That WAS easy! My Localism Land Rush experience

Today was the day for my Localism "Land Rush".  I had been watching others and reading about their experiences for the past week or so, and Texas fell on the final day of the Rush.  Since I have a bunch of points, I had unencumbered access for the first 15 minutes (which started at 2pm).  Despite this, I was a little anxious, and the sponsoring process wasn't quite as intuitive as I had hoped (probably "user error"), but I was still finished by 2:04pm.

For some reason, the time and date when I was eligible to purchase the sponsorships kept slipping my mind.  I would like to thank Russell Lewis for calling me earlier, as he inadvertantly prompted me about the time.  Since he is also in the Austin market, he may be kicking himself right now, since I purchased all 468 communities today. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0PIdWdw15U&feature=related

Okay, I actually purchased 12, some of which were Austin neighborhoods, and some of which were outlying towns to the north with smaller populations.  I heard anecdotal evidence today that some folks bought upwards of 70 sponsorships, so I guess I feel like a bit of an underachiever now. 

If you haven't already purchased any areas, I would encourage you to pick a couple or a handful and give it a shot.  I realize that much of the value may come later, when the site is fully rolled out and re-designed again, but the prices could increase then.  Either way, it seemed like a really low risk to spend $96/month on any form of advertising.  Having spent crazy amounts of money on pay-per-click internet ads, national magazines, newspapers, and more, this seemed like a very easy decision to me.

Now I just need to work on cranking out all of those descriptions of the different areas.  One idea that I had was to leverage the sponsored pages with buyers and sellers in those neighborhoods/towns:

As you can see, I have written a good number of articles about the area, and I went ahead and invested a little money to sponsor this page about your community on Localism, which is a nationally-known website. 

Hopefully, by the time I am able to use the above script with my clients, Localism will be a household name, like a few other sites which shall remain nameless here.  If not, it still sounds cool to say "nationally-known", right?

At any rate, I may decide to add a few more communities later, but I thought this would make for a good low-cost test run, and I purchased all of the areas that seemed more important/critical today.

Bring on the traffic!