Yellow Page Decline Continues While Facebook Search Grows

During this past week a couple different things happened both worthy of their own blog post but time never really allowed me to get them done so I am getting them out together.

We all know that the Yellow Pages (and all copy cats) have had a continued decline in the usage of their print version, no secrets there. If early indications from real life examples are a sign of an accelerating move of their customers to smaller, less expensive ads then this year it could be a real scary ride for the industry.

A couple examples:

• While meeting with a large regional bank this week the marketing director indicated they cut their budget to a very small percentage for this year as compared to previous years based on the trends of people moving online. The person indicated that they previously had full page ads in their section of the Yellow Pages but had decided to move to the smallest listing available with a logo. How is that for a significant shift. When a conservative regional bank is making moves like that and starting to put more of their money into online marketing you know it is going to be a tough year.
• A fast growing local restaurant actually moved completely away from any paid listing in the Yellow Pages and moved back to the completely free listing. They thought it made more sense to focus their effort on expanding their web presence.

What I find particularly interesting is that the bank, who sets a yearly marketing budget and starts implementing it as soon as 2010 starts, has made such a strong move away from such a long running tradition as full page ads in their regional Yellow Page edition. This tells  me that last year was horrible for the Yellow Pages but now even the most rural and conservative of businesses are pulling out, in other words, even the strongholds in the rural regions are starting to move away.

Now on to Facebook, over the past month and a half I have seen a STRONG, and I should emphasize STRONG move upward in the amount of traffic I am receiving from Facebook search. I had read quite a bit about Facebook and the work they were putting into their search functions and had paid quite a bit of attention to that and had actually tested some things around that to see how it affected traffic to various sites.

Well the verdict is in and the Facebook dream scenario is happening more and more, Facebook would love for people not to go to Google to search (which is one of Googles biggest fears obviously), and with the amount of traffic I am seeing from Facebook search for quite a few different keyword terms it tells me that people are starting to be even more sticky to Facebook. Hopefully I can test a few scenarios with this soon and report back with some real numbers, but I can say that for certain terms that I rank well for in Google that I am getting just as much traffic from Facebook from them. A little side note, Facebook web search is powered by Bing....

iSupportServices.com Launches NorthCarolina.me and Business Support Services

Localtek is proud to announce a partnership with iSupportServices.com, the company owns several state .ME names and after the success of Missouri.me had interest in using our state Geo development platform for the launch of their state names and also extend the partnership into other areas where we provide rural small business services.

NorthCarolina.me is the first of the states to launch, over the coming months iSupportServices will be working directly with small business customers to support their technical and marketing needs and we are proud to be a piece of that solution.

Here is the press release that went out today:

iSupport Services, LLC
Chris Poer, 877-228-9002
cpoer@isupportservices.com
www.isupportservices.com

Do You Still Read Print Magazines and Newspapers?

Sunday afternoon I was spending a lazy day around the house (we all deserve one) when I realized I was holding the devil in my hands, I was actually reading a print media magazine. One of those old school things that we had before this Internet thingy.

Obviously there is a major shift happening in the news and print media world that everybody could see coming except for the people actually in the middle of it. That shift is the accelerating move of people reading news, opinions, and everything else online. As much as we that live in the online world would like to believe that everyone reads online the major move did not happen until the last couple years and it is accelerating every quarter, and this is not just due to the economy. The shift is here to stay.

Well, in reality I have only ever subscribed to the print newspaper for maybe a total of 6 months, this was around 1995 or so. Pretty much directly after that my news world started to come from media sites online. But I always continued to subscribe to several (ok probably 10) print magazines because for some reason I found them more useful than print newspapers. News is real time, much of the articles in magazines were more story and research based so real time did not matter as much.

Over the years though I have continued to shift until I got to the point where I subscribe to only 2 print publications, those are Wired and Fast Company.

Those 2 magazines are my 2 favorites and I think they still have very good, interesting, and forward thinking articles. I really wish Business 2.0 was still around since that was #2 only to Wired for me.

Anyway, I am sure over the next year or two I will likely quit subscribing to those as well and move completely online.

As the majority of my readers are from a pretty tech savvy online crowd, do you still subscribe to any print magazines or newspapers? How much longer and if you care to share what are they and why?

NOTE: After I wrote this Cate sent me a link to a great story that has about every link you would ever need to understand the shift and what it means. Thanks Cate!!!! I have reading material (online) for awhile.

ChefPatrick.com and BruceMarler.com Together On Video At Bido.com

I will be getting back to full blog posts starting tomorrow but in the mean time heres the video of the ChefPatrick and Bruce Marler show on Bido. It was a great time and I hope there is plenty of info on there to keep you interested. Its fun being live and not knowing what type of questions are going to come your way. Sorry if I do not look like Patricks usual partners on his Friday videos!

Thanks for watching.

Minisites Looking Good After Google Pagerank Update

My Wordpress Minisites and other Minisite types seemed to of fared rather well during this weeks Google Pagerank Update.

