Has anyone done well with regional/geo sites?

[Edwin]

Aweber is another possibility when you're evaluating email newletter distribution services. Especially if you'd have to pay anyway with the anticipated number of subscribers, because you wouldn't be comparing free to paid.

 

[wonder_lander]

Thanks, we've only got about 1500 on our email address list though it's not difficult for us to build that with a little push.

Will certainly evaluate the costs of each when it becomes a paid service!

 

[martin-s]

Have a look at Sendy. Self hosted, emails through Amazon SES - cheap as chips.
https://sendy.co/

Our mailing list is ~40k and costs are about $5-10 each month. Will handle much greater volumes than that though.

 

[martin-s]

Deliverability is good - assuming your email template is.

 

[dog]

So it's better to do a tourist travel site with a killer Geo?

I used to own malta.com. I earned virtually no money off the local market - it all came from affiliates via car hire and hotel bookings, and foreign adverts. If I was living those years again I wouldn't even try to cater for the people actually in the geolocation (not worth the time and staff) I'd just have information about the place and make money from people outside the area coming into the area. That also had natural traffic so not much work was needed. I guess it would depend on the strength of your geodomain and traffic flow as well as the type of location - eg sheffield is going to be harder to monetise than london.

 

[RobM]

I think tourist sites are better in that you have more to write about and people you can affiliate with.