Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I need some advice.  My husband and I have created a website that is better than a directory listing site for daycares.  The site has NOT launched yet, but we have been having long discussions about our pricing strategy. 

I have spent the last 2.5 years researching what is most important to parents and daycare providers and I feel pretty confident about the website, however, the question I now have is what kind of price do you put on a new unknown service?

The competition offers basically a Yellow Pages listing with very little information while we offer a five page website (and growing) to give parents more of a “preview” of what each local center has to offer.  The daycares benefit because they can give parents a detailed firsthand look at what separates them from the competition, and parents can narrow their choices before they go out and tour 20 centers.  They can also get an idea of what type of environment they would prefer before they even leave the house. 

In order to get daycares to pay for a listing we need traffic.  In order to get traffic, we need parents that are looking for daycare.  You see the challenge.    

Right now we think that a price of $180 /year or $45 quarterly is an amazing value.  10% will also be donated to charity.  The reason for this price is because it is around what our competition charges for less.  Also, this is about what a parent pays on average when they enroll their newborn in daycare, therefore the listing fee could be paid with one new client.     

We have a few ideas, but we would love to hear from the community.  Thank you in advance. 

Hi Kimberly,

This is a really good idea for a service venture. I think that the $180 a year charges are quite alright if not minimal, as compared to the value that you're giving.

I think you may have probably covered this already, but one way of determining the prices might be to work out an estimated average percentage increase in a daycare provider's sales via your listing.

This will of course depend upon how popular your service is among parents. For that you could create a buzz on relevant social media outlets such as parenting and family focused blogs/forums via interaction with your target audience.

You can go for SEO for advertising or Pay Per Click service to your website... SEO cn be done with freely ...

Go ahead dude.. All the good luck..

You need to show value.

You can charge substantially more for your listings, but you need to show clients what they will get.  The more revenue from clients, the more money and resources you can invest in driving traffic to your site.

It seems like you don't know enough SEO to trump your local market.  You need to do that.  You need to dominate Google for local searches for Daycare centers.  If you don't do that, you don't have a business, imo.