Most of the online advertising dollars for services are being spent by aggregators, essentially directories that have invested creating a directory in a particular service vertical. These span from sites that genuinely create content and value like edmunds.com in the auto industry to just industry directories like www.beautyschoolsdirectory.com or www.LegalMatch.com for lawyers.

If you are in the service business there is no doubt that you gave been asked to get listed in one of these directories, and you have probably been offered “leads” for a price. I know of one beauty school that is charged $40 per lead by one of these directories, and i don’t doubt car dealers and lawyers are getting the same kind of deal.

Most product companies would laugh in your face if you suggested buying a lead for $40, but service businesses are generally low volume but much higher margin which is why it is actually feasible to pay that much for a lead.

Now here’s the dirty little secret, a beauty school directory might advertise using google and pay as little as $1 or $2 for a click through, and then turns around and sells it for $40 without adding any value at all.

Service based businesses don’t need to be held to ransom like this, the only things these directories have figured out is how to advertise on search engines. There’s plenty of resources online to help you, and even some companies that would be glad to handle your campaigns for you, getting you locally targeted leads for $1 to $5 :-)