MyGermanCity.com has been online since 2007. Around 10,000 pages about German towns, regions, history, food, cars, and the practical business of living here, written in English by one person, for people who are not in Germany yet.
That last part is what might make this page worth your time.
Who Reads This Site
Two kinds of people keep coming back. The first is planning a trip, and usually a specific one: they want to stand in the village their great-grandmother left in 1889 and find out what it looks like now. The second is working out whether to move to Germany, or has already decided and is discovering how much paperwork this country can generate.
What both groups share is the thing that should interest you. They are looking at Germany from the outside, in English, and most of the businesses that could actually help them are advertising in German, to Germans, on the wrong side of a language barrier.
What A Partnership Here Gets You
A page of your own on this site. Your headline, your text, your pictures, a video if you have one, your contact details, and a link to your own site. It lives at a permanent address, it gets linked from the pages where it actually belongs, and it stays put.
No banner. I stopped selling those, and I am not starting again.
The reason is simple enough. A banner interrupts somebody who was reading about something else. A page answers a question the reader already had, which is why they typed it into a search box in the first place.
About Traffic Numbers
I am not going to quote you one.
I could pull a figure off the server and it would look impressive, and I could not honestly tell you how much of it is people and how much is scrapers hammering the same page from six addresses in the same second. Until I can separate those properly, you get no number from me. Anyone who hands you one without explaining how they counted is doing you a disservice, and you have probably met a few.
What I can tell you is how this site gets found. It ranks for the names of small German towns, and it has been doing that for close to two decades. Nobody lands on a page about a 4,000-person village in the Eifel by accident. They arrive typing the name of a place they have a reason to care about, and that reason is usually family.
Your Page Will Say That It Is A Partner Page
At the top, in plain words, where nobody can miss it. Same for the link to your site, which carries the markup that tells search engines it is a paid placement.
That is not a concession I am asking you to swallow. It is the reason a partnership here is worth having. Readers trust this site because what it recommends cannot be bought, and the labeling is what keeps that sentence true. Quietly slipping you into an article would burn the thing you are paying to be near. The full policy is on the disclosure page.
Where The Fit Is Usually Best
- Relocation and moving, including destination service providers
- Residence permits and immigration law
- Tax, accounting, and personal finance for people with income in two countries
- International schools, universities, and online language schools
- Insurance, particularly health cover for expats
- Real estate, property management, furnished rentals, and mortgage financing
- Conveyancing through a Notar (civil-law notary, an office with no real equivalent in the English-speaking world, and a constant source of confusion)
- Shipping: household goods, cars, and pets
- Recruitment and job placement for people arriving with a profession
- Weddings, which more Americans hold in Germany than you would guess
- Tours, transport, and places to stay in towns the guidebooks skip
That list is a starting point, not a fence. If you do something else and can explain who here benefits from it, explain it.
What I Won’t Do
- Recommend you in an article as though I had found you myself
- Put your link into editorial text without a label
- Let money decide the order partners appear in
- Take on a business I would not point a friend toward
What You Send Me
A headline, your page text of up to 1,000 words, images, a video link if there is one, your company contact details, and a logo.
I edit for style, so the page does not read like it fell in from a different website. If something in the text makes a claim I cannot stand behind, I will come back to you about it rather than publish it. Nothing goes live before you have seen it.
What It Costs
Ask me. It depends on what you want and for how long, and a number sitting on a public page for seven years turned out to serve nobody, least of all the people who read it.
Write to marcus@mygermancity.com and tell me what your business does and who you think it helps here. If I cannot see the benefit for my readers, I will tell you straight out, and we will both have saved an afternoon. :-)
Marcus
Founder, MyGermanCity.com