Be The Exclusive Guide For Your Local Neighborhood

We publish articles on home improvement, health and fitness, business and marketing, and general lifestyle.

Your brand is showcased in each article as the neighborhood guide and can be shared on your social media channels automatically.

You could try cobbling together different technologies to try and build your own neighborhood website, but it would be very difficult and expensive to develop the same level of technology that you will have instant access to. We’ve invested well over a half-million dollars in our neighborhood marketing system (so you don’t have to) and can leverage it for a small fraction of that.

First of all, we’ve built a powerful, ready-to-use neighborhood marketing system so you don’t have to. But we don’t stop there.

When you get approved as a WhirLocal Neighborhood Guide, we will:

• Add your business profile to the neighborhood as the exclusive Neighborhood Guide.
• Create at least 50-100+ free ads and business profiles for local businesses in the neighborhood. This is a great place to start when building relationships by using our marketing strategies. (Note: You will have the ability to add unlimited free ads and business profiles for local businesses in your neighborhood)
• Provide an onboarding call with our neighborhood marketing specialists
• Give you access to our training and weekly office hours calls.
• Plus, all the benefits of the WhirLocal Pro Account to help you stand out from your competition and thrive.

You don’t ‘have to‘ do anything to receive benefits from our neighborhood guide program. However, we recommend several strategies to build relationships, generate more referrals, and generate the most success from this program.

1. The “Local Spotlight” content strategy: Reach out to local people and places and do a spotlight on them. This can be as simple as them answering some questions on a form, or you can branch out and do a video interview in person or via Zoom. We recommend doing this 1x per week (and yes, you can batch and schedule them). Don’t worry, we provide complete training on how to do these interviews, post them as a spotlight in the neighborhood, and we can automatically share them on your social media channels and in the neighborhood Facebook group.
2. The Facebook Group Strategy: We set up a WhirLocal {{city}} Facebook group and feature you as the neighborhood guide and add you as a moderator. We automatically feed our neighborhood content articles and any of your spotlights and local buzz articles as well. Facebook groups get much more engagement than a page alone.
3. The “Giveaway” Strategy: Work with your local restaurants and local circle of influence to sponsor a weekly gift card giveaway. This provides great engagement and helps to build your Facebook group audience.
4. The “Local Buzz” content strategy: We also give you special publishing tools to create or curate local “guide” articles about all the great places and things that you love in the neighborhood. ie “3 local coffeeshops that will satisfy your caffeine cravings”, or “5 things to do in the rain in [neighborhood]”, or “The top 3 pizza places in [neighborhood]” … you get the idea. Consumers love this type of content and it is great for social media as well. We recommend posting 1-2 “guide” articles per week.
5. The “Claim Free Ad” Strategy: And finally, WhirLocal offers a free ad and neighborhood business profile to help local businesses with their online marketing. We make it easy for you to either refer local businesses to sign up or “claim” their free ad. When you follow our local “Claim business” strategy, you can lock that local business into your referral network and get paid a recurring monthly commission if they upgrade to a paid WhirLocal package.

Lead with value for the local business owners, and you will be able to not only build relationships and generate more referrals for your business, but you can help them succeed in their business as well by introducing them to our platform.

In addition to the WhirLocal neighborhood marketing and technology platform that we provide, and your great personality, we recommend the following resources. 

1. Canva.com account: The simplest way to edit videos and graphics. We recommend the Pro account for $12.95/mo.
2. Zoom.us account: The easiest way to record your local business spotlight video interviews. We recommend the Pro account but it is not necessary.
3. Facebook page: We recommend having a Facebook page for your business so you can share neighborhood content. [FREE]
4. Instagram Account: Another great social media tool [FREE]
5. A laptop, desktop computer, or tablet: While you could theoretically run everything from a phone, it is strongly recommended that you have a laptop or desktop computer.
6. Good Internet Access

Of course! 

This is our Salem, Oregon neighborhood (our pilot). 

Here are a couple of other neighborhoods:

• Keizer, Oregon
• Albany, Oregon

Yes, of course!

