April 28, 2006

Delivering flowers, delivering babies

Driving to work, I always notice the florist near highway 237, where a man stands outside waving an arrow-shaped “Flowers” sign. When I think of local businesses trying to attract new customers, I picture this florist. I also think of someone like my midwife, Olga Libova, who delivered my son. Her local business is all about babies. And she too wants an easy way to promote her services to prospective clients.

Being on-call to deliver babies means that she does not have a lot of time to spend on advertising’

High Visibility, Easy Set-up

As more small businesses became familiar with Yahoo! Local, they have asked for an easy way to place local ads that will drive foot-traffic to their stores, and phone calls to their services. As consumers of Yahoo! Local, they benefit from immediately seeing the phone numbers to the businesses listed in the natural search results, without having to click further.

And of course, those businesses also want to stand out from the crowd.

Introducing Local Featured Listings

Our team at Yahoo! Local has been working with people like Olga, as well as local real estate agents, florists and more. We created a product called Local Featured Listings, which introduces small businesses to online local advertising.

A Featured Listing is a top-of-page listing that is available at a flat, monthly rate starting at $29.95/month, depending on the business category and location. (A bottom-of-page listing is also available at a discount.) These limited advertising slots are available on a first come, first serve basis.

featuredlistingsmall.JPG

With an easy sign-up, the small business selects their category, and chooses the local regions where they want to advertise.

A Local Featured Listing is a quick way to start reaching the online audience right in your neighborhood. The listing highlights the business telephone number and provides links to the website, a map and directions ‘ which is exactly what consumers want.

Once these small businesses have tried Yahoo! Local, they can learn about the many different advertising products that Yahoo! offers.

That’s the news for now. We have much more to come for local residents and merchants alike. Let us know what you think, and stay tuned for more!

Aytek ‘elik
Yahoo! Local Team

Comments

  1. Your titles can’t be understood on their own in RSS readers…
    - Delivering flowers, delivering babies
    - Say “Hello” to my little friend

    (I know I know, being more clear also means being less funny and witty, …)

  2. Good job, but how about some more features like bulk uploading like on Google Base?

  3. Well, we *do* offer full-text feeds…

  4. Yeah, but My Yahoo doesn’t display full text feeds.

  5. * PLEASE * PLEASE * PLEASE * PLEASE * PLEASE *

    …consider putting sponsors and features on a Right column – AWAY from the “naturals”

    It is hard enough to get any decent Organic “Web” Search Rankings.

    LOCAL may be the ONLY way for the small
    “no nothing ’bout SEO” to get even a “flickr” of prospects.

    Now with Features on top – FORGET IT. ;-)

    If you want to give them a small graphic or logo icon as a consolation…..so be it!

  6. With the Local Featured Listing program, what happens to Sponsored Links?

  7. @arul my yahoo has an option for summary.

    my.yahoo.com>>Yahoo! Search blog>>Edit>>Edit content>>For each article, display the:>>Headline and short summary

  8. If you want to give them a small graphic or logo icon as a consolation…so be it!

    Superb idea

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  10. Nice work, but how about some more features like bulk uploading?