Advertisers have long been challenged to find ways of penetrating local markets.  Local advertising can often times help companies target their products at smaller, more specific segments of the population and that, in turn, can often lead to higher ROIs.  The problem is that without eyes and ears in every community across the country, it's hard for advertisers to keep up on the competition and monitor the happenings of local markets.

Placeblogger, a new directory of hyperlocal blogs, has the potential to turn into a great resource of advertisers looking to overcome those obstacles.

Created by the author of a hyperlocal site, Placeblogger organizes local blogs into an easy to navigate hierarchy based on location.  I played around on the site this afternoon and it's a fairly straight-forward procedure to check out the blogs writing about a particular city.  To find blogs tracking Houston, Texas events, for example, you simply click "Find a place blog"… navigate to The United States… then to Texas… then to Houston.  As it turns out, there are 7 blogs already in the directory that write about Houston.  Even though the site has only been operational for three days, it already boasts over 700 cataloged place blogs.

Advertisers could easily use this service to find out what's going on in local markets and use that information to plan ad buys.  Instead of buying national advertising for your line of snow boots, that will undoubtedly do nothing for the 1/3 of the country that would never use them, you could buy targeted advertising on popular blogs and websites written for markets in the northern states.  That could potentially mean better ROI and large advertising savings.