Business directories

[Mutt K]

It's coming up to that time of year when all the business directories are starting to hassle me about renewing entries for next year - "the book is closing this week and you must fax back the order today"

I have had entries in previous years in Yellow Pages, Business Pages and Thompson, all for central London where my market is, but in these online days, I question whether anyone in business uses these anymore or just goes straight for Google etc.

Any views?

[simpo two]

I suspect you're right, but it's worth asking new leads how they found out about you. You have to find out where your business is coming from in order to spend advertising in the right place.

But all advertising is a gamble IMHO; you stick your money on the table and hope something comes back. One year I made £20K from a £1K spend in Marketing Week; the next year, zip.

[wolf1]

I use Yell.com because it is usefull for mailing lists without having to pay. Time consuming to extract the info but it included addresses and post codes which the book doesn't. I'm only a small buisness mind so cost is of the upmost importance.

[dick dastardly]

Make sure you have a listing in dmoz.org and one in the yahoo directory (if you can justify the £200 fee). These are the 2 major feeds for the search engines.

It depends on your business of course but the majority of todays business comes from online searches.

[Mutt K]

Thanks for your input chaps, I suspect there is something in all of these responses.

When I have tried in the past to research how people have found me, the response has often been "through yellow pages". However, this is something of a generic term now because when pressed, they have been using Thomson or Business pages, but to their minds it is just "yellow pages."

All of these directories have their own web sites eg Thomweb, Yell etc, but trying to find something specific is like playing pass the parcel; you have to keep going through layers of stuff to get to what you want, and know I get easily bored when I try to find someone that way.

I have a specialist who has optimised my website and ensures it gets good slots on the main search engines so that is probably as much as I can do.

Budget permitting, I might just run with Yellow Pages next year. Thompson is not much good any more and Business Pages has been a bit of a flop this year, despite their promises that they were really going to push themselves as the directory most used by business. Can't say I have noticed that advertising campaign myself!