Yellowpages.com

Have you had any success using banner ads on YP.com?

They gave me a package with a banner on the top of the page under my category and a listing in 3 print directories for $136 per month.

Yellowpages!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Billboards

Thank goodness I stopped at their $89 a month deal. Actually not so much of a deal. I have yet to talk to a customer that got my number from the phone book.

I won't being doing that again.

yellowpages, would be good for the geritol crowd, a billboard everybody will see, in the targeted area.
If billboards didn't work explain the blond attorneys ad, on everybillboard in Detroit. She spends way over 50k a month

He's talking about yellowpages.com.

I've had a lot of customers try different yellowpage websites for advertising and they've all had far lower traffic and conversions per dollar than if they were using other forms of pay-per-click(PPC) advertising.

People don't go to yellowpages.com to search stuff. When was the last time you were on one? The search engines(Google, Bing, Yahoo) are the online equivalent of the yellowpages. It makes no sense to confine your advertising to one site unless that is the site your customers use.

yup!!!!!
Yellow pages anything sucks, even the eskimos not to fool around with anything yellow.

Just optimize your free listing. They run their online business the same way they run the books. Paid placement by seniority, not by best fit. Then by alphabetical order, not by best fit. They basically took the book and put it online. AND...they all want 12 month contracts with no escape clauses...like the book.

When they give me a "so much per month" price, I ask them if I can have April and May.

This is precisley why this type of yellow pages anything is just outdated. With all the different avenues to spend your revenue on why throw it away here.

You got it. Just don't ignore their traffic. I am putting the numbers together now for a post, but they all still get a TON of traffic, so everyone make sure to optimize your free listings.

I'm confused, "free listings". Cost money to be in yellow pages and yellow book

Nope...everyone is entitled to a free listing. In fact, the listing in the book is free. They just try and sell advertising on top of your listing. I have my listing in all the major YP online...for free.

the key is tracking. If you are not correctly tracking your calls then you will never kinow your true ROI. The best way is to have a tracking phone number . You still need to know the conversion rate and average ticket. You also need to ask the right question when tracking calls "how did you hear about us " might get a different response than "How did you find our phone number?". Every market is different so dont discard an advrtising media just because someone else failed with it.

Great, it sooo nice being entitled

What has the free listing returned for leads? sales? Is it turning into a dead stick as my impression of it would seem?

Several of the online yellow pages are used by the search engines as local citation so having consistent data can help you achieve higher rankings in the local search results. They are scraped by some of the most authoritative local citation sources like Acxiom, Localeze and Infogroup. Some of the sites are:

superpages.com
yellowpages.com
yellowbook.com
yellowbot.com
whitepages.com

Thats the ROI....

I see. Even though an HO might not go directly to one of YBs sites, they could still show up on Google and increase your overall presence.