By CAL BEVERLY
editor@TheCitizen.com

What “local web”? you savvy local business owners and managers may ask.

I’m talking about the WorldWide Web (the ubiquitous “www” in Internet addresses), but turned to the advantage of us local business operators.

Let’s make the vast ocean of interconnected cyberspace — supposedly dominated by huge, inscrutable and intimidating naval powers named Google and Yahoo and Amazon and eBay and CraigsList, among others — and convert it into our own profitable local harbor.

And let’s fly our own flags over our safe, local harbor. And make money in our own little corner of the world serving the folks who live, work and play around this safe harbor.

That’s my pitch. Stick with me and I’ll tell you in specific detail how we can do it.

Here’s the nearly insurmountable obstacle to profitably navigating the unfriendly and vast ocean of the WorldWide Web for local merchants: Nobody knows your little boat — your store’s pretty or not-so-pretty, inexpensive or not-so-inexpensive website — is bobbing unnoticed in those vast, stormy waters.

And all these millions and billions of people seeking something are flying far above your little boat like huge swarms of stratospheric lightning bugs, looking for connections. But they can’t see you. And you can’t seem to get their attention in any worthwhile numbers.

Notice we are not talking about the Walmarts and Sears and Targets of the world. We are focusing on local brick-and-mortar storefronts that exist to sell products and services to people who live near those storefronts.

So, local businessperson, your problems are multiple: little boat in a big ocean, few know you are there bobbing about, and you are uncertain how to get the attention of your real-life, local, prospective customers.

Occasionally, you might even think to yourself, “This website stuff is a waste of my scarce money and even scarcer time. Do I dare do without it?”

Let me just go ahead and say the hard truth: The way you are doing it may be a waste of your time and money.

But the corollary hard truth is this: No, you should not abandon your web presence.

So, what should you do? Stick with me — the answers are ahead.

I can already hear the rumbling dissents: What about search engines and search engine optimization and all those other geeky tricks to get people to notice me?

I’m thinking of a particular dry goods store that has been around a long time. Suppose that dry goods store hires an SEO expert (at some considerable cost, for the non-scamming ones) to use your money to bid on certain “key” words in search terms for Google and others.

Suppose somebody in Walla Walla, Washington types in “blue jeans” in a search engine query and pulls up this Fayette County, Ga., dry goods store (which, by the way, is not in the mail order shipping business).

What good is that search to the Walla Walla searcher or to the Fayette County dry goods store? But, the store owner just paid for that click-through, no matter that no sale was even possible to be consummated. And those otherwise worthless click-throughs add up in expense to the store.

Add the ZIP code to the search, you suggest? Well, if you can get the Walla Walla guy to do that everytime, good luck. And then the merchant has to depend on the big search engine having a relatively recent, “clean” list of actual businesses within that ZIP who are selling that merchandise. I’ve seen some nationally-sold business listings, and I’ve fired every one that I’ve used.

What about ZIP-targeted sites like CraigsList, you ask.

Well, the local merchant has to enter in the specific items to sell and hope that enough garage-sale and classified bargain enthusiasts also are looking for a retail source for blue jeans. The trouble to the merchant is immense and the return is miniscule.

Looking pretty dim, you might think. But wait, local help for local merchants is on the way.

First, some questions you need to answer:

Are you selling anything (or developing qualified leads) right now via the online route?

If the answer is yes, what is your cost per online customer compared to your cost of regular, walk-in or call-in customers? Figure your marketing and advertising costs, both traditional and online.

A publisher friend in another market got in-depth with a plumbing services vendor who revealed that one online lead was costing the plumber from the mid-$40 range to more than $100 per lead (lead, not sale), depending on his choice of where he placed web ads on several very large commercial services sites in Atlanta.

He was pleased with the low range but willing to endure the high range, simply because of the differing volume of leads each site produced.

But even so, he lamented that he could not afford to eliminate his traditional advertising (including newspaper) because the web leads alone just did not produce the volume of sales his operation required.

One disappointing fact for many service businesses is the decline in leads from phone book Yellow Pages types of directories, once a foundation for service industry marketing.

