The URateLocal Team lets college students earn money when they help put local businesses on the map

June 19, 2007 (Press Release) -- URateLocal is a peer review database for local businesses and services that serves the college community by allowing students to find out the best entertainment, health care, and education from other people like them who can profit from their own reviews. The growing URateLocal community will then determine the popularity of a review by rating it according to its usefulness. Students can write about their experiences at school, after hours, and at their favorite restaurants. They can choose to write their own reviews, comment on others, or simply rate other user reviews.

Students can earn extra income through URateLocal's profit share program in which they earn money through Google Adsense. The site operates on the principle that those who benefit from other user reviews can help the author of that review make money by commenting on it or recommending it. Reviews that are ranked high by the URateLocal community stay in the database longer and can be featured on the front page where their reviews can be seen by a much bigger audience.

Students today have to contend with the rising cost of living with the high price of tuition and college textbooks, rising gas prices, high speed internet and cable bills, and other miscellaneous costs. Students do not know where to turn as corporations compete with each other for their business. Students who study full time find it difficult to earn an income to support their lifestyle. URateLocal promises to help the college community by supplying them with additional income for their contributions and allowing them to browse the many reviews written by other cost conscious students who support local services where one does not have to sacrifice quality for affordability.

Customers often do not realize the value their reviews have to local business owners who use the reviews to make improvements to their business model and to learn more about who their potential clients are. It is recommended that when students register, they include all their demographic info which will help local business owners help them in a system the URate team likes to call the "Circle Of Progress". While the demographic info helps local business owners market their services even before they have a location, students will be the first to know when a service catering to them will open in their area. The more demographic info you provide, the more local business owners could use that information to attract the customers they want by tagging their reviews, adding pictures and videos, and posting links to URateLocal reviews on their homepage, blog, or any other site that allow button links. Through this "Circle of Progress", URateLocal aims to bring customers together with the services that matter most to them.

URateLocal is different than other local service review sites in that it enables more collaboration between customers and local business owners by allowing business owners to link to any customer review on the URateLocal site for free to promote their business. Local business owners are also encouraged to write their own reviews about their service on URateLocal and comment on other reviews in which they can add information or correct misperceptions.

For those with entrepreneurial dreams, URateLocal along with its product review counterpart URateStuff are the perfect place to test your product in a system that helps you target a demographic, find buyers and investors within the URateLocal community, or seek professional advice from business owners who update their member pages to include up to the minute bio and contact information. The data that is compiled on URateLocal and URateStuff are available to everyone and useful to those who do market research in their field of expertise.

URateLocal and URateStuff are the only review sites that allow users to post videos in their reviews. Customers can post video reviews and videos that detail their experiences using a product or service while sellers and business owners can post video ads in which they can be creative in how they choose to position their product. Sellers can also take advantage of the video format by posting live tutorials and using their personality to give their product or service more credibility. The popularity of Youtube among young collegiates has inspired the founder to enable its functionality on the site with all the features that make Youtube the most popular video sharing site today.

More multimedia and web 2.0 features are currently in development at URateStuff and URateLocal to make it one of the most viral social networks for college students looking to find others with similar interests. Users can make friends, subscribe to RSS feeds for automatic updates, and upload multimedia content. The site is featuring cities from the U.S. and Canada with more updates coming soon.

Since URateLocal brings local people together, students can also use it to network offline. This ability to form an outside community of people who share the same tastes in art, music, food, and recreation represents a new era in Web 2.0.

Home - http://www.uratelocal.com/
Los Angeles, CA - http://losangeles.uratelocal.com
New York, NY - http://newyork.uratelocal.com
Toronto, ON (Canada) - http://toronto.uratelocal.com
Kitchener, ON (Canada) - http://kitchener.uratelocal.com