The money part. You have a local domain, you have it ranked, now what?

There are many ways that you can turn your local domain into a profitable venture, in some cases (depending on how you implement the monetization), you will be able to earn recurring income from your site.

There are three main ways in which you can leverage your local domains to earn revenue from local businesses that are more than willing to pay for real estate, and in many cases the entire site.

Revenue Technique #1: Selling Ad Space

You can sell space on your site for advertising. This can be done as banner ads, side bar ads, header ads. Companies will be willing to pay for positioning on your website if it ranked near the top of the search engines and depending on the niche, they will likely be willing to pay $100's for a prominent ranking (per month).

Income Potential: Several $100 to $1,000+ per month

Revenue Technique #2: Selling a Review/Listing

Many companies would be willing to pay you to put a review of their companies services on their site, and this could be as simple as adding a listing to your page. Again, this is market dependent as some niches are willing to pay more than others (ie. a lawyer will pay more than a personal trainer), but you could have multiple listings bringing in monthly income.

Income Potential: Several $100 to $1,000+ per month

Revenue Technique #3: Selling the Site

You can also sell your local domains to local companies that are interested. They can assume responsibility for the website, but once your site is ranked it carries a lot of value to a company to buy out. They will be able to control the traffic on that site and benefit from it in it's total in whatever way they like.

Often times companies may be interested in contract work on the site (by you) after they buy it, so if you do sell a site there is the potential to benefit from it in a service arrangement as well.

Income Potential: Several $100 to several $1000 (one time payment)

Note: You could also monetize this other ways as well, through ad publishing networks like Google Adsense, affiliate programs, and the promotion of your own products, but for clarity I have kept my focus on local businesses.

BONUS Technique: Trading Services

There are many companies out there looking for help with their local SEO efforts and most of them expect to pay a good deal of money for this service.

Say you help a company that sells eye glasses, perhaps they would be willing to exchange a brand new pair of prescription glasses in exchange for local domain SEO. This happens more regularly than you think and these companies are more than willing to exchange services versus pay cash most of the time (as they have mark up to work with as well).