Please Comment – Tell Me The # Of Times You Used The Phone Book In The Past Year!

I have a large family, and I have a lot of friends from all aspects of life (young to old) being an internet entrepreneur working with large numbers of business owners.  I have asked 10 close friends and family members (one of them 80 years old) that aren’t computer nerds (such as myself) how many times that they have used the phone book in the past year. The answer would be an excellent golf score! The phone book was used 2 times (total) by all 10 individuals in an entire year.  These people I choose to ask aren’t any different from the typical internet user in an entire year period.

The same people mentioned that they would look for products, service providers and shopping through the internet on a weekly basis! So, let’s assume this statistic from this basic data.  The typical person considers buying a product or service 52 times per year on the web, and they consider buying a product or service .2 times per year through the phone book!

This gives us an interesting perspective in to where a business should advertise.  If this basic poll holds any legitimate value, and for fairness, let’s say that the typical person uses the phone book up to 2 times per year, we have to assume that you can drum up 26x more business from the web with a properly implemented internet marketing campaign. Also, understanding the way the internet and search engines work – a company that dominates the search engines with top rankings would likely perform much better from a business perspective because they aren’t competing against 100 text listings in a phone book, especially if they hold one of the top 3 ranking positions in Google, Yahoo & Bing (and other major search engines).

A poll taken by PollDaddy.com mentions some pretty incredible statistics and is definitely going to be more accurate than my poll. They mentioned that 20% of people rarely use the phone book, 76% never use the phone book and 4% definitely do use the phone book on a regular basis.

Ultimately, my assumption would be this. People looking for local contractors such as landscapers, AC services, mechanics and other local services may refer to a phone book, however, I believe an even larger number will continue to look to the internet for these local services.

We have to wonder, are they using the phone book to look up new businesses or to do this?