Why Yellow Pages? Why Now?
Boy they had it so GOOD for so long didn’t they! They collected your advertising dollars in advance and you waited breathlessly, for months, to get the new Yellow Pages directory to see how your ad displayed and what your competitors had done. Then along came the Gold Pages and then the Internet. Now they would like you to advertise on the yellowpages dotcom!
The question to ask here is just how can you effectively communicate on the internet? You will need a solid website presence. Consider online advertising to bring initial website exposure. For our clients the website presence always comes from a WordPress website that allows you to control and refresh content.
To put this in terms that their previous customers might find useful is to view internet exposure as being similar to billboard advertising and Yellow Pages ads.
Google AdWords campaigns, and other online ads, are based on the “auctioning” of ad positions based on bids that allow any business to place an ad on the first page of results, for the keywords that they purchase. In a chosen keyword category you can pay more for your ad placement, but your competitors can also increase the price that they are willing to pay. While this strategy can be leveraged to move up to the first page, in the long run you will continue to drive the cost of that placement higher and higher. Because the auction process is ongoing, there is also no guarantee that your placement won’t be bought out at any time.
If Yellow Page ads are compared to Google Adwords, we can see that the placement of the ad is not static but can be very dynamic in terms of content. However, if you are not willing to spend the amount of money required to be at the top of the category, then you need to concentrate on the keyword content. However, content is limited to 2 lines of 26 characters, and can be copied by any competitor at any time. In the Yellow Pages model a business calling itself AA Websites always got the first position for one year, until the next year when a business named AAA Websites got that slot.
Your WordPress website installation can be compared to billboard campaign. If you had a billboard site, then you could continue to occupy that location as long as you wanted. Your WordPress website however has very low fixed costs in comparison to billboards and the content can be refreshed on a timely basis. In addition, that content can be delivered 24 hours a day across many different Social Media platforms and directed to mobile devices. A billboard only delivers content to the cars driving by.
To put it in context, this is the way of the future and the old way of doing things is falling by the wayside.
See the article from the New York Times News Service that quotes Eric Lefkofsky the founder of Groupon.
