hyperlocal.org

"Once you get these small business customers to advertise online, it's going to be a billions-of-dollars shift," said Stuart McFarlane, chief executive of Pasadena, Calif.-based Insider Pages. "But the real challenge is, how do you bring in yellow-pages customers at a low enough cost to make it affordable?"

Search leaders Google and Yahoo have created largely self-service empires that let marketers bid for and place promotions next to search results, requiring advertisers to pay only when people click. The cost-effectiveness of search ads has attracted pioneering companies for years, but now marketers of all stripes are signing on, including national and international businesses.

Local advertising dollars, however, remain elusive. Google and Yahoo handle only a couple of hundred thousand local merchant ads, compared with the potential for tens of millions of customers, according to industry analysts.
"It's enormously difficult to get these small businesses to adopt Internet advertising," said Greg Sterling, an analyst at the Kelsey Group.

Small and medium-size businesses are typically stretched thin and, unlike national advertisers, rarely can afford to hire agencies to handle ongoing keyword auctions offered by search engines. Many small businesses know that the Internet could help them but have neither the time nor the inclination to go online, because of the medium's perceived complexity.

Still, analysts say, consumer behavior will drive change. Unlike the pervasive hype of the Web boom, Sterling said, "there's a reality now to the Internet that didn't exist before--consumers are doing research to find products and services."

 
Full article