National Enquiries Business Directory

Agents may have received a fax recently asking for details for the National Enquiries Business Directory. Above the area to fill in your details it says the only charge for the listing is the cost of returning the fax. When I went to actually fill it out I looked a little closer, the fax number is a 1900 number and faxing the form will actually cost $19.95.

Just a warning.

Undercut on Good Food magazine

After coming back fresh from the ACP Connections conference and being told how important the Newsagency channel is to them, its disappointing to see magshop being able to sell a 12 month subscription of the new BBC Good Food magazine for just $39.95 with an additional free apron.

As somehow the 12 month subscription is only for 11 issues that makes it in total 89 cents under cost price(11x$4.95 being $54.45 and 75% of that being $40.84). I can't believe that they can be doing this without additional discounting from ACP.

How important are we meant to feel now?

Online listings for Newsagencies

To date business listing web sites in my opinion have had little usefulness for distribution newsagents. I have made profiles in several of the free Australian ones available but haven't encountered any customer contact resulting from them.

Three are a number of reasons, primarily I think the dominance of Google limits the traffic of these sites. I also think to most people the product is primary in their mind over the business, so that when they want to purchase a certain title or organise home delivery they are more likely to search online via the title. Finally these sites cater more to fixed location businesses rather than area based services.

The information fields many of these sites have also make it hard to accurately portray your business. Some of them I have found hard to even find a listing for 'Newsagent' let alone a distribution agency. Entering the data for your free listing can be a frustrating affair. You can also expect to be contacted from some of them wanting to sell you a premium listing.

If you do have some time to kill though here is a list of the sites that I am aware of and have myself used to make a free listing.

Hotfrog

Aussie Web

zpages

street-directory.com.au

truelocal

bigroo