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Advertising Cost Reduced to Zero !!
At the bottom of this article you will find my "sig file". I attach it to every article that I write. As you can see it bears my name, web-site address and e-mail address. This is not done out of vanity, or a desire to see my name in print. ...

Advertising - Does it matter?
When advertising, you need to sell your opportunity, your products, and yourself. What sets you apart from everyone else? Maybe you produce a newsletter with a specific content where there is a demand from a particular group of people, or you...

How Advertising and Marketing Got Started
Copyright 2006 Presslink Publishing This is the first in a series of 10 articles starting with the beginnings of advertising and marketing through to present day. Advertising, as we know it, probably started to prosper in 1904 when John...

Internet Advertising Options
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Keys to Targeting Your Internet Advertising
So you got your website up and running. You hired an excellent web designer to craft a perfect home page and satellite pages that will really draw in the visitors and inspire them to buy. You have a beautiful catalog of products with...

 
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Local Business Advertising & Google Adwords

Local Business Advertising

"I don't need the Internet to advertise - I'm a local business!"

Okay...

If you could spend £0.04 (or $0.05 in the US) and have a new customer - what would you do with your local business advertising budget?

I hope you would spend that money again and again!

Granted this is the ideal example and you are likely to pay much more then £0.04 per customer you acquire, BUT - herein lies the rub for local businesses:

An internet presence announces your business to the world.

When you are online, you have little control about where traffic is coming to you from (if you are not actively driving traffic that is), but what if you could make sure that people who lived in your area, who buy your goods and would make ideal customers could be targeted!

Google Adwords can help you target local people, not people from New Zealand if you live in the UK - but people close to you.

Pinpoint geographic targeting of prospects is an optimum use of your local business advertising budget.

Is it 100% foolproof?

Alas no, but it's a good start.

How do I do it?

Well the easiest way to do this is as follows:

Create a national campaign with your search terms and your location terms - eg: If you're a plumber in Poole then "plumber poole" would be a good keyword.

Create a geo-targeted campaign (this can be done in a couple of ways - I'll leave the nitty gritty details out for now) which means your ads are served to local people when they search for your keywords.

So in the plumber example if a local person types in "plumber" and doesn't mention anything


else, your advert will be shown.

So goes the theory anyway.

Does it work all the time?

Like I said - Not always very well.

This is because Google uses IP addresses to determine location and this method is somewhat of a cleaver when a scalpel is required.

It all depends how diligent ISP's are when allocating IP addresses to their customers, the only way you can know is through empirical means.

What if the regional targeting is producing no results?

If this is the case then a national campaign with location terms included (as mentioned above) is your best bet.

If you were to run a national campaign on the same keywords without the location terms, you will be competing with other players who have a national presence for your particular product/service which could prove very expensive.

Your local business advertising budget spend should at the very least give Adwords and PPC advertising in general a tryout. Remember there are an infinite number of keywords in any target market.

Just because the big boys may have a stranglehold on the 'obvious' terms does not mean your market is saturated.


About the Author: Tom O'Brien is a certified Google Adwords Professional and helps businesses maximise advertising ROI. For further tips on using Adwords effectively, visit: http://www.pdqprospects.com/services/GoogleAdwordsCampaignManagement.html

Source: www.isnare.com