Does $3000 sound like a no pitch call?

Earlier today I was on a live call hosted by Jack Humphrey. From what people say he is a well respected authority on Social Marketing. He his one of the owners of Authority Site Center and he has also published a great guide to Social Marketing. You can pick it up for free at Authority Black Book. I have read this guide and there were a heap of great tips I picked up to use on my sites. Did I mention that it is free?

Getting back to the call. It was promoted as “The Next Great Internet Opportunity” and a call not to be missed. In the call which was also a webinar it would be a pitch free information call that talked about trends in the internet that are going to be huge. All of that had me intrigued. That surely was something I did not want to miss out on.

So there I was listening to the information. Joining Jack Humphrey were Mark Braunstein from vTribes, Monica Holbrook and Benjamin Prater. They started off by talking about how small businesses are looking for an alternative for Yellow Pages advertising and about how Google just has not really captured the local area advertising market.

Next they had Benjamin talk about Apple Iphone applications and how these may be used along with geo-targeting to help people find local information as they are out shopping or wanting some food. All this sounded interesting. They also talked about something called Cloud computing, you can look it up on wikipedia if you don’t know what that is.

During all this time the speakers went on to say we are here to teach you about the trends of the future and we are not selling any internet widgets or stuff like that. After having me all excited and thinking wow this is great information out comes what they were really wanting to talk about.

Presenting DNA!! What are you talking about you might say,  isn’t DNA that scientific stuff? No. In this case it is the Directory Network Association. There is a website that explains more. I will have a link to this tomorrow.

This is a network of sites that will have an address such as http://directoryoflongbeach.com. You can check out that site to see an example site. This is a site that has all sorts of information about Long Beach in California. The aim of the site is to attract local advertisers so that they can connect with people wanting information about businesses in that city. It all sounds great but when you are expecting a pitch free call the bit that came next was a bit surprising.

They announced that they have bought up the directoryofcityname sites for all of the major US cities and also many foreign travel destinations or cities and for $3000 or $5000 for the more popular locations such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles you can buy a domain that gets you in on the network. The sale of these domains takes place next Tuesday.

It was interesting that during the call you could see other cities around the world being snapped up using the domain name of directoryofcityname. My city of Canberra was available when I first looked but by the time my stupid internet connection stuffed around and connected me to my domain buying site it was gone.

If you think this sounds good and you are interested in learning more check back tomorrow as I will have a link to the site that has all the information.

For me I would love to be part of the network but the price keeps me out of it. I just have to say for a no pitch webinar it is funny how it turned out. A $3000 opportunity is hardly a no pitch kind of thing. The bad thing about all of this is that it looks like being something huge, at least if they can pull it off. Time will tell.

Don’t forget to come back tomorrow if you are wanting more information.