How many of you pick up and skip through the Yellow Pages when you want to find a product or service these days ?

I hazard a guess that it is far less of you than would have done that 5 years ago.

In our house we do not even know where the Yellow Pages are so, yesterday, I set off on a mission to find them.

My wife’s system of storage for household items is predictable and pretty precise (apart from when it comes to filing old bills, bank statements etc – which never get filed) so I was able to track down the big soft cover books within minutes.

Both Yellow and White Pages still in their plastic wrapper. never opened. never used. A victim of the Internet I fear.

Anyway, enough of the digression. I was only using it to prove a point that most of you know anyway – that the Internet has become the prime way to search for products and services in much of the developed world and this trend will continue as our young’uns mature and us older guns become more adept at using the technology.

How do the professionals see the situation though ? You know, those highly skilled and highly well paid executives that must choose where to spend their (or their client’s) money to promote their products. For them the stakes are much higher.

A recent article on The New Era of Inbound Marketing by SEOMoz Blog suggests that “…. over the last two decades, we, as a generation have been drifting further and further away from it (direct sales). Door-to-door salesmen are nearly gone. The effectiveness of brand advertising, direct mail, trade show marketing and cold calling sales have all diminished rapidly in favor of a new set of channels we all use to buy – nearly all of which center around the web.”

They go on to provide a raft of figures from Forrester Research based on projected marketing investment in the next 5 years to prove their point.

So what does it mean for you as a small business owner ?

If the Yellow Pages are not being opened in my house (and there are four of us here ranging in age from 50 to 18 years of age) then they are not being opened in other people’s houses as well.

As for the online versions of these products. Well, we wouldn’t know where to find them and that goes for other online directories as well.

What do we all do ? We SEARCH on Google for whatever we need and you can just about bet that this is what most people do as well.

Now that’s OK for when we are actually looking for something but what about that advertisement that catches our attention and takes us to a website selling a product that we didn’t even know we wanted ?

That is perhaps a little bit more problematical but it is a fact that we are most likely to at least see those advertisements in places that we frequent most often. That is obvious isn’t it ?

After all, there is no point putting a billboard in a laneway with no traffic is there ?

For me it is the football sites that I visit every day or the WordPress, Internet Marketing, web coding or web design blogs that I also frequent regularly to keep up with my industry.

Or through Twitter – but that is another story and a big one at that……

For my daughter and my wife it is undoubtedly Facebook. yes Facebook, the fourth most populous ‘nation’ on the planet.

So where are you going to spend your precious advertising dollars ?I know where I am going to be spending mine………..

The Thank You Economy You Need To Know This !