The internet's gone/going yellow pages

airguy · #1 (**permalink**) 04-09-2004, 11:51 AM

In addition to the stuff we do on the net I have a heating and cooling business. It's the time of year we have to decide on just how much we want to spend and what size ad we want to go with. It's feeling very much like the pay for click we are paying for on the net. You decide on a half page under a few headings and then pay X number of dollars a month over the next year.

You spend what you can afford and try to attract customers to call for services. When your smaller, and running a smaller or no ad, and going by reputation or word of mouth almost every call is a money call. The larger the ad the more people call just wanting estimates, shopping or looking to rip you off.

I never had a bad check that wasn't honored and never had a charge back until I started buying larger ads in the yellow pages. I never had as much fraud as I do now on the net until we started having to pay for every click. The net is still cheaper but like the yellow pages you now have several books/sites that all are ready to send customers your way. You better sign up with all the yellow books because you know that some people throw out all the other books and only keep this one all year long.

It's funny how some things just don't change, as much as we want them too........

EJRS.COM · #2 (**permalink**) 04-13-2004, 05:46 PM

You are definitely right there. We wanna think we've advanced thru the years... Have we really?

stevealmond · #3 (**permalink**) 04-13-2004, 07:06 PM

100% correct, the bigger you get the more people want to rip you off. The problem is, by staying small and relying on word of mouth the business will always struggle and probably fail. So you have to go with big adverts in yellow pages, ppc campaigns, magazine ads, etc. You will always end up with people that will try and take you for a ride. However it's your job to spot them and dump them before they do your business any damage.

Good luck with this years campaign.

Regards

Steve

ellenthompson · #4 (**permalink**) 04-13-2004, 07:33 PM

I own a company that is a directory of online apartment sites and this puts me in competition with online superpages and yellowpages advertisements.

I have noticed that superpages listing come up very high on Google, at least for some apartment-related keywords. I have not noticed this on Yahoo! and MSN which are taking market share away from Google.

I do SEO and PPC stuff and am now investigating advertising on other sites that come up high in search engine rankings. I'm not looking for free or reciprocal links - just what looks like can be a good value. A quick search reveals them - as well as high superpages rankings e.g. www.improvenet.com.

I am high tech, but don't go to www.yellowpages.com, etc. to look up stuff. I know it is expensive to have the Internet add-on and you're in competition with everyone else. That said, they have great positioning with Google...at least for now.

kneelsit · #5 (**permalink**) 04-13-2004, 07:43 PM

Sorry I would have to disagree completely with your comment about the "need" to advertise or pay for advertising.

It has only been since I put my first site up on the net back in 97 that my sales started to take off and I have spent virtually zilch on advertising.

The only thing I did was pay initially for a "one time" (ha ha) listing in LookSmart to get on to MSN search pages.. Tried Overture UK PPC for one year then dropped it. Total promotional expenditure in cash terms over 7 years around $300 tops. Total hours expended on my site to get to #1 and 2# position on Google and Yahoo for my main keyword phrases literally thousands.

Well I'm off now to put the finishing touches to my sailboat - my personal reward for those thousands of hours spent.

ellenthompson · #6 (**permalink**) 04-13-2004, 07:54 PM

I pay a remarkably small amount for advertising for a well established site. However, my business would have never gotten off the ground without some PPC ads. It took months for us to get top rankings for popular keywords. As of late, we are consistantly on the first page for Yahoo and MSN but not on Google.

Since I sell advertising, I can tell people till I'm blue in the face what my traffic honestly is, but if they don't see me on page 1 on Google for some random keyword, they don't advertise.

While I do know many small businesses that are making money with little to no advertising, it's not a good strategy for everyone.

The answer depends on what your objectives are. I know a guy who built a great fax-related business by paying as much as $7 a click. He knew his numbers, his ROI and his payback time. This gives me heart palpitations, but it really works for him.

I'm not honest about valuing my time (most of us aren't) so I'm not sure what I'm paying for my "free" traffic anyway. There is always opportunity cost.

