Yellow Pages or Junk

Raise your hand if you have a Yellow Pages book in your home, okay, almost all of you. Now raise your hand if you receive "junk mail", yeah, thought so.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you kept all that junk mail (a.k.a. Direct Mail), you received for a year?

I was at a Yellow Pages conference towards the end of last year & that exact thought flashed across my mind. What I was interested in finding out was what would weigh more, the four Yellow Pages Directories I've got in my home, or all the junkmail I collect over the period of 12 months?

I didn't have to wait very long to find out. Just four months after I'd started with my little experiment, I've got some interesting numbers for you. Now of course these may not be valid for everyone, but I couldn't find anyone else that was crazy enough to have kept their junk mail for four months, which already tells you something...

So, here are the numbers. The junk mail weighed in at 12 pounds & all four of my Yellow Pages Directories together amounted to 9.4 pounds!

It means I collected 3 pounds of junk mail per month. If you do the math & extrapolate, that amounts to 36 pounds of junk mail per year! I'm pretty confident that after a year, those Yellow Pages Directories would still be 9.4 pounds & unlike the junk mail, each of those Yellow Pages are still useful.

I'd really like to continue my experiment to collect a full 12 months worth of junk mail, but what I've got already looks like a pile of trash. At first I tried organizing or at least stacking them, but it just didn't work, you can't keep that in your house (I eventually had to keep it in a corner of my garage).

Where's my Yellow Pages? Next to my phone :-)

Visual Tutorials

Yellow Magic offers step by step visual tutorials available online. The areas covered range from common day to day procedures to areas you may only have to perform once a year. These tutorials have been very helpful to new users and even good refreshers for long time users. Follow the link to get an overview tutorial on one of our latest Mobile Applications, http://www.yellowmagic.com/mcm/MCM-Application-Overview.html.

Yellow Magic customers can access the Visual Cookbooks by logging into the TSR system. Upon login follow the Visual Cookbooks link. You will find several tutorials that have recently been added. We are currently working on a list of tutorials, which will be released soon. If you have any suggestions on what you feel would be helpful for other Yellow Magic users, please let us know.

Search your directory with Twitter!

Now it is possible to search your mobile directory with a Tweet! Go to www.yellowmagic.com/MCM-TT.pdf to learn more.

To Google or not to Google

Given a choice between going for a printed book vs electronic, I'm the type of guy that would go for the electronic version, every time! Well, that's what I thought until I arrived home & found the water heater had stopped working on a cold winter day! The first thing I did was go online (of course) & do a search on Google for plumbers in Temecula. I got results, the issue is that I got just over 440,000 results. Now, Temecula has just a tad over 110,000 residents and I'm pretty sure they aren't all plumbers and even if they were, it still doesn't explain away the other 330,000!

Trying to deal with the overload, I resolved to stick to page 1 of Google & started clicking links, waiting for pages to load & reading through reviews, following links and reading pages and pages of information. After about 10 minutes of that, I stopped & did a sanity check. Right then, my wife walked into the room & asked if I'd phoned the plumber yet. My terse response was that I'm still looking for one, to which she replied "Why don't you just use the Yellow Pages?". I was about to launch into a whole oral dissertation on the merits of local online search, saving the trees from certain paper-death, but looking at her face, thought it best to just go get the book.

Needless to say, about 1 minute later I was on the phone with a plumber that worked after hours, was accredited, accepted credit cards, in business for over 25 years & already on his way to my house.

Trying to use Google vs Yellow Pages when searching for something like a plumber, or other service that you need, there's just no comparison. Seriously, think about it, you can't instantly compare companies on Google like you can with the Yellow Pages. I'm not just talking about the physical book, you can get a 100% Yellow Pages book look & feel online (of course Yellow Magic developed the software)! Just go here & take a look: http://www.completephonebook.com/ You literally get the best of both worlds, if only one of my local directory publishers had an online directory like this, it would have solved my problem immediately.

If you prefer the Google-look, but want to avoid wading through 440,000+ results for a plumber, check out an example of our "MagicCarpet Lite" pages on http://www.yellowmagic.com/guia You get all the relevant results, maps, comparisons, plus links to all the display ads at the click of a button. For Firefox & IE browsers, you can even replace the default search bar to go directly to your site! For those of us that are more inclined to use their mobile phones, the answer is "MagicCarpet Mobile". Go to http://www.yellowmobimagic.com/tem09 using your phone's browser & type 'yellow' as the name search term to see the full range of listing features.

Oh, by the way, even if your users do go to Google, our search-engine-optimized online directories can give you first-page results on Google & then pull them straight back into your online directory.

2010 YM Newsletters

Happy New Year to Everyone!
Yellow Magic has so many new Yellow Pages Industry Publishing and business products and features to introduce this year that we have decided to devote 2 mini-newsletters each month, one for will focus on new Print directory publishing news, tools and features and the second one dedicated to Electronic publishing news, tools, features and widgets. We hope to keep them short, sweet and packed with good info for you! You will begin receiving one on the 1st and the second one about the 15th of each month. We look forward to your contributions and suggestions. Have a Successful January!

We are pleased to introduce our new Sales Manager, Grace Salumbides to the Yellow Magic Team! Grace has more than 22 years of experience at GTE and brings both production and sales experience to Yellow Magic and our customers. Welcome Grace!

Another New Year for exciting new changes with Yellow Magic!!!