Jennifer Lind

According to an AT&T Press Release regarding Yellowpages.com:

2008 FIRST-QUARTER HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE:

• 70 percent year-over-year increase of unique visitor traffic to the site, according to comScore Media Trends report for March 2008.
• 25 percent year-over-year increase of monthly searches delivered through the YELLOWPAGES.COM Network — there are now more than 125 million searches a month.(3)
• Sales of YELLOWPAGES.COM online video ads have exceeded company projections.
• Mobile searches increased more than 50 percent from September 2007 to March 2008.(4)
• YELLOWPAGES.COM added Microsoft Corp. to its ad network though an exclusive arrangement, publishing YELLOWPAGES.COM advertisers across Microsoft local search sites, including Live Search, Live Search Maps and MSN Yellow Pages.
• Being ranked No. 31 in comScore’s top 100 Web properties for March 2008.

Read the complete press release here.

How do you market a purely online business in the local search realm? I’ve seen many of these companies turn to national advertising when faced with this challenge, but there are other options that will lower your cost per click.

Although you are a national company, you still have specific local market areas that you are targeting. It is important to still think locally because your advertisement should be focused on the local buyer on an IYP site. For example, a hotel comparison site like Priceline.com has hotels where you can reserve a room, it just happens that they are not specifically Priceline.com’s hotels.

A national buy will cost you tens of thousands on any IYP site. However, if you focus on specific metro markets that make sense for your company, you could drastically decrease your CPC and increase your relevance. For example, a site like jobweb.com, which is a career and job-search site for college students, could only target the big university towns like College Station, TX, Berkley, CA, Iowa City, IA, etc. Then if your CTR meets your expectations you can consider going to a national ad to draw in those smaller college towns.

Yelp is a great local search site, that is really focused on customer reviews. As a Yelp user, you can connect with friends, become part of the Yelp Elite Squad, have a local conversation, tag your favorite reviewers, add bookmarks, and add a list of favorite businesses. You can also use Yelp on your mobile devise to find businesses on the go.

Yelp has strict guidelines for writing reviews and gate keeping which advertisers they allow to post on the site. This is very appealing to users because they know that reviews are being written by real people and not managed by the business owner who asked friends and family to post a review.

Yelp will remind you of Citysearch, but is more trustworthy because of their strict advertising policies. Yelp also has a better layout and has a more personal look and feel, with pictures of the reviewer and better descriptions on the lookup page.

Advertising on Yelp

As a local business owner, all you need to do is claim your business. You can then see how many people are viewing your profile and update your business information. Also, since very few businesses are promoting on Yelp, you have a good opportunity to make your business really stand out. More info on Yelp for Businesses.

Yelp has some options for sponsored listings, which allows you to add a large image slide show or announcements. This will also move your listing to the top of the page under your relevant category.

Yelp Syndication

Yelp is prominent on many social networking sites, including Facebook and Squidoo.

Info on Yelp’s Facebook syndication:

Facebook has recently launched a new feature called Beacon which allows Facebook to request information you might want to share with your Facebook friends from sites like Yelp. If you are actively logged into Facebook, your Yelp reviews can be shared with your Facebook friends automagically.

One of the new directions that Local Search is taking us is pay per call advertising. This option is now available with main providers Ingenio (owned by AT&T) and Free411 (aka Jingle).

What is Pay Per Call Advertising?

Basically the same as Pay Per Click, but the url link is replaced with a link to call. The call number is tracked, and you pay by the number of calls you receive during your pre-set day parting hours.

Who Should Look into Pay Per Call Advertising?

Service based local companies such as plumbers & contractors, restaurants, financial services, travel companies, auto repair and sales, and telecommunications.

What About the Average Bid Costs?

Obviously, if a customer sees your ad and decides to call you, that person is going to be highly relevant and will be ready to stop in your store or request your services. The high conversion rates you receive means you will pay slightly more than your typical PPC campaign. An average pay per call bid price will be around $8-$10.

Where Can I Find Pay Per Call Ads?

• Yellowpages.com (tile ads at the top of the page)
• Dex
• Switchboard
• Local.com
• AOL
• Mobile Search Engines: MSN Mobile, AOL Mobile, Mapquest, Traffic.com
• Directory Assistance calls: AT&T, 1-800-Free411
• LowerMyBills.com
• plus more!

The main thing to remember if you are placing a pay per call ad online is to design your creative accordingly. You want to use a call to action that will entice the user to pick up the phone, such as “call to get promotion.”

One goal I set for myself a month or two ago is to get involved on more social media sites. After all, internet marketing is my career and my passion, so I really should know as much as possible about this emerging form of marketing.

We all wear many hats, and have many stories to tell. On this blog, you see my career focused hat and the stories I can share about the internet marketing field. On other sites, I’ve dedicated to more personal stories. I recently added one of my most personal stories to Squidoo, and am eager but nervous about the results I will see (if any???). My goal here was to tell my own story about my dad’s cancer diagnosis and to create welcoming areas where others could tell their stories as well.

When I was looking through other squidoo sites, I noticed many great features such as adding content from Amazon, eBay, links, Flickr pictures, polls, and duels. This was a small trial of my social media technology knowledge as I linked to a Flickr set I made specifically about my squidoo topic. Otherwise, it was pretty easy to set up. I’m not saying this page is the best or even close - it’s my first attempt and I will continue to improve it.

There are some great opportunities on squidoo for businesses. For example, check out this page about a new style of laptop bags. This author describes the bags in detail, give you pricing details below, tells bag designers they can promote their bags through the page as well, and asks readers to explain which bag is their favorite and why. I love this because Squidoo creates a welcoming area where users can tell others about their favorite products, and promotes other user-generated content.

