It’s that time of year again when Sensis comes a knocking with a new batch of products to gobble up your advertising dollar. Now that Sensis runs Sensis.com, Yellow Pages Online, White Pages Online, Trading Post Online AND all their print alternatives, there’s a lot of things to consider.

This month, we’ll look at Yellow Pages Online (YPOL) at www.yellowpages.com.au. Last year, the site had a major makeover and is now easier to use and easier to narrow searches down to particular products, services and areas.

Many of you may already be paying for priority listings on the YPOL site, which is a good idea that Stockstreet recommends to all clients. At a fraction of the cost of the corresponding print ads, it represents good value. But once page 1 of your classification is filled with paid priority listings, what do you do then?

Sensis has now introduced keywords that affect listings on the YPOL site. Just like keywords are a focus of your own website, you can now nominate keywords that affect the placement of your ad at the Yellow Pages website. This means not only getting more customers that you do want, but also filtering out the ones you don’t.

Another feature that has been around for a year is the concept of "Platinum Tiles." Each classification at YPOL now has three banner ads that appear above the priority listings. Advertisers pay a premium to maintain these banner ads and, needless to say, these tiles generate a lot of leads for these advertisers although relevance can be an issue i.e. are the leads the kind of customer you are looking for.

The bad news is that if the three spots are all taken by your competitors, you’ll have to wait for one of them to drop it before you can jump in.

If you haven’t spoke to your Sensis sales rep yet this year, take the initiative and call them to give you more information on the above. It could be worth a lot of extra online business!