Overall the Pagerank results are definitely more positive than negative and with this I have seen an increase in traffic for targeted keywords to many of my minisites. Here are several that came out looking good:

Branson Mo

Port Isabel

Pensacola Beach

Hot Tubs

HotTubs.net did not increase in Google Pagerank but did get a traffic bump this week for ranking well on various related keywords. The rest of the list above went from pagerank 0 or 1 to Pagerank 3.

Overall I have also noticed that many of my sites may of stayed the same on pagerank but keyword driven traffic that I have been fighting for has increased measurably over the past week or so.

Now hoping a few of my newer sites like Math Book,  Cayenne Pepper and Glucomannan start showing even stronger results.

Make sure you check your sites, both in SERPS and Google Pagerank, you might just find good news.

Chartbeat Real Time Stats Service Launches

Today Betaworks launched a new real time website stats service called Chartbeat. The potential looks very good with this one. Although I use Google Analytics on some of my minisites I still always seem to default back to Awstats but Chartbeat may change that.

Chartbeat requires a couple lines of code to be added to your site, one after your head tag and another right before your body tag. I just did an install on two of my sites (this one and ifones.com). The time from sign up to install to seeing stats in the panel was literally 5 minutes FOR BOTH SITES. Now, if it was just a web stats package I would not be so excited but when you look in the stats panel you also see who is tweeting about your site, what links are sending traffic to you, all in real time (web stats are updated every 10 seconds, so almost real time).

I like the widgetized display of my data, and from looking at other site data I like the historical charts and tracking that can be done.

After the intial 30 day trial it is 10 dollars per month, I will test this over the next month and then report back with a full review. The potential is there that this for sure.

Betaworks also has a stake in Twitter, Tweetdeck, and a few other real time services. Some may argue that Twitter is not always real time:)

You can also read more at Techcrunch and see links to site data.

Micro-Payments for the Twitter Crowd

While Twitter continues to figure out ways to monetize its fast growing, highly addictive micro-blogging services another company has found a way to *attempt* to monetize the tweeting crowd.

I was just reading a post on TechCrunch.com, they are reporting that Tinker is launching a professional micro-blogging network.  Tinker is a micro-blogging tracker of sorts. It tracks social network posts containing certain terms and reposts in widgets embedded on blogs and sites.

 The selected "professional micro-bloggers" will be paid a share of ad revenue created by their widgets and Tinker streams. I expect their to be a deluge of requests to be considered a professional blogger. At the end of the day, unless you have a large amount of traffic I see the potential for this to be pretty small, maybe its just the term micro-payments that get me.

Domain Name App on the iPhone – DomainApp

One of my developed domains is ifones.com where I do both Apple iPhone News aggregation and original iPhone App Reviews. I get several requests a day for app reviews and last night got one that hit on the domain world.

The co-founder of ideegeo Group sent me an email asking for a review of DomainApp which allows for quick and easy domain searches for 80 different extensions. The application is free and I think it will be useful to the general population of consumers that are more interested in one domain name but not large numbers. The application links directly to the iWantMyName.com site and pricing is not really domainer friendly as it more targeted at the general "consumer". I will say this is a great sales tool for the iWantMyName.com site.

That said I have played with the app for a little bit today and think it could be useful to me for quick multi-extension queries. One of the neat features I found is that I can select up to 10 extensions that are basically considered my favorites. I am then able to do a quick query against these 10 and get the results. This is handy for when I am running through and airport or in the car (domaining while driving is a bad idea BTW).

I will keep the app on my iPhone but will not be using it for actual registrations, you can see more at DomainApp

Newspapers Closing While Localization Continues on the Web

If you came here after searching for Why Newspapers Are Closing On The Web you may also want to read the post about Print Media Moving Online.

As has been widely reported lately the old school newspapers continue to lose money and close up shop while online ad spending grows. Today I found an interesting story, ironically, in the paper version of USA Today. How did I find it, well because the paper was sitting outside my hotel room door this morning.

Rather than paging through the cumbersome, too large, flimsy paper copy I went online and read the same story. Hence the problem the newspapers are running headlong into.

Most papers have some online ad component at this point but most were using it to supplement their offline revenue rather than using it as their primary business model. This is catching up with them. As more and more people are going online to check everything from news to classifieds to weather they no longer need 6, 12, 24, 36 hour old info.

As I posted on twitter recently its all about local, local, local, social, social, social....

You can read the story here: USA Today Article

I think for the majority of the newspapers, although their online ad revenue has grown, it is too late to fix their core business models to make it through the era of real time, mashed up, and twitter size news.

I found it extremely disappointing that a group of people laid off from the Denver paper actually were petitioning to get 50,000 subs signed up for a subscription fee to start an online news site. Once again, old school models that just will not work for localized news.

These issues that the newspapers are facing are core to many legacy brick and mortar industries but are also the reason our domain names/web properties will continue to gain value even while the economy fights through this downturn.

Comment away!