Online ad sellers think local

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that have received positive customer reviews, offering them a flat rate for a top listing on its site, with the business owner paying only for phone leads. In the coming weeks, the company plans to begin service in San Francisco and Seattle.

Even if small merchants are receptive to advertising online, companies like Insider Pages face internal obstacles within their industry. Among yellow pages directories, for example, the "feet on the street" have long been reluctant to pitch the Web for fear of cannibalizing their print sales and handsome commissions. (Some print salespeople earn six figures annually.)

To counter that thinking, Verizon pays its roughly 3,000-member national sales team larger commissions for landing Web advertisers than for print customers, according to Eric Chandler, vice president of e-commerce marketing for Verizon's SuperPages.com.

"It's been a long transition to continue to get them focused more and more on the electronic side without impacting the print side. We don't want to pull from one to get the other," Chandler said. Superpages.com has operated since 1996, and Chandler said the division is profitable.

In recent years, local advertising has been touted as one of the most promising growth markets for search. Anticipating the trend, Google, Yahoo, Amazon and CitySearch have built tools to help consumers find local businesses.

Yahoo recently introduced a free Web site service for small businesses, hoping that its initial interaction with local merchants will make it easier to sell search ads and other premium services later. Yahoo has also teamed with SBC Communications, BellSouth and others to harness their local sales forces and promote simple, flat-rate search-engine marketing packages.

"We've made it painless and free," said Paul Levine, an executive who heads up Yahoo's initiatives in this area.

His counterpart at Google, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, said the search leader is approaching the market by improving automation and tools for small businesses and by partnering with "high touch" companies such as BellSouth, SME Global and Leads.com, which all have sales forces that encourage adoption of search ads.

"There are two challenges: How to sell to them if they're not coming to the front door and, second, how do you manage them?" she said.

Superpages.com sells fixed-price and pay-per-click ads to appeal to a broad range of local advertisers. Chandler said the company tries to make the system as simple as possible, selling categories in which merchants can appear.

"Are you making money from Day One? No," he said. But he remains optimistic: "We feel like you can turn the corner pretty quickly if you can get a critical mass."

[TV James]

Holistic Advertising

The day you see a Yahoo! or a Google buy a yellow pages company is the day you'll see local internet advertising take off.

These small local business leaders don't have the time to do the research or to figure out complex segmented budgets.

They rely on the yellow page salespeople to help them through the process and help them interpret the results. It requires that kind of personal contact hand-holding to get the job done.

Verizon's making a smart first move, but still, will you see the fruits of Verizon's work if you don't go to superpages or smartpages or whatever the name of Verizon's particular online yellow pages is?

Either a search engine's gotta get into the print business, or parter with an established print business (like Verizon) who's willing to look at the bigger potential money picture.

[NWLB]

Home grown SPAM.

Could it be that other than most local advertisers not trusting somebody selling online ads, it could be some dont want to become the first local store to be called out for sending LOCAL SPAM?

I wouldnt want people coming into my store and taking issue with an ad which triggers unintended messages and such out. Given how poorly some people grasp the internet, more than a few will wind up saying yes to that without realizing it.

NWLB
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