Folks, Yellow Pages are here to stay and much more valuable than Web Advertising.
I may be considered a traitor for posting this considering that I'm in the web advertising business and the co-founder of a web advertising company with a social networking twist based in the Bay Area. The name of my company is not important, however what is important is that you walk away from this understanding why the Yellow Pages always have and always will play an important role in advertising, much more so than the web. The key issues that everyone in the web advertising business has been trying to address and struggled with since its infancy is how to create a meaningful degree of relevance, community, and visibility for the advertiser and hence a reasonable ROI on their advertising dollars. Folks the ROI for web advertising just isn't there, at least not yet. For anyone who has ever bought online advertising, you know exactly what I'm talking about. The problem is clutter and massive amounts of it, which has been growing exponentially. That's not to say that online advertising is useless. Far from it. Craigslist for example is a great place for anyone to post a free Ad within a specific community and achieve visibility within that community for a short period of time. Of course, having a website to compliment your online ad also helps to make a compelling case to your audience about what you're offering, but more so as a background canvass than a direct method to produce sales. Then again, having a website (SEO friendly or not) is of no value, unless your customers are aware of your URL in the ever growing black hole called the world wide web. By the time you ad up the cost and time of designing, maintaining and hosting a website, making it SEO friendy, throwing money at AdWords or hoping that somehow your website will magically achieve high organic rankings amongst the search engines, Folks you're ROI from a local community yellow page ad will have produced real results. This is a fact of life and from someone in the online advertising business.
