes. A lot of these networking events seem to consist mainly of people who want something for themselves, but are not prepared to help others. A bit like Business Link... who are totally useless. I went to one of their start up meetings, and the gentleman I met flatly refused to even get out of his chair to look at my website... even thoguh I had pre-arranged a demonstration. He said "this is not the time to be displaying your product, I am here to get you started".. and then he just gave me lots of useless photocopies of material which is publicly available on the Internet. Grrr.

[Thais]

What has happened to the Wordmouth website then?? Does it not exist any more?

:?

[StartUp]

Seems not!

Back to the discussion, I would like to see some kind of star rating so people can flag up companies they don't recommend (without becoming libellous!)

i have had instances in the past where people have had a really bad attitude, or just plain poor work. There is nowhere to bring this to others' attention.

Julia

[Anonymous]

We are setting up that very thing, it is nice and simple. When someone posts anything negative, the post is sent to the business before it goes live, and they have the option to reply to the post before it goes live. We then pull out the libellous stuff, and post it.

[Ozzy]

Oh yes... the memories of Demon forums come to mind ;)