Things are really start to get interesting for local advertising.
Things are changing and they are changing fast. When I started selling internet advertising we were able to tell business owners that if they didn't advertise on the internet they may as well kiss their business goodbye. They bought most of the time. Fact of the matter is that we really thought that the internet would change everything, and it did. But, things are still changing for small and medium size businesses. So what do you do if you are a business person trying to sort this all out? I recommend you objectively analyze what an offering will provide you from an investment standpoint and weight it against what you are currently doing then track the results. More and more options are popping up on the radar screen for business people and old businesses are beginning to change the way the conduct business. See this article for more info on the Yahoo partnership with 170 newspapers. This is all really great for advertisers and there will definitely be some losers, some winners and some what-the-hell-were-they-thinking ideas as a result. For right now, track, track, track.
Are you a household service provider looking for a way to drive more traffic and more leads for your business? If so, check out Getvendors.com a Social Network for Households. As a service provider you are presented with a few options:
Option I - Pay Per Lead Program
Bid Starts at 99 cents
Your payments are tied to performance (you pay only for the qualified leads you receive) and you can control how much you spend every month on leads. You select which locales for what categories you want to receive leads.
Our lead includes user’s complete requirement details, phone number, and email. We review filter out fake leads.
For every request users receive five bids (two sponsored bids and three organic matches). Thus, the proportion of leads that convert to actual business for a professional is close to 20%
Pay per lead program provides you a way to stand out of stiff competition for limited organic matches. Note, even if you participate in the pay per lead program, when your listing is one of the entries in our organic matches, you are not charged for that particular lead
You get benefits of Enhanced Directory Listing option for free.
Or
Option II - Enhanced Directory Listing
$10 per month
If you prefer to have interested customers making you a direct call rather than you making follow ups then this is the option for you.
Your detailed profile along with contact information, customer referrals, fee details, website link, years of experience, available coupons will be sent to users when there are matching requirements or users do contextual or directory search on our portal
The static listing page devoted to your offering helps you in getting more search engine exposure (and if you do not have website then you can use that as your webpage)
You can cancel your membership anytime.
Or
Option III - Basic Listing
Free
You can register your profile with our service for free.
For registration only requirements are to have a valid business phone and an email address
If there are no outstanding complaints against you in consumer forums and if you are professionally qualified then your listing will be part of the dataset evaluated by our organic match algorithm
You can upgrade or cancel your membership anytime
Please note, currently, this is the only membership option available for service professionals in the state of Texas and Maryland.
Or
Option IV - Banner Advertisement
Contact Us For Price
We have banner advertisement/sponsorship space available on our pages. To get more details, call us at 415-738-8449 or send us email at customerservice[AT]GetVendors[DOT]com or contact us using our request form.
Check this video out too.
I think there are enough tools to make this site useful to a user so they would come back to use the site and contact the vendors that are advertising on the site. At these prices, give it a try for at least 3 months and see what you see. Track your investment closely and see if it works for your business and brings you the types of customers that you like working with and you see as a good fit for your business. You only know once you try.
Well we have launched in a really soft way. Really soft. So the focus of the blog is going to change from focusing on building our application that tracks and monitors advertising generated calls, clicks and emails to advertising options for small and medium size businesses. There are so many options out there for advertising we want to explore them all and present impartial information about each and every one. So, if you provide an advertising option that is available to small and medium size businesses contact us and we will take a look at what it does, how it can help and what the potential value is to an advertiser. More o on this contact info tomorrow.
Where do you fit in? Are you trying new things? Are you tracking the results to see if the advertising works for you? There are many great options out there for small and mid sized businesses, so take advantage of them, but only keep them if they work for you.
November 15th at 11:59 pm PST we gave birth to a very quiet, healthy advertising tracking and monitoring service. Check us out here Adsymetrix. This is a super soft launch while we work out some bugs over the next week or so. If you would like to be a beta user let us know.
What an expert says about Online Yellow Page advertising
We don't have any opinion, other than personal, on where you should advertise. We are, however, committed to the fact that you do advertise and helping you to quantify and qualify that advertising so you can adjust your advertising budget accordingly. Check out what this guy says about online yellow page advertising and traditional print directories. Decide for yourself and get tracking.
You are a business person who gets approached often by salespeople selling yellow pages, newspaper ads, radio, tv, maybe a billboard or two? There are so many traditional ways to advertise your business and so many new options what should you do? Read this article about the growth of online advertising and you will see that more options are coming down the pike your you to evaluate. What I recommend, is trying and tracking. Try out a new advertising option and track and see if it works for your business. Don't rely on what the salesperson says about what the advertising can do for your business. You may have find a few diamonds out there in the rough.
You are a business person who gets approached often by salespeople selling yellow pages, newspaper ads, radio, tv, maybe a billboard or two? There are so many traditional ways to advertise your business and so many new options what should you do? Read this article about the growth of online advertising and you will see that more options are coming down the pike your you to evaluate. What I recommend, is trying and tracking. Try out a new advertising option and track and see if it works for your business. Don't rely on what the salesperson says about what the advertising can do for your business. You may have find a few diamonds out there in the rough.
In case you didn't think you could afford to advertise in print...
It can seem a little daunting to advertise in a newspaper when perhaps you may have to cut your advertising budget somewhere else or you just don't have a ton of money to waste. Try out Mediabids as an option to buy significantly discounted newspaper and magazine advertising. Check out this article to gain some good perspective on how it works.
When you are done checking them out and are ready to place an ad, I highly recommend using our advertising tracking tools to evaluate the effectiveness of that spend. Not just on its own, but against your other advertising to determine the most effective locations for your ads, but the spots that provide the most bang for the buck.
We really want you to advertise and grow your business. We just don't want you to do it blindly and without a plan. So try different advertising venues, do what you know and do what you don't know. But, measure it and monitor it to see if you are touching the customer that you want and that will help you to grow your business. If you don't feel like doing all that tracking and monitoring on your own, use the Adsymetrix service since we will be launching in Alpha mode November 15, 2006.
If you want to read about going local with your advertising check out this article.
Great mapping tools from a great service provider.
If you need a mapping tool or map icons don't build it yourself, check out Terra IMS. In the meantime, you can read what they wrote about us here. By the way, just a few days until we go live in alpha, more will to come on that front.
We are building an incredibly useful tool for small and medium sized businesses to track and monitor the effectiveness of their online and offline advertising.
