For two years, I lived and worked in the small town of Redding, California. About 6 months ago, I launched categorized directory of Redding related links. It’s doing decent, generates a few thousand uniques every month, most from Search Engines and Adwords. I use it to help local business get a traffic jumpstart, and get their name out there.
Redding is a smaller town in Northern California. It has a population of about 90,000. It is mostly a destination for retirees or people escaping the Bay Area. Being a county seat, as well as a tourist destination, most of it’s economy is based on retail and tourism. The other large industries there are medical and insurance, which makes sense, since Redding has a high retiree population.
The biggest boom, however, is real estate. Real Estate in Redding California has exploded due to the Bay Area exodus. One thing I noticed is that while there is an abundance of agents in the area, most of them do not have traffic to their websites.
A quick look at the Overture search terms shows that real estate and it’s derivatives are the second most search for terms when people are looking up information about Redding.
If you are a designer, particularly one located in a smaller town, it would be to your advantage to create a traffic stream via a smaller, locally based directory. This will help generate traffic for you, and help you earn some additional income by running locally based ads, or even google adsense on there.
I toyed with the idea of making a search function for the website, but then I realized that I could let google do the work for me. Using the Google search program for adsense, I’m able to pick up a little extra cash from visitors who still were unable to find what they were looking for.
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