It’s no secret that we are anti-yellow pages, as well as their online affiliates.  We have been very outspoken during many of our seminars about the dangers of getting sucked into the trap set by this 800# gorilla. Yes the yellow pages have a long history, they had a good run, 10-20 years ago it was the place to be, if you remember all you had to do was let your fingers do the walking and I don’t deny that lots of fingers walked over to the book to look for products and services.  Sorry guys but its over, the fat lady sang, the fingers took a walk over to the computer and they won’t be coming back.  Google ,Yahoo and Bing are doing all the talking these days.

Now I have to give the yellow pages credit for not hanging up their gloves and coming back with a strategy to try to keep its advertising clients tucked away inside a private man made community but it doesn’t work. Their business model is completely flawed for the following reasons.

1.    Most people are not stupid
2.    Why in the world would anyone want to be sent to another website and then look for the vendor they are seeking
3.    Business owners realize that they can be seen as individuals online and don’t need to be huddled in with the masses on a cookie cutter template site created by the yellow pages.

Lets be as clear as clear can be, if you have extra money to waste and that’s your goal then the yellow pages online are the perfect partner for you, but if you’d like to succeed in a competitive environment with a unique strategy cultivated for you and your business as an individual then the yellow pages dot com may be the biggest business mistake you’ll ever make.