Online or Offline Advertising?

 

There are many methods for you to set up online advertising. Whether your business is online or offline you can benefit from advertising online. I own a plumbing company and get great results from many different methods. I use everything from postcards, flyers, websites, and classifieds.

One method I use is getting free web page advertising from the multitudes of classifieds that are on the net today. This does take time, but when I was first starting out with my plumbing company this was a life saver. Everyday I would delete my old ad and post a new ad, that way I would always be on top for the search results for the category I was in. You may not have to do this depending on what industry you are in, test the results for yourself. This free ad brought me in about $800 per month worth of work, not a ton, but enough to pay for other ads.

I have done a ton of postcard advertising and have had awesome results in that area as well. This was not always the case though. My first set of postcards that I put out had gotten no results at all. Then I discovered something called copywriting. This is the method you use to help lead readers down your ad to the offer. Yes, you had better have an offer somewhere if you are going to get calls. The copywriting skills I learned even helped my free website advertising campaign that I was using.

Another method of marketing that I used was coupons. At first I thought this was not working well, yes, each month was capable of paying for the ads. Which is a good thing since each month cost me about $750, but I did not make much over and above that. I tried this for six months then stopped doing the coupons. At which a funny thing happened. Over the next six months I continued getting calls, to the tune of about $400 worth of work per month. On top of that 70% of all the clients I had seen in the first six months had either called me back for some other work or referred me to someone else. This gave me a lot of work, which at this point became free again. Between this and the free web advertising I did not need to advertise anymore, but I wanted to grow. So, next I tried my hand at the yellow pages. This worked well, but with my new copywriting skills, this actually worked too well. I had to turn away $1000′s of work each month since I could not find any employees. Oh well, live and learn.

As far as which would be better online or offline marketing, I would have to say that for your business you need to try every possible method that you can.  Until the flood gates have opened and then there is no turning back.  Oh, remember to test and track everything.  If I did not track my coupon ads I would not have ever believed I made money from those.