KnoxvillePage officially launching with four months of service for the price of one
With more than 60 local businesses signed-up as early-adopter customers, KnoxvillePage LLC is officially launching its local search engine and eCommerce marketplace this month with an almost “too good to be true” offer for Knoxville business owners.
“Our mission is to create a network of locally-owned businesses in Knoxville,” said Anthony Ragland, Co-Founder. “To do that, we need to lower the barrier to entry to sign-up for KnoxvillePage and show business owners value. If local businesses network together on KnoxvillePage, then we can even the playing field against national chains and better promote buy, shop, and eat local.”
With that said, KnoxvillePage is offering business owners who sign-up in November 2019 a business profile page on KnoxvillePage and local marketing support for one payment of $49 until March 2020. The normal rate for this package is $49 per month. But local businesses that take advantage of this offer will get four months of service for the price of one month.
We spotlighted KnoxvillePage in a previous teknovation.biz article after Ragland pitched during this year’s “What’s the Big Idea 48-Hour Launch.” Since that article, Alan Sims joined Ragland as a Co-Founder. Sims is the Publisher of the widely-popular blog, Inside of Knoxville, where he is known as the Knoxville Urban Guy. KnoxvillePage will be cross-promoted on Inside of Knoxville.
In a recent article on the blog, Sims wrote: “We are passionate about building an online network of locally-owned businesses and making it easy and convenient to find and shop local. Since June, we’ve made dozens of feature enhancements and upgrades to KnoxvillePage that help in that effort.”
For Sims, joining KnoxvillePage as a Co-Founder was a natural extension of his Inside of Knoxville blog and its local business and community focus. “A lot of my friends are local business owners,” he explains. “I’ve spent the past nine years writing about them and their businesses. I’ve seen good and bad. KnoxvillePage can make a positive impact and help keep more money local.”
KnoxvillePage has set an ambitious goal of adding 1,500 business profile pages to its local search engine and more than 1,000 local products to its eCommerce marketplace in the next several months.
With a vision to enrich Knoxville, Ragland and Sims are working with passion and purpose to help locally-owned businesses compete for customers against larger enterprises – from big box stores that have increasingly shifted to more of an online presence to global shopping platforms like Amazon.
A quick review of the KnoxvillePage website shows about 100 different categories with some of the more popular being books, local art, gift cards, household items, clearance, and gifts for kids, men and women. Customers can also search by geographic area – all sectors of Knox County plus Blount and Sevier Counties – as well as for a specific product.
Ragland amplified on the “locally-owned” focus, saying that KnoxvillePage limits clients to those whose owners live here and are not either a chain or franchise. The two exceptions to this rule are real estate and insurance agencies which frequently have an affiliation with a national brand.
Since we first spotlighted KnoxvillePage, the co-founders say they have added staff to better support the start-up’s customers and also made improvements to the site to make it more beneficial to clients – from improvements to the local search engine algorithm to ensuring that every page was designed to be mobile-first and fast-loading.
The start-up has also added a social media marketing and video production department to provide local businesses with supplemental social media and content marketing assistance.
“Affordable social media and video production services is another way to add value and support local business owners with their marketing,” said Ragland. The first video we created as a team was this “Find Shop Local” promotional video featuring some of our local business customers.
Thus far, KnoxvillePage has been self-financed but, as we noted in our earlier article, Ragland has secured domain names for many other cities and expansion is clearly one of his goals. That occurs after the local rollout proves successful and investment capital is secured.