You can refer other real estate agents to our Neighborhood Guide program. If they apply and are approved, then you will earn the affiliate referral commission of 20% on their paid package. PLUS, as they become active and refer or sign up other businesses in their neighborhood, you can earn a 10% bonus recurring commission on any of their referrals who sign up for a paid WhirLocal package.

For more information about our affiliate referral program, click here.

Yes, here are some examples in Salem, Oregon. 

When you help a local business “claim” their free ad and business profile or you invite a business to sign up for WhirLocal via your unique referral link, you automatically lock them into your referral network. If that business signs up for a paid WhirLocal package, we pay you a 20% recurring monthly commission as long as they are active. Plus, if they happen to refer other local businesses (we make it easy), you get paid a bonus 10% recurring commission if any of their referrals sign up for a paid package.

Don’t worry, we don’t expect you to make the sale. Once they sign up for a free listing or claim their listing, we can assist them and help them understand the value of a paid package.

For more information about our affiliate referral program, click here.

While we can never guarantee that they will (because we aren’t Google), the short answer is YES! Our websites are currently getting a lot of love in the search engines for terms such as “Buy local [neighborhood]” and branded search terms for companies.

Because we’re adding a steady stream of new content every month, and businesses who are using the neighborhood marketing platform also have the ability to generate and publish content (reviews, blog posts, offers, projects), we are always giving the search engines and consumers something new to find and explore.

When we publish our articles, we can also set up systems to automatically share a link to these articles on the following:

• Your Facebook business page (we will need editor access to page)
• The local Facebook {{neighborhood}} page, where you are a moderator

A 5-page professional website is included in our Pro package and includes an integrated marketing system. However, there is no obligation to use it if you have an existing website that you prefer. 

No, we handle technical support for local places in the neighborhood for both free and paid accounts. 

However, it does make sense for you to be an active user of the platform so you can demonstrate that you are “eating your own groceries”.

We use our contact manager CRM and automated workflows to reach out to your circle of influence for the following purposes:

• Introduction to Whirlocal
• Invitation to sign up for a free or paid account
• Invitation to do a spotlight interview, along with reminders to do additional interviews as a regular topic contributor

How does it work?

1. You provide a list of your circle of influence
2. We upload it into the contact manager CRM and add it to our automated workflows

No worries, we realize many companies already have a CRM and don’t want to change.

We still use the WhirLocal contact manager CRM for our communication tools and automated workflows reaching out to your circle of influence. 

We will capture new contacts via the chat widget, but you can export those at any time to your primary CRM if you’d like. 

Yes, of course. While our system will generate organic traffic when you use the strategies we recommend, you can also use paid ads as well. 

If this isn’t something you want to do on your own, we’re happy to help for an additional service fee.  

We give you the tools to publish your videos in a special video project folder. From there, we work with you to distribute each video as follows:

• We push the video automatically to our WhirLocal YouTube Channel and create both hashtags and a “local” playlist for your video
• We can also push the video automatically to your YouTube channel if you have one (we will need access to your YouTube channel)
• You copy the embed the YouTube code into a local spotlight article and publish it in your WhirLocal neighborhood

Your investment is based on the following:

First things first, we’d be sorry to see you go. We value our relationships as much as you do.

If you decide not to renew as a Neighborhood Guide, here’s what happens:

• You will lose access to all neighborhood guide status and corresponding brand positioning.
• You may no longer represent yourself as a neighborhood guide in any of your marketing.
• You will lose access to the exclusive neighborhood guide publishing tools designed to spotlight local places and people.
• We will remove the automatic social sharing features to your Facebook page.
• You will be removed as a moderator on the neighborhood Facebook page.
• We will remove your chat widget from the neighborhood.
• And any and all other guide benefits and privileges.

What happens to the contacts in my contact manager?

If you choose not to maintain a WhirLocal Grow or Pro account, we can assist you in downloading your contacts into a .csv file.

All contacts generated from any neighborhood newsletter or subscription option will be copied and transferred to the next neighborhood guide.

Any contacts who have signed up for a WhirLocal account through your affiliate link or otherwise subscribe to any WhirLocal marketing materials will be part of our list unless they unsubscribe.

Will you be getting a new neighborhood guide?

Yes, our goal would be to find another guide to fill the role and take advantage of the opportunity.