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Dude Ranch Business Opportunity

Dude ranches are a big business all over the world; any place there are worling ranches looking for non-ranching income.  Naturally, many of these are looking for ways to get exposure on the internet so there are lots of sponsored ad links on the search results and the top ranking sites tend to be marketing/sales operations.  Conveniently, one of the top dude ranch sites lists it's rates and products for advertisers, so it is easy to see the financial potential of a dude ranch site. 

The key to success will be search engine rankings and that will be difficult to achieve for the term "Dude Ranch".  The top ranking dude ranch sites have been online for a long time and both page rank and history on their side.  That being the case I would take a "Long Tail" approach to developing this site.

 By "Long Tail" I mean I would target keywords related to all the many activities availabe at dude ranches.  I would guess that many people seach for activities first and a location second.  Therefore, building pages obtimized for more niche terms related to horseback riding, etc. should be easier to rank for but also generate significant traffic.  

Based on the rates I saw, dude ranches are willing to pay several hundred dollars a year to be listed on a site that sends them significant traffic.  This is true even for those that have their own websites.  Many of the listed ranches I saw do not have especially good websites.  If you write well I think it would be quite possible to go through the website content of individual dude ranches and re-write more compelling copy for DudeRanches.biz pages.  

It would take some effort, but I think a competent writer, especially with a little practice, could build a nice one page description in an hour.  Once the site was indexed and had started achieving some search engine rankings I would notify the ranches I had written about.  I would tell them what I had done, explain there was no charge to them for the service, ask them to send updates if their services change and suggest they watch their referrers to see if this sites starts sending them traffic.  Next year, with proven performance, selling advertising should be much easier.

As a placeholder until I can expand the content, I have listed below the Ebay auctions that include the words Dude Ranch in their titles.  If you click on any of those links you will go directly to that a uction on Ebay.