Friday 12 June 2009

Three Effective Ways to Promote Your Offline Business Online

When the going gets tough, the tough…go online!

That’s right. Even today in these tough economic times, there are cost effective, recession proof ways you can market your business, which will make you tons of money and cost you next to nothing.

No matter what type of business you own, you can get laser targeted, high quality traffic and leads from the Internet. Think about it. There are people, thousands of them, surfing the Internet right now looking for a solution that your business provides. They just don’t know you exist. But if they did, then you would be making significantly more money that you are now.

If you advertise your business in the local paper, you’re going to spend a few hundred dollars. The yellow pages is even more. A print ad could run into the thousands, easily.

Direct mail might be a solution, but then you have to buy or rent the mailing list. That’s at least a few hundred, if not more. You’ll have to have your offering written. Unless you’re a competent copywriter, you’re talking about a few hundred, easily. Next, to get any sort of volume, you’ll need to print a few hundred of your letters or cards, pay first class postage to mail them, and even then you can assume that only about 1% to 3% of your recipients will even care about your offering. So, if you main 1,000 letters, you can assume that 10 to 30 people who got the letters are even in the market for what you’re advertising. You’re paying $10 to $50 per lead…not sale, but lead!

Whereas, if you know how to harness the power of the Internet, you can get people who really are interested in what you have to offer, and who really do need your product or service and are more than willing to pay for it, to come find you!

There are tons of ways of doing this, but let’s basically talk about three.

1. Pay-per-click. You know the $50 lead, above. Well, for only pennies per click, you can get Google to place ads in strategic places around the web where your prospects are likely to see them. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad. You can get a real, bona fide lead for pennies!

2. Blogging. Or if you want to get leads essentially for free, you can build a blog yourself or hire someone else to do it for you and Google will bring you traffic…for free!

3. Finally, You can combine the above two strategies and a few others and not only have targeted, interested prospects visit your website but also give you their email address along with permission to market your products to them! Wow! Your prospects will not only be reading your ad copy, but they will be wanting and expecting you to send them more information.

You can do all of this for next to nothing! Now, that’s recession proof marketing.

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