Greetings All,
Well, June 2009 is in the process gone forever, how was your month go? Got a productive one?
Before going further, let’s do our weekly catch up first:
* Breaking the Rules
* How to be Self-Made Millionaires
* Super Affiliate Handbook 2009 Edition
* Is SBI Really for You?
* Ways to Expand Your Affiliate Business
If you want to make the most effective use of your time and energy to help local businesses gets online and help them operating their online presence effectively, you need to start with smart market research first.
Instead of guessing or try to figure out by yourself toward to find out whom your potential target customers are, or to know which businesses are spending the big ad dollars, you can find it out by search off and online Yellow Pages or a local business directory that has display ads.
Speaking of that, the first thing you need to do is to go through the listings. When you find a niche that has full-page or very large display ads, make a note of it. And then continue searching until you reach the end, or find more than enough potential niches.
In most cases, you’ll find there are “rich-niche” businesses and professions that advertise like this:
* Contractors
* Dentists
* Doctors
* Insurance
* Lawyers
* Real Estate
These businesses and professionals make large sums of money on each new customer or client they get. Spending thousands of dollars every month to advertise their service is just a fraction of what they receive in profits.
Believe it or not, most business owners complain that 50% of their advertising budget is wasted. They just don’t know which 50% and where are they gone!
They don’t know just by using these basic free tools, such as adding Google Analytics, Stat Counter or any of the other third party services to their sites and then can start to track the statistics.
If you can help them and be able to prove (and show) a prospect where their potential business is coming from, what they do when they view a Web page and where they leave (exit). You got potential customers and you can be the one that gives them great value for their advertising spending.
But no Yellow Pages book can do that! Instead of guessing whether or not a given display ad is performing well, a customer of yours who has a web page will have measurable statistics to rely upon. These statistics can also provide valuable market research for the client. No Yellow Pages book can do that either!
For you, the marketer, the results you get from your exploration of the Yellow Pages listings is just the start. You’ll have to “weed out” all the retail-oriented display ads like restaurants and other businesses that are working on a small profit margin. Just because a restaurant has a full-page menu, that doesn’t mean they’re making a big profit. They’re just up there because their competition has a menu, too!
After that, take the final results of your searches and organize them into categories that will simplify the next step in your market research.
Put all contractors as sub-listings under the more general term “contractors”. By doing it in that way, when you take the next step and search for them in Google, you’ll be able to just run through the list one word at a time, like this:
1. Contractors building
2. Contractors concrete
3. Contractors drywall
And so on…
After a period of time, if you think this is a good way to help you find hungry ad buyers, call your Yellow Pages advertising department and ask for the cost of all the display ads they offer. If their answer is shocking you, then ask them if you can get a discount on the “rate card” they quote you.
Then you’ll know for sure that this is probably the most powerful source of market research for hungry advertisers in your local area!
Finally, if you don’t have time to search those potential local customers by yourself, if your main target market is in the America, you can use Get Found Local service to help you out.
It said there are 20,000,000+ businesses in America and many of them have no way to cost effectively reach local customers. Many simply cannot afford to take out an ad in every Yellow Pages directory, which caused the majority of people use the internet yellow pages doing local searches on-line more than using the traditional Yellow pages.
‘Til next time.. promote & prosper!’
Cheers!
Connect with Ann