Name of your website?MyMinnesota411 Small Business Directory
Your name?
Eric Nelson
Your Location (city, etc)
Saint Paul
Please give us a short summary of your website?
MyMinnesota411.com is a website that provides free listings for Minnesota businesses. It ranks very well in Google and allows visitors to search for local businesses by name and category in the state of Minnesota. Visitors can also find daily Minnesota business headlines from around the state.
What inspired you to launch MyMinnesota411.com?
MyMinnesota411 was one of the first directory sites that SlickRockWeb SEO Services created. It was created initially as a free service to our clients but was quickly expanded to provide free listings to any local Minnesota businesses.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
SlickRockWeb.com was the first website that I launched and it was in 2001. MyMinnesota411.com was created and launched in 2005.
How did you decide on a name for MyMinnesota411.com?
The name we decided on was based on using the 411 number which is a standard three digit number for most phones used to retrieve information on a business listing. The Minnesota portion of the name is obviously related to the scope of the website which features only Minnesota based companies.
What makes this website different from other, similar offerings?
Our site focuses on Minnesota based business listings and is a free and automated service. All listings however do go through an editorial process before being posted online.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
Our goal is to grow MyMinnesota411 into providing premium listings and adding the capacity to provide for fee services like company press releases and company reviews and recommendations.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
We would build in the online for fee creation of and submission of company press releases.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
Our biggest headache has consistently been online security and identifying and fixing coding exploits.
What has been your biggest challenge?
A lack of time to continue the development and expansion of all of our website properties including MyMinnesota411.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Our own internal organic search engine optimization methods have allowed us to have the site rank in the top 3 in Google for the search terms Minnesota business directory and Minnesota small business directory.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
It has required more time and patience than I had expected. The competition for finding and retaining visitors to our web properties has significantly intensified in the past few years and you have to keep adding new features just to keep pace with everyone else. That requires a constant level of new development.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
We will continue running MyMinnesota411 as long as the parent company SlickRockWeb remains profitable and stays in business.
What is your website address?
MyMinnesota411 Small Business Directory
