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Neighborhood shopping made easy

Web site serves as Yellow Pages for local companies

Rebecca Jones, Special to the News

Published October 29, 2007 at midnight

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A local husband-and-wife Internet firm hopes to become to online shoppers what the Yellow Pages are to those who still shop the old-fashioned way: a way to support local businesses but to let their mouse do the walking.

Pam and David Rubins, of Englewood, launched TechCenter Info.com almost a year ago and LodoInfo.com a few months after that. Their goal: to create neighborhood search sites to provide a comprehensive online directory of businesses in those two parts of town.

They have since brought both sites, as well as directories for Cherry Creek and Boulder, under the umbrella of 1SpotInfo .com, and in the next few weeks they plan to add similar directories for Lowry/Stapleton, Littleton/Englewood, Parker, Fort Collins, Castle Rock and two areas in Colorado Springs.

"Then we'll go out of state by the beginning of the year," Pam Rubins says. "Our goal is to cover 100 areas by the end of next year."

She says the concept sprang from a cocktail party encounter her husband, a solutions architect for a Fortune 500 company, had with a local doctor a few years ago. The doctor was spending $15,000 a month to hire a medical management company in Arizona to manage his practice. He didn't know that a local company could have provided the same service. In fact, David Rubins had written the medical- management software for the company.

"Before we built the site, it was impossible to find all the businesses in a specific area," Pam Rubins said. "Small businesses, in particular, couldn't be found on the Internet."

At the 1Spot site, users can identify which part of town they're interested in exploring, then search by category, everything from "accountants" to "youth organizations." The site will identify all the businesses in the neighborhood that fall in the specified category and will plot them on a map so users can see at a glance which ones are closest to them.

A listing is free for all the businesses in the area, but the Rubinses hope they'll spring for a paid listing, which will not only buy a spot on the 1Spot home page but will also ensure that when users Google a category, the advertiser's Web site will show up among the first few listings.

"The buzzword you'll hear all the time is 'search engine optimization,' " Pam Rubins said. "How do you get your site found on the Internet? It needs to be on the first or second page of a Google search, or it may as well not exist. And we have a software program that does that."

The details of just how that works are proprietary, but in essence, 1Spot treats Google like a person.

"We know that Google likes content to change a lot. If you have a static Web site, Google won't pay a lot of attention to it," Pam Rubins said. "But by having all our listings under 1Spot, something changes every day on our site. We have 17,000 businesses listed. We're hit all over the place. For us to get 30,000 hits in one week is a 'nothing' week."

Each of those hits represents someone looking to buy something.

"You won't find a news story, no weather reports, no stock tickers on 1Spot," she said. "If you are on our site, you're looking for something in a specific area."

Rubins says that translates into real sales for brick-and-mortar stores. She cites a couple of recent studies, which found that of 4,000 consumers polled, 75 percent search for local services online, and that more than eight out of 10 online local searchers follow up with an offline store visit, phone call or purchase.

Elizabeth Sullivan, who runs the Zenergy Yoga and Pilates studio in the Tech Center, has been advertising on 1Spot for nine months, and she says she's found it to be a worthwhile investment of her admittedly limited ad budget.

With a 1Spot listing costing $100 to $200 a month, she's found it affordable, and she appreciates that she's not locked into a long-term contract.

"My rent in Greenwood Village is exorbitant," Sullivan said. "I have to do everything I can do to market and advertise. I can't wait for people to come calling on me. It just doesn't work that way. But this does work; it has worked. I see more and more people coming in because they found us on the Internet. I tried it out as a trial and it certainly hasn't hurt."

Pam Rubins, who has become the full-time marketing director for 1Spot, says no other service offers the same combination of advertising plus search engine optimization that 1Spot offers.

"Our focus is on the whole package - print ads, online ads, PR for local clients, every piece to help the small business succeed," she said.

She said the company, which the couple has privately funded until now, has been profitable since its first month. The company is now seeking investors to help it grow.

The site

At 1SpotInfo.com, users can identify which part of town they're interested in exploring, then search by category, everything from "accountants" to "youth organizations." The site will identify all the businesses in the neighborhood that fall in the specified category and will plot them on a map so users can see at a glance which ones are closest to them.