Thursday, December 27, 2007

MerchantCircle: Local Advertising for Dummies

I had a conversation last week with my dentist about advertising and he was in lockstep with me about the foolishness of phone book advertising and how local businesses are struggling to transition online.

MerchantCircle has zeroed in on the huge opportunity by creating a solution for small business owner who don't know a lick about SEM. The Silicon Valley startup already has more than 300,000 customers.

I couldn't be more in agreement with their website:

Many local businesses have been stumped when deciding where and how to advertise, and end up sinking their budget into placing ads in the yellow pages. We think the yellow pages are feeble relics of the rotary phone era, ineffective and unworthy of their outrageous prices. in the information age are much more likely to search for you on the web, and want more information about your offering than you can cram into one little static phone ad.

The phone directories will slowly die out, as well they should with their bloated ad rates and neglible results. As I've said before, Local is the biggest untapped opportunity in search marketing and will be THE story of 2008 thanks to companies like MerchantCircle who will help small businesses to find their way online.

Posted By John Gartner at 09:02 AM
Permanent Link: MerchantCircle: Local Advertising for Dummies | Comments (1)

(1) Comments on MerchantCircle: Local Advertising for Dummies

MerchantCircle recently crossed 500,000 members. We’re proud to help local businesses acquire customers by offering an alternative to over-priced, ineffective offline marketing channels. We’ve been interviewing our merchants in all 50 states – you can read about their MerchantCircle experience here: www.visualcv.com/merchantcircle.

We’re committed to providing every local business a web presence, easy-to-use marekting tools and a platform for connecting with other merchants, all for free. As always, please email any questions or concerns to support@merchantcircle.com and we will respond as soon as possible.

Comments by Kevin L. : Friday, June 27, 2008 at 08:34 PM

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