First read and then go to my web site to see how I am doing http://www.FortDodgeWEB.com.

If you live in a town under 100,000, your local newspaper is probably choking the bucks out of area businesses with high advertising costs. It's not all their fault though. The cost of printing has gone up. What else is unfortunate for local newspapers is young people like myself never pick them up.

As far as coupons, only certain types of businesses in my town can afford to pay for spots in the newspaper and classifieds. And when they do, it's like throwing the dice to see if they can make their $500 back. Yes I just said $500. Putting a coupon in my local newspaper costs around $500 for 15 days. Of course that all depends on the size and color. $500 is the low-end.

As far as those inserts my local newspaper distributes for the local pizza places, they charge $.27 each. One of my local pizza places distributes 30,000 copies a month. That's $8,100 a month!

To me that is just absurd, and goes to show there are a lot of towns in the US right now just brewing for entrepreneurs to introduce local Internet advertising. YOU sitting on your computer right NOW might live a town just like mine. Think of the opportunity you have.

I recently started calling local business to see if they would like to put a coupon on my web site for free. Yes, I said free. You have to offer web coupons for free at first because it's a catch 22. The only way people will go to the site, and tell others is if you have good coupons and lots of them. What I have found is businesses are VERY willing to put coupons on a local site for a trial-period.

I will not give all the information away on how I did it, but I will begin to reveal more and more. Let's just say if you can get a couple of your local major pizza chains to let you scan their newspaper inserts and put them on your site, it will be a snowball effect from there. Grocery stores are ideal!

Chances are if you can get this thing going, your local newspaper will be very inclined to offer you a buyout...if you so choose to do so instead of expanding the concept across your state. The race is on, so start figuring out how to make a web site or pay someone to make it for you and start calling businesses!

Go to my web site to see how I am doing http://www.FortDodgeWEB.com.

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