The Amazing Yelp
Yelp.com is all over the place these days. They have a community in just about every major city in the country, especially the west coast. It started at San Francisco, which is undoubtedly the hub for Internet-related innovation. It must be a fun life out there in SFO for people that are Internet savvy. So what’s so great about this site? Here’s some statistics on the site that we dug up from a few different sites.
Traffic
As you can see, there are in the same league as top sites such as digg.com and del.icio.us, which are huge social bookmarking sites. The difference though is that people visit social bookmarking sites more for fun than for real information. On the other hand, Yelp is a reviews site that people go to look for information on businesses and things to do in places. If you are a small business, you should be worrying about getting yourself placed on local search results and sites such as Yelp.com should be on your agenda for cheap marketing tactics.
Here’s more statistics about this site:
Those are some amazing numbers that most sites can only dream of. And the best part? The owners of the site don’t spend a dime on marketing the site (alright, may be that’s an exaggeration, but you get it). All content on the site is user generated. And as you know, content is king in the Internet world. So guess what that means? The site will grow exponentially as more users take to it and the value keeps going up, all thanks to the great site features that its visitors love.
The lesson learned from this is not anything new, but a reinforcement of the idea that building a community is THE best way to make a website successful. Create a a community around your site using features such as blogs, forums, polls, rewards programs, give-aways, Reviews, Etc. Find creative ways to engage your visitors to interact and add content to your site. And that process can be fun too. It’s an amazing feeling to see a community grow, just like it is to see your business grow. And more often than not, the former can lead to the latter as well.
Don’t wait. Local search and online marketing can be your competitive edge.
Leave a Reply