If you are interested in using Squidoo for your business, here some of the other applications you may be interested in: Youtube voting, Flickr voting, Amazon voting, text list, links voting, polaroids (giant picture!), RSS, talk bubble, sticky notes, the most important thing. Happy squidooing!

When placing advertising on a new site, it is easy to just analyze that particular site: the site features, the navigation, the placement of your advertising, ect.

However, if you take a closer look at their network affiliates, you will see a whole other world. You are probably familiar with this because the major search engines also distribute their ads to other sites. It works the same way for most local search sites. For example, by placing performance-based ad on Superpages, your ad is being distributed to Local.com, neighborhood.com, infoUSA, and others.

To find these lists, just take a look at the main website and search for alliances or affiliates. Superpages’ affiliate list can be found here.

It’s important to look more at relevance and quality than quantity when analyzing these lists. Also, look at the types of channels they are distributing to. If you are interested in reaching your customers via mobile search, you will want to choose your advertising placement accordingly. Some sites are also starting to look at internet video, radio, and traditional advertising affiliates as well.

If you are planning to place ads on several sites - say you want to place directly on Local.com and you want a Superpages ad as well - you will want to research how your ads will be affected. They may be competing with each other. To get around this, you may try to place under differing categories, or place a national ad on Local.com and local ads on Superpages.

Local search… is it the new way we search or the old way? It’s both. Local search connects us to our community and to our neighbors. The old way of search is now online and it will continue to develop further than it ever could in the traditional means.

Instead of pulling out the yellow pages book to find your local salon, you can now find the salon just before you boot down your computer for the night. Just jump online to Google Maps, MSN, or Yellowpages.com and search by the town or zip code and type in salon. Within 2 minutes you will have every salon at your fingertips, and you will be able to see their website, print a coupon, send the address to your mobile phone, and read what others are saying about the company.

So in a world where I can now buy clothes from New York while I am sitting here in Minneapolis, why would we still rely so heavily on local search? There are many reasonable answers to this question. At the core, I think people will always like the feeling of going into the store, seeing the behaviors of the company’s employees and the customers in the store, and touching the product for themselves before making a buying decision. The need for community will never disappear completely from our society.

So what is next for local search? Even more interaction with the customer. The employees of our local Panera Bread live here in the same town. They know the community, they breathe the same air, they drive the same streets. The more that our local businesses get involved with the community, with the internet, and specifically with their customers, the better our communities will be (and the more loyal customers they will have!). I would love to see a local business with their own blog, tell customers about a local event related to their products or services, asking customers to vote on their favorite products, opening a discussion to help the customers understand the product or service better, etc.

Customers want to be involved! (And they want to be the center of attention!)

Local search sites and general search engines will eventually adapt to changes, especially changes brought on by their searchers. Next time you are out driving in a new part of town, you may see a message from Superpages.com on your mobile with the nearby location of your favorite coffee shop chain.

Yellowpages.com’s ads are now live on MSN. The sponsored results from Yellowpages.com are showing up at the top of MSN’s Live Search Maps and MSN Local Search.

I performed a couple of searches on MSN and had the best results finding the Yellowpages.com listings on the MSN Maps. I’m currently not seeing them live on MSN.com.

With the comScore’s recent web impressions report Superpages.com ranked higher in web impressions than Yellowpages.com. Yellowpages may be able to pull ahead of Superpages in ad impressions with this new partnership.

Results of comScore for March 2008: Superpages ranked 26th - in Top 50 Web Properties - with 27,672 impressions. Yellowpages.com ranked 31 with 24,962 impressions. MSN ranked 3rd with 121,013 impressions for March.

Since I am such “a good customer” of Kraftfoods.com (basically just an average email subscriber), I have been selectively chosen to try out Kraft’s new mobile recipe subscription.

How it works: subscribe online by entering your mobile #. You can sign up for weekly or daily recipes and then enter the time of day you would like to receive your recipe text. Kraft Foods will send you a recipe from one of 5 category choices every day at the time you selected.

If you decide to be proactive in your recipe search, just search the site for a recipe you’re interested in making. Then choose to either send the recipe or the shopping list to your phone.

Why I am not signing up for this service: Kraft’s message is just a url link that you need to either copy or paste into your phone browser, or go to a computer and plug in the url to get your recipe.

A whole world of games, learning activities, and other interactive tools are available for children. Learning isn’t just for the classroom anymore, and it definitely isn’t limited to reading a book or sitting through a discussion. I came across a website from Jefferson County Schools in Tennessee with a large resource of Interactive Websites that are specifically geared towards children for grades pre-K-12 (turns out there are many other sites with a compilation of interactive children’s sources as well). These sites cover a broad range of topics including math, the solar system, art,  animals, bacteria, etc. Many even have teachers guides.

Many of these sites are rudimentary in their look and feel and may require an adult to help the littler ones navigate since even I had a bit of difficulty finding the interactive portions through all the other links. However, some of the sites link to area science centers, national geographic, and other large organizations with money and staff available for web design. My personal favorite is the National Gallery of Art. Here, you can create your own art pieces online. Create still life paintings, landscapes, collages, mobiles, 3-d shapes, and tons of other options.

One thing that concerns me is that many of these interactive learning sites required registration to use. I’m not sure why you would require email and other info from a child to use your website.

It’s great to see that education has taken a bold pioneering stop toward interactive learning and is creating fun environments online for children.