Are you still in the dark ages fumbling around in the dark? And I don’t mean any of that frisky messing around with your spouse?
What I’m talking about is using old skool local newspaper and Yellow Pages advertising to get a stream of people phoning you about your services. Are you also aware that now fully 82% of new prospects that local businesses get are through search engines like Google?
Local Business Advertising
If you’re wondering how you get your website to the top of Google so you actually get noticed, then don’t worry! There are specific strategies that can be used to get your website noticed and have people ring your phone off the hook waiting to do business with you.
Maybe you have a website already and it’s just not getting the results that you set out for it to achieve when you (or your web designer) developed the site? Perhaps you don’t even know why your website isn’t getting you any customers? Well, the answer is undoubtedly… TRAFFIC! Or a lack thereof. You see traffic is the vital key ingredient of any successful online marketing campaign.
Local Marketing: Traffic simply equals people
I’ll give you an offline analogy to illustrate my point about traffic.
Imagine that you live in a large country house off the beaten track. You and your partner are desperate to sell the house and you decide to sell it privately to save on those expensive Estate Agent fees. After all, it could save you 10 grand on a 200K house, right? You decide to put a sign up outside “FOR SALE”. Hmmm, one issue… no-one is passing the sign in the middle of nowhere to actually see the sign which is supposed to be an advert for the sale of the property. The sign is effectively useless.
A website without anyone visiting it is effectively like that house in the middle of the countryside with no visitors. There is no chance of a sale (or any sales) without traffic (visitors) going to the website. The website can be the prettiest website in the world but with no traffic, it’s dead!
Most business owners know they need to become more internet savvy to keep up with the increasing demands of the modern world because they could be out of business in just a few years if they rest on their laurels and trust what worked for them in the past will continue to work. If your competitors implement these simple strategies and you don’t, you could be left “dead in the water”.
It’s certainly not your fault that you don’t know every traffic strategy on the internet. You can’t be expected to know all that stuff. It takes years of testing, trial and improvement, seminars, books and online video tutorials to learn all the information you need to create and manage successful websites and advertising campaigns. The truth is that small business owners are already almost super human with running their business operations during the day, balancing the books in the evening, ordering stock, dealing with tax returns, it just never stops. It simply isn’t your fault that you don’t know all these internet strategies.
To Your Online Success,
The Profit Share
The mutt's nuts or the dog's drivel? I double dare you to leave a comment! :-)
Wayne,
Traffic is very important to all websites. Nobody wants to have a site with no one visiting it. Of all the strategies for increasing traffic, what can you recommend? Or do we need to utilize all opportunities/strategies as we can?
Thanks!
Master one strategy at a time and then move onto the next one.
For many traffic strategies to send your traffic skywards, you can simply subscribe to this site for free. Plenty of information there!
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I don’t have any hard evidence against your claim, but I respectfully disagree that the yellow pages are dead. I can vouch for many people in my hometown that still use the yellow pages — seniors especially. A landscaping company I know of uses yellow pages, word of mouth, and other offline methods for advertising. I don’t know how well they are doing compared to other businesses that do have websites, but the business has existed for years.
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It is really important to advertise your business not only to get more customers but it also help you increase your popularity.
I wouldn’t say that local advertising is dead, but you have to use the right tool for the job. Local advertising isn’t as effective for promoting an online store. But it may work well if you have a brick and mortar shop.
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Wayne, this is so up my street.
I live and work in the UK. Our SME’s seem to be lightyears behind when it comes to marketing online.
It’s really sad to see and frustrating, as helping SME’s score in local search results is what I do for a living.
All the facts are there. Everyone is searching online first. The trend is growing and will never go away. Traditional advertising is less effective every year and yet UK SME’s are still skeptical.
I just released a new course online. It’s outstanding value for money. I have not had one cancellation. All of my clients have had success with it and I know that you will agree that’s a rare thing.
I couldn’t give it away to businesses in th UK. If my fellow countrymen don’t pull their socks up soon, they will be playing a long hard game of catch up.
I’m just thankful that the web has no boundries because otherwise I would be banging my head against the wall.
Hey Wayne
Advertising today has become an integral part of any business. Internet is a way better source to advertise than using yellow pages or newspaper for a wide reach. But if you are targeting a particular set of people, the old school works well.
I agree that one cannot know all the strategies to market online, but more importantly, knowing the right techniques can make a world of difference to SEO. That apart, I still believe that offline advertising is important to cater to those people who do not use computers or Internet.
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Using the Yellow Pages has been like flogging a dead horse for quite some time now, they’ve had to drop their advertising rates quite dramatically too.
The only thing that hasn’t changed is that they still won’t every take NO for an answer when their annoying telesales reps call you at least twice a week.
There are so many innovative ideas are growing up to increase the traffic what attract more the purchasers so I think the traditional strategies are being backdated to the consumers with some specific points. I think it’s good as it’s helping to be creative ?! Thanks for sharing your opinion.
By means of marketing, relying on the old – passé version of marketing can definitely pull you out of business. Internet marketing is a must, a local business can turn globally known in a matter of months or years.
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If we do good SEO, we get good traffic. Well planned SEO can get a website target traffic. So apparently it seems like we can forget about putting ad on yellow pages etc, but actually still there are people who are reluctant to use google, yahoo or bing, instead they would look into yellow pages.
SEO is getting harder and harder with search engines ramping up their processes every few months. It is so difficult to index let alone get ranked in the top pages. Can be frustrating at times
I think the old form of advertising has taken a lot of beating in the last few years and the trend is going to continue. Even if you go with the old medium, chances are your prospects will do a google search about you to find who you are, your reviews and so on so if you are not using internet (yourself or with the help of an expert) chances are that you will loose on a lot of business..
Internet marketing strategies are the latest edition to the advertising world but we cannot deny the importance of traditional business advertising. One can actually combine the two and get frutiful results in the form of increased traffic.
Am thankful to share this informative post, really the local business listing is very effective to promote our business in local. It gives more traffic and also increase your business marketing.
Hi as far as I can see advertising has to adapt just like anything else iin our fast changing world. What we call traditional advertising techniques are just the techniques for the time. Just like what we are doing will be obsolete in the future. Everything has to change to survive.
Thanks lee
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Advertising both online and offline are surefire ways of getting a lot of traffic to your site (in terms of your online site) and offline (in terms of your local market). I always go for both types of advertising, why settle on only one aspect when you can generate more sales or prospects by covering both?
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The Yellow Pages is now much more than just print media. They now have online and mobile media platforms that are greatly expanding their product offerings. Writing off the Yellow Pages too soon could be detrimental to your business.
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