Borrell Associates Inc. just published a report looking at the increase in online local advertising over the last two years. In 2005, local paid search amounted to $420 million and 5.6% of all sponsored links on the major search engines. This year, the amount is predicted to be over $1 billion with 33% of sponsored [...]

Over a year ago, I was searching out an ASP portal solution for my local portal, http://atGeist.com. I had built atGeist.com in Microsoft Frontpage and integrated several components to add more functionality: e-Classifieds for self-service classifieds, Snitz Forums for message boards, and Constant Contact for e-mail collection and newsletter lists. The system that I [...]

Over the past 6 months, I’ve been reading a lot of books. Like most entrepreneurs, I have a short attention span so the books I read must capture my interest early or it will have a bookmark in it for months.
A recent read is a must for anyone doing a local portal website: “The Tipping [...]

Local online coupons are making a return after several dot-coms bit the dust in 2000. This most recent one, Zixxo.com, seems to have a fairly easy to use coupon website engineered for local portals and users.
An advertiser or user merely registers with Zixxo to add or view local coupons based on your zip code. Once [...]

The early Internet “local portals” (myYahoo!, Excite.com, AOL’s Digital Cities) defined the word “local” by zip codes. They would buy databases of businesses listed by SIC codes and parse the displayed data accordingly. Someone from Indianapolis for example would be presented with local content that had zip codes that matched that city (46202, 46203, 46226, [...]