Jennifer Lind

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.

1. You should take the time to fill out the Enhanced Business Profile (MIP page). Keywords will narrow search results and are pulled from your more info page.
2. Fill out your category keywords for each heading. This can be found by doing a category lookup in the portal.
3. Use promotional text in the first line in addition to your business name (this is not an option if you have a local campaign, only an option if you are targeting by metro, state, or nationwide).
4. Relates to #3: use all the characters available to you for creative! For the title line, you have 50 characters and 70 characters for the promotional message.
5. Change your promotional text every 3-4 weeks if possible.

The newest interactive feature of the Internet Yellowpages is video. Citysearch, Yellowpages, and Superpages have all added this feature to their advertising products. Why should you add a video to your internet yellow pages listing? A video prompts action, enhances your company image, increases confidence, and will make you stand out from competitors.

For each internet yellowpages site, the production costs are all included in your product purchase. When you buy the video product, a local contractor will call you to arrange a meeting. Or, choose to use still pictures or your current television ad. The product includes professional voice talent and music. You’ll go through the production process, editing, and then your video will be live on your listing. Typically you are allowed all the edits you need before the ad is live, and other edits will need to be arranged with the videographer. Once you have the video, you own the rights to it. You can load the video onto your own website or use it in a television ad if you wish.

A few things to note about video ads on each IYP site:

Yellowpages:

• offers the video ad with any listing ad
• full length video is 45-60 seconds, you also get a thumbnail version for mobile devises and the URL
• video appears on more info page of your advertisement listing
• 500 value points
• Samples: Plumbing, Roofing & Siding

Superpages:

• 30-60 second spot with rights
• must purchase the video icon separately - icon is required
• video has information in the frame and appears as a “pop-up”
• Samples (video appears on the listing page so you will need to look for the video icon): Florist, Insurance

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, I recently painted the bedroom a bold blue color. I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to choose a color! By the time we were ready to paint, we had 8 paint samples each in 3 foot squares on our wall. Some blue-gray, some green-gray, some navy, some country blue, until we finally found the right shade of a blue with some green and a bit of black. Our own version of Aquarium! One tool that really helped was the Benjamin Moore Paint site, which is a great example of an interactive marketing site.

To start, you can either choose one of their rooms or upload your own digital photo. Skim through their paint chip samples to select the color you want for the walls, trim, hallway, and ceiling. You can even customize this with a specialty finish.

If you are totally lost, you can load combinations that will do all the work for you. When you’re done, you can print the project or save the colors to your notebook for future use.

The one thing they should consider adding is a feature that would automatically send your order to a local retailer. They could create an order form, allow you to select how much paint and what finish of each you need, and all you’d have to do is stop in and pick it up.