Your Own Town Portal Website  

Selling Your Online Marketing Services to Offline Business Owners

A town portal site is designed to advertise the services of local businesses online. These local businesses pay the site owner a monthly or annual fee to list their services on the site.

While this type of portal focuses on businesses located within a specific district, there are business portals that service a particular niche market, and some of these cater to a defined area too.

In large cities, you may locate online business directories that are dedicated to restaurants, pet businesses, companies serving the interests of families, etc. Communities worldwide are served by innumerable small companies and independent operators marketing their products to the local population.

In these tough economic times many companies are competing for a limited pool of customer spending, and they need to be smarter in deciding which advertising and promotion mediums to use. With more and more companies turning to the Internet to trade their wares, a town portal site can help these businesses by setting up websites for them and then promoting them to the local community.

Many business owners lack the time or skills to set up and operate their own website. There is a willingness on their part, then, to use the services of others via the relatively low cost medium of the Internet to promote to their existing and potential customers.

If you are considering creating a portal site for your town or area, then the potential for making money can be high. It’s a low cost venture to start and you can set up a site using free software that is readily available. With the instructions provided with the software, the site can be set up without the need to know anything about html. The only initial outlay is the cost of obtaining a domain and its hosting, both relatively cheap items to purchase these days.

The software used is free open source based on a Content Management System (CMS) called Joomla. The CMS system involves php pages that once created enable you to create new content without you needing html skills. The content is created as simply as if you were using a word processor and in a back-office away from public view.

For more information on this free town portal creation software, visit:

http://www.mytownportal.biz