More and more, people are dropping land lines and the Yellow-Pages habit is in steep decline. A lot of former Yellow-Pages-type sales people are looking for new jobs these days.

Web-based pure Yellow Pages-type directories haven’t filled the gap yet, and may not ever.

Part of the reason is that the user and the merchant face the same hurdles in finding a relevant directory site as they do in finding relevant search marketing.

So far, we’ve talked about yes answers to the main question above.

So, what if you answered no? My question to all local businesspersons in this market is this: If the answer is no, what is your site doing, productively speaking?

So, you rightfully reply, you’ve talked a lot about what is not working for us local merchants. If you know so much, Mr. Newspaper and Website Publisher, what is your answer to our acutely local sales dilemma?

My answer is to repeat the well-known story of bank robber Willie Sutton, many times caught and imprisoned for his repeated crimes over a long life.

“Why do you keep robbing banks, Mr. Sutton,” asked someone when Sutton was nearing the end of his life.

“Because that’s where the money is,” Sutton famously replied.

Champion bass fishermen (and women) say basically the same thing about catching fish: Go where the fish are. Find out where the fish are, and then go there. Bring the right bait and the right tackle, and you will catch fish.

OK, you say, so where are our customers, our local customers, the ones who will be moved to call my office or walk in my showroom?

My answer is — only half facetiously — they’re not in Walla Walla, Washington.

Your local online prospects, your existing local customers and your full harbor of potential customers — they are visiting and reading and interacting with a very few local websites. Find the highest trafficked local websites and plant your flag (your website links) there, and then measure your return.

Find out which local websites (especially local news and information, the more local the better) have the highest number of actual “unique” visitors, and buy web ads and hot links on those sites.

Local web ads, frankly, are cheap. (So were the first automobiles — at first.) Many of you will find that you can run a full month of many web ads for less than your water and sewer bills. More on that later.

But, you ask, what about YOUR website, your contribution to the localness of the BigBadWeb?

What about optimization, content and its relative freshness?

What about “flat” sites (most local retail sites tend to be flat) vs. database-driven sites, vs. content management systems?

What about all that stuff a local merchant doesn’t claim to be an expert in, and doesn’t know where to look for help?

Some of those answers you will find in this print special section. The rest you will need to transition to the continuation of this article online at The Citizen.com (coming soon in Part II).

And, therein lies a valuable lesson for every businessperson trying to plant a visible flag in this local harbor we know as Fayette County.

I’ll check back in with you online.

For those who want to stick around for a flat-out plug for our website, I’m delighted to report that TheCitizen.com is experiencing its highest levels of traffic ever this month. If there is a site based in Fayette County that has more traffic, we haven’t discovered it, and we’ve looked.

Based on our measuring services, TheCitizen.com and associated sites have three to four times the number of unique monthly visitors as any other site serving primarily Fayette County. In fact more eyeballs see our website than see our printed products, and we print 43,000 papers every week.

We are measured by two leaders in Internet metrics, Google and Quantcast. Both services measure our sites directly, and there is no guesswork involved, no tiny sample surveys and that sort of thing.

As of Sept. 25, Quantcast had us with more than 97,000 unique monthly people, while Google (which measures slightly differently) had us with 128,793 unique visitors for the past month. Expect the numbers to vary from day to day and week to week, depending on what the lead news stories are.

Just for fun, go to Quantcast.com and look up our numbers, and then compare them with other local sites that you know, including the big boys in metro Atlanta (TV and radio stations). We are a fraction of what the AJC site pulls, but then we don’t have their overhead and we don’t have to cover the geographic area they must cover.

Through a cooperative arrangement, we put a WSB-TV hot link box on our front page, and they link to our site from their front page every day. Check it out.

Local merchants, plant your flag in a place local people see it, on a continuing basis. Get local people clicking through to your website, increasing your site’s traffic in a much more targeted way than shotgun key words on some national search engine.

Your click-throughs will be local people, local customers, local traffic.

And by the way, The Citizen Showcase launches this week. Check it out to see how it might help you reach your local sales goals.

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