TalkLocal

The CitiesOf.com

Don't be fooled by the look of TheCitiesOf.com , or the apparent lack of traffic to that domain. They have hundreds of sites with the Citiesof in the domain such as TheCityOfOrlando.com. Taken as a whole the traffic across their network is not bad. This domain network of city domains has been around for a while as has had time to develop some strong organic rankings in google. They started in a basement and are now in an office with an active sales team with some background in selling yellowpage ads for the front cover of the yellowpages. They sell yellowpage type ads across their platform at around 35.00 a month. I think they will eventually realize that Pay Per Click may be a better model to grow revenues and it allows for XML distribution/syndication of their listings to other local sites in revenue share deals. Look at their backfill data, it looks like it was just copied and pasted in there, they should be feeding something paid in there.

Local 2.0 Where Local Meets Social

Sebastien Provencher  has launch a new blog called Praized  that talks about the intersection between social and local. Take a look at his Portal/Platform post. He still works part-time for Yellow Pages Group Co. in Canada. (Why do all my roads lead to Canada lately). I think he is pretty sharp and I really believe there is a great opportunity for blogging and local search or hyper local search to mesh together nicely.

Blogging in Local Search

If I had some cash I would buy the company Metro Blogging I think their take on local search through local blogging is right on. They have also been working with Helio which I think is a smart move. I think they are pretty small in terms of employee/owner overhead.

The Dirty Laundry of Blogging

Rick Segal, a Toronto based VC has some thoughts on Dirty Laundry . I have noticed that when I go to tradeshows, I tend to now make sure I know more about the guy I'm talking to because our conversation could end up in a blog post and fly around the blogosphere like wildfire. I have been interacting more with CEO's and owners of companies lately and one thing I've taken away from these meetings is that these guys know how to shut up and listen and say very little that can get them into trouble, its probably a trait I need to internalize.

The Real Fraud in Marketing

For those that promote that click fraud is rampant or an issue in Google Adwords, they should ask themselves how much fraud there was and still is while marketing in traditional offline print publications. Even if there is 20% click fraud in my Google campaign, at least I know that 80% of my audience saw my ad, not only saw it, but they requested it, so it either was what they were looking for or pretty damn close. In the print world, I can't really track, I know that the subscription levels are goosed up sometimes, my ad sits in the middle of the magazine or newspaper and I have to hope someone gets to that page to see it, then they actually have to be interested in it, then they must remember my ad or take down a phone number or a url. If 10% of my audience actually saw my message it would be a huge success, so I am saying a huge succes in the offline world is a 90% fraud rate. I'll take a 20% click fraud rate in Google every day when 80% of the people not only saw my message, but requested it. (And I don't think the click fraud in Google is that high)

Where is Dan Chan of DayPop

I have been trying to find Dan Chan who created Day Pop. Daypop.com has been down and out of service for about a year now. I did have some brief emails back and forth in January, because he was looking for funds to keep his site online. He seems to have disappeared. DayPop was growing and seemed to have huge popularity and a huge brand awareness. Dan was one of the first to do blog search and feed search along with news very well. I've got some great ideas I wish I could talk to Dan about. I will pay $500.00 to anyone that can get him on the phone to talk to me for 15 minutes, that's all I need.

The Death of Pageviews

Check out Steve Rubel's post on the demise of the pageview as a metric in advertising. With the popularity of Flash and Ajax programming, pageviews in the future will take a less prominent role as a value for web properties selling ads.

A Quote from Zillow on Sales Teams

Peter Krasilovsky's Local onliner blog  has a great Interview with Zillow's  CFO and VP of Marketing Spencer Rascoff. The part that interests me is this:

While usage is very strong, ad sales aren’t there yet, Rascoff conceded. “Monetization is slower than we’d like.” There are currently 50 advertisers, including mortgage lenders, movers, Real Estate brokerages, home builders and luxury consumer products. They are attracted, in part, by the site’s “Wall Street Journal” quality demographics.

Part of the challenge with sales is a shortage of sales staff. The site has ten sales people in New York and San Francisco, but it should have had 30 or more sales people by now. The competition for sales staff is intense, said Rascoff. “It is harder to hire direct sales than we realized.”

I think the business model for Web Integrity Services is becoming clearer to me. If they have 10 salespeople and only 50 advertisers, I could quadruple that many advertisers with 10 salespeople.

Sales Teams Are Expensive

I'm a little late since PubCon was last week, but something in John Battelle's keynote speech has stuck with me. John was talking about his publishing network Federated Media and how hard it is to find good online salespeople. He said that finding a good online salesperson that sells advertising is twice as hard as finding a good programmer. He also said that the average cost for a salesperson per year is about $140,000.00. As high quality blogs and websites develop that gain large audiences, John states that for a blog publisher to take on the costs of 2-3 salespeople and still try to make money will be a failed venture. So your options are to join his network and maybe make $6,000.00 a month. I think he is a little off. In some areas of the U.S. a good salesperson is easy to find, if you look in the right place and train and develop the talent. I also think you can get them for much less than his number.

Widget for Videos