Regardless, at 5 or 10 cents per incremental visitor, how can you object to more traffic if you have the capacity to serve it?

avscaptain · #7 (**permalink**) 04-13-2004, 08:03 PM

I have not paid for any listing on the web and I am getting tons of hits and sales throught the free search engine submissions. I have spent several hundreds of hours optimizing my keywords but it has paid off.

stevealmond · #8 (**permalink**) 04-13-2004, 08:17 PM

Hi Kneelsit,

It all depends on the business that you are running. Yes for the keywords that I target that are relevent for the business that I run, I have top ten positions on yahoo, google, etc. To get these positions has taken thousands of hours, just like yourself. However I don't have a sailboat, yet! So I have to do other advertising. Yellow pages is no good for my business, neither do I believe that PPC would work for me. However online and magazine ads do work and so I spend money with these resources. Sometimes you have to spend money to gain money.

Regards

Steve

fastjon · #9 (**permalink**) 04-13-2004, 08:20 PM

AirGuy is right on both fronts - the more you advertise on Yellow Pages or the Net, the more dead wood you attract - Try cold calling if you really want to seek out some fraud!

But, it is a love-hate relationship that we can't live without. In my business I need the yellow pages and the Internet; and I use the yellow to send traffic to the net in order to qualify my leads and better educate them.

The major difference that I see is that the Yellow Pages have no accountability - you pay and take your chances - with the net, at least you can pay for traffic, qualified or not, but traffic nonetheless. I believe that the best strategy and most economical is to diversify in every sense and minimize exposure in each medium.

As for the need to be in all the books or all the search engines - yes, there is definitely a similarity. After all, in the books or on the net, it's all about segmentation for the publishers and fear for the advertisers.

simonm · #10 (**permalink**) 04-14-2004, 03:50 AM

Interesting the comments about having to be in yellow pages and otehr directories. I do the marketing for a major B2B and B2C and we are now withdrawing from many directories as, having monitored what work comes from where, these directories add nothing, but cost a significant amount.

In the sense of say £1,000 advert, my company has to do at least £10,000 of work just to cover the advert! I might get many small jobs through yellow pages but I don't get the big ones. In fact, they come from the web! We have had various multi £100,000 contracts over the last few years solely due to our web and search engine presence!

TrafficProducer · #11 (**permalink**) 04-14-2004, 03:08 PM

Quote:

the bigger you get the more people want to rip you off.

Play the odds here.

Say you get 1,000 sales 1% are fraud.

Mow say you get 1000,000 sales and 1% are fraud.

The later has more fraudulant sales.

airguy · #12 (**permalink**) 04-15-2004, 03:17 AM

I'm not so much concerned with fraud from the customer, as someone pointed out you do your best to weed those out, the one's you get caught by is just part of playing the game.

What does concern me is fraud from erroneous clicks, and the fact that the search engines will want larger bribes in the future for the traffic they send. Anymore I just feel like I am validating parking for people to look in my shop and every once in a while someone buys something.

mir2u · #13 (**permalink**) 04-18-2004, 10:25 PM

I agree that the yellow pages carries risk, both for our businesses as well as for us consumers. And it is more and more expensive for us as well as our customers both in higher prices for goods and services as well as in time sorting thru the chaff to get to the meat. And the risk of failure is there not only for each business owner (ie the fear factor of NO customers), but also for the customers who do buy from us (fear of being cheated by unethical businesses).
Therefore we are initiating a Word-Of-Mouth Referral Service that is NOT driven by advertising dollars, but rather by RECOMMENDATIONS of Quality Business from Consumers who have been satisfied by them. As a Permission-Based Opt-In service, we are experiencing that Good People (not deadbeats) who want Quality Business Relationships are interested in using our service and contributing their Best Recommendations. And we've found that virtually any quality business is able to afford to help us pay for the expenses of the service, so money is not the deciding factor; quality and excellence ARE.
Perhaps this approach would help in your situation if you are in a B2C business and there is a facilitator (read leader) willing to coordinate the building of both the business and user networks needed to make such a service work effectively.