Our community and our world have made a cultural shift from doing business with our neighbors to buying almost exclusively from multinational corporations.  The Internet gives a tool to reverse that trend and connect the community buyers to the locally owned sellers. The impact on our community for the family business could be substantial for generations to come.

 A significant part of our community turns to the web to do business.  Chattanooga Citizen is a locally owned and operated website that opens the door for our community to do business in our community.  We connect the local farm, ranch, dairy, mechanic, carpenter, plumber, etc. to the community before the community goes to the multinational providers. This is a difficult task, but very doable.

Many local providers have seasonal products or varying production.  This is especially true for the small farm or ranch that may have no products today, but a lot tomorrow.  Potential customers don’t know who the providers are or what quantities are available.  It is easier to go to the local “super-store” rather than to all the local vendors.  To make the small vendor more reachable, we are developing a service to connect the customer to the vendor directly, adding an optional delivery service.

 Our goal is to make it obvious to the consumer who the locally owned businesses are.  And when it comes to the food we eat, consumers want to know who provides organic produce, meat, and dairy products.

 The delivery service will be a list of local people who will pick up products from local vendors and deliver them to customers for a modest fee.  The customers can easily obtain local quality products with the convenience of web browsing and not have to spend the time going from vendor to vendor.  If the customer chooses, they can pick up their products directly from the vendor, having confidence that what they want is available and even set aside for them.

 We are looking for people to get involved with our efforts and ask for your participation.

 Please consider placing an ad on the Chattanooga Citizen site.  We use the typical bidding system that is common with Internet advertising.  Minimum cost is $1 per 1,000 impressions, or in other words your image ad would appear 1,000 times for a dollar.  Details are available at http://ChattanoogaCitizen.com/Ad.  You can provide the art for the image, or we can develop them for you.  We are offering a startup special of three ad designs and a $20 credit on advertising for $75.  Normally we do a single ad image for $50.

We are offering turn-key vendor websites with your own domain name starting at $100 for the first year and only $50 for subsequent years.  All you need is the artwork and some text descriptions.  We will also do the art for you for an additional $100 which includes two ads and a $20 advertising credit.

Additionally we are looking for authors who would like to add news, sports, and other items of interest to the site.  Authors are paid the bulk of the advertising revenue, so this is a possibility for some extra income or sole income for the aggressive.

Finally, the Chattanooga Citizen uses the same technology as the Bradley Citizen.  The Bradley Citizen is owned and operated by a resident of Bradley County, Tennessee.  We are looking for a resident of the Chattanooga Metropolitan Area to become the owner and operator of the Chattanooga Citizen.

Interested parties should contact email us at ChattanoogaCitizen@ShofarAd.com