Thank you, Pat.  I appreciate the plug.  I try not to push our paid services too hard, I don't want people to get the impression that I just do this for the money.   But, we do have bills to pay, so I guess I should mention a few things.

First, you are right in the way you explained it.  If you have a free listing, only our subscribers have access to your contact information.  And, only about 2% of our more than 15,000 registered users have subscriptions, so the enhanced listings have a much larger potential audience.  Also, only about 4% of our listed companies have enhanced listings, so they tend to really stand out among the 6,500+ companies.

Second, the fees are very reasonable and based on the number of counties you cover.  Up to 5 counties is only $99/year.  They go up from there, all the way to $2,999 for a national listing.  We do this because we figure those who are really working in more counties can afford more and it hopefully discourages people from selecting a lot more counties than they actually cover.  I think there are some companies that list in the as many counties as they can figuring that they can find someone to subcontract an order to and make a couple of bucks.  We really just want people to list the counties they can actually cover and regularly provide service in.  We think that helps the small independent abstractors and the larger companies that do actually regularly provide services on a regional or national basis.

And, third, purchasing an enhanced listing and/or subscription helps us keep the site up and running.  We do our best to keep everyone informed about what is going on in the industry and we feel we need to provide a lot of services for free (blogs and forums, for example) to keep traffic up on the site to attract more potential customers here to use the directory.  That benefits all of us and the paid services we offer allow us to do it. 

We appreciate all of the support we get from all of you.  To those who have purchased enhanced listing and subscriptions, I thank you for supporting Source of Title.

Best,
Robert A. Franco
SOURCE OF TITLE