Greg will be speaking about “Small Business / Local Search” at Searchfest 2009 which will be held March 10th in Portland, Oregon. Get your tickets now.

1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.
After dropping out of college I began a career in financial services. Just a handful of years in such a rigid environment taught me that corporate America was no place for me. My business partner, Brian Prince, and I began Hotel Hotline, our first company late in 1999. At full tilt we learned the benefits of search marketing, and quickly rose to become a top discount hotel provider. With annual sales of approximately $15 million we continue on our model of low cost customer acquisition via search marketing, and enjoy one of the highest margins in the industry. Continuing on the success of our first venture, in 2000 we purchased Best of the Web from a handful of university professors. We spent the next couple of years transforming it into a general web directory with a mission of classifying all of the information online into relevant categories. Under the BOTW flag, we have since launched the BOTW Blog Directory, a directory of high quality blogs, and BOTW Local, a resource for users to find information about businesses throughout the US. Going forward, BOTW will continue to execute on providing users with relevant information while expanding our reach into the lead generation business.

2) What is BOTW Local and why should somebody use it?
BOTW Local is a destination for users to find detailed information about businesses (more than 16 million of them) in every city in the US. Users can easily find the lowdown on businesses in their area, and are encouraged to provide feedback and reviews of businesses so that others may benefit from the collective wisdom of the crowd. Business owners find BOTW Local to be a cost effective way to target users in their geographic area, bringing them more business from the highly targeted traffic they receive.

3) In 2009, should businesses still care about online directory listings?
A listing in a web directory is as pertinent today as it has ever been. While the band members may have changed, the song certainly remains the same. Any business owner wishing to enahnce their online marketing efforts will surely benefit from a listing in a quality web directory. A listing in a relevant category of a quality web directory provides the business owner with a citation from a trusted source, providing relevant traffic from users and a quality signal to the search engines.

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