Today we review one of the most unique and business-oriented plugins I’ve come across lately: WP Local Plus. Being honest, I had never heard of this plugin (it had been marketed heavily within the internet marketing community), however on installing it and playing around for some time, I immediately saw the potential in it.

Let’s start with a quick explanation of what WP Local Plus does:

WP Local Plus is an automated, WordPress plugin for creating content packed dynamic local business directories.

Ok, haven’t we seen lots of business directory themes, plugins etc??? Here’s where things get interesting, read the above sentence again, and make sure you notice the word ‘automated’. Yes, you actually don’t need to create any data manually – that is the best part about this plugin. You can simply set it up for the city / place based on the keyword (e.g. Restaurants in Milan) that you would like to display and it extracts the data accordingly. Does that get your attention now? Read on…

WP Local Plus is a very innovative plugin that uses publicly available data (with a method better than simple scraping) to build the content on your site. Whereas before it used to be restricted to the US, it has now gone international so you can use it anywhere around the world. The content is not scraped but generated on the fly whenever the page is refreshed. Rest assured however, the page generation is still very fast, so there is no performance hit on your site.

Apart from its content building facility, which is pretty amazing in itself, it has another very cool feature, the built in contextual ad system. This allows you to set particular keywords to display contextual advertising whenever a visitor hovers on a said keyword.

Allow me to suggest some ideas here. Imagine that you have a restaurant review website for your locality, you can offer keywords for sale to local restaurants. So for example a restaurant which specialises in seafood can choose to advertise a special offer for all the ‘seafood’ keywords on your site. Therefore when a visitor hovers over the word ‘seafood’, he will see the text bubble with the offer, e.g. ‘50% for lunchtime meals during the week’.

It also features two other potential money makers you can make use of:

• Featured Listing Advertising System
  This is similar to the ads that appear on Google search results, basically a business can pay you a monthly fee to put them above other businesses in the listings for their category. Great to generate recurring income.
• Shadow Box Advertising System
  You can use this as well to sell advertising in a category, for example if you have a Milan Sports Shops category, you can have a shop that pays you a sum to have a graphic banner pop up over the other listings in a shadow box (see screenshots below) in the listings page.

Another excellent feature of the plugin is its full Google Maps integration. The business search results will show up on a map, with full Google maps functionality and the ability for the visitor to expand the search or access full details of a given place.

The following two videos will show you how WPLocalPlus can be set up and used, do check them out if you’re interested or just want some ideas on how you can make this plugin work for you:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7C0YzBlkbI[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk3nOTzpU8Q[/youtube]

Pricing is $39 for the 1 site licence and $49 for the unlimited licences version. I think this is a very decent price for such a powerful plugin.

When you purchase WP Local Plus, you also get a few bonuses which will help you make money with this plugin:

• WPLocalPlus Profit Plan – an interesting series of 2 videos, around an hour and a half about how the author makes money with the plugin, plus another section about SEO Strategy. Quite essential viewing before using this plugin.
• Local Cash Catalyst Report – PDF with more information about how to cash-in with this product.
• WPLocalPlus Blackbook – another PDF with more ideas on how to make profits with WP Local Plus

Conclusion

This is a very valid plugin that can help you build a directory site very quickly. The important thing is that you don’t get illusioned into thinking that it’s just a case of installing the plugin and watching the money roll in. This is never the case with any plugin or system on the internet, although many people want you to believe otherwise.

The creators of WP Local Plus are honest with their product description and the plugin really does do what it’s supposed to, making it worthy of recommendation. In any case, it also comes with a 60 day no questions asked money back guarantee, so there are very little risks in getting this plugin.

As an improvement, I would suggest that they add some more documentation in the forms of PDFs or pages on their site. At the moment the only tutorials are provided via video, and while they are good, videos are difficult to update when new features are released, and some people might prefer to print out instructions on paper rather than watching videos.

Get WP Local Plus

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