DiscoverOutTown is a site that most people don’t know, despite huge SEO traffic from Google and Yahoo! It’s operated by a small company based in Vicksburg, Mississippi and sells a simple product: “hyperlinks” for a modest, annual fixed fee. (They’re really selling very affordable SEO services not packaged directly as such.) As one admiring CEO from a partner said to me, “There are no Stanford MBAs, no technology gurus.”
There’s a small sales force and a focus on a couple of verticals, mainly “hospitality” and relocation.
There’s nothing slick or “Web 2.0″ about these guys, but paradoxically they’ve had a mobile site and capability for several years, well ahead of the curve. And given their cost structure they’re very very successful. The same CEO cited above said “They’re just killing it.” There are lots of activated links in lots of towns. DiscoverOurTown also provides content to Google and Yahoo! as well.
I always like stories like this because they defy the conventional wisdom and are both surprising and refreshing.
February 7, 2008 at 8:13 pm |
I love it!!
February 8, 2008 at 8:44 pm |
When you deliver a quality service at an affordable price, customers tend to stick with you and to tell their friends.
I noticed that they have a (quite remarkable) Google pagerank of 7/10 on their homepage. This also indicated that the Google algorithm thinks highly of them.
February 8, 2008 at 8:59 pm |
Indeed.
July 21, 2008 at 10:17 am |
[...] $10 CPMs . . . profitable. And many people have never heard of the site. In a way, this is another story like DiscoverOurTown, which I wrote about previously. [...]
September 14, 2009 at 4:15 pm |
[...] Sterling DiscoverOurTown is one of the great, little know success stories in local. I’ve written about the site several times in the past. The site was in a way like Craigslist on a smaller scale: [...]