Is this the end for Yellow Pages?

This week saw the latest edition of the Yellow pages distributed around Newcastle city centre. This photo shows what I saw on my way back from a meeting. A wheelie bin with a pile of Yellow Pages stacked up next to it!

I'm not sure what this picture tells me other than they companies these were delivered to did not need the Yellow Pages or thought it was surplus to requirment.

My belief is that the days of Yellow Pages and similar directories are well and truly over. Why would you thumb through a directory when you can have all the information about the services you are looking for at you finger tips via a computer or mobile phone - what is more you can often get much more information about these business online that you could ever do in the Yellow Pages. At the end of the day your business could be spending hundreds or thousands of £££'s each year on advertising in these directories only for your advert to end up dumped next to a wheelie bin in a back alley of Newcastle!!! What a waste.

Spend your adverting budget smarter! Make sure you are trying out new ways to make contact with prospective clients. My first port of call, use the money you would spend on telephone directories on advertising using Pay Per Click Advertising.

Of course there are some businesses who will make more money than they spend in telephone directories and to those business I say keep doing it.... but also try Pay Per Click advertising.

And don't stop there. There are dozens of ways to attact customers online, try one out each month and you could be looking at a different business this time next year.

Alternative Ways to Get Visitors - Social Networking Optimisation

I often talk about search engine optimisation (or SEO) to help drive good quality traffic to your website. I also promote pay per click advertising (or PPC) as an alternative way, and a quick win way of getting traffic to your website.

Well I am going to look at a few other alternatives that will also help you get visitors. How about exploiting the advertising potential of Social Networking websites such as Facebook, Myspace and Bebo? These website collect (or more accurately are volunteered) masses of information about the people who use them. What do they do with this data? well now they are offering you the opportunity to target the exact niche for your business. Admittedly you are more likely to succeed in some markets more than others but here is the crack -

If you have a product, say you sell very baggy jeans - you know the sort I mean, the ones that seem to be below the bum line yet still just about stay up - well you business would know that the age group to target these is the 16 - 24 year olds. But there is more, you are likely to know people in this age group who are into Hip Hop music are likely to be interested in your product. Well the likes of Facebook will allow you to specify that you only advertise to these people when they are looking through Facebook. Something worth trying out? I think so. Try our Social Networking Optimisation

Ask.com has a face lift. Will anyone catch up with Google

Ask.com has had a bit of a face lift. Is this an attempt to eat into Googles market share?

Probably. But it is still difficult to see the day when Google is not the dominant player in the market. Ask is probably the only search engine that is making any positive dent in the Google empire - but ironically it relies on Google to make its money - the sponsored adverts display on the results pages of Ask are actually Google Adwords, these ads are server by Google to Ask and then a commission is paid if anyone clicks on the ad! So Google is in a no lose situation with this, if they lose market share to Ask they are still getting the advertising revenue.

I guess Google will keep an eye on the share that Ask gets, after all they don't want any one muscling in too much and getting to big for thier boots.

Good luck to Ask is what I say, a little competition didn't do anyone any harm.

Christmas online sales 'rise 50%'

The proof is in that Internet sales boomed last Christmas.

From the BBC
"UK online sales rose by more than 50% in the three months to Christmas, according to an industry survey.
Internet sales between 1 October and 31 December hit £15.2bn, up from £9.61bn a year earlier, with electronics and clothing doing well, Capgemini said.
Firms with both a High Street and online presence, such as John Lewis, did best, the survey said.
For every pound spent on goods in 2007, 15 pence was spent online, pushing annual electronic sales to £30.2bn.
In 2006, for every pound spent on retail goods, the Internet spend had been 10 pence. "

Read the full article at BBC.co.uk

Of course not every web site will be a winner. The successful ones will be using all forms of online marketing to ensure that they get customers on to there site. The thing is that this sort of marketing is available to everyone, not just the big boys.

Now is the time to start thinking about how you can take advantage of next years Christmas sales, here is a quick checklist for you to get on with - start with number 1

1. Search Engine Optimisation. This the slow burn of the online marketing world, but can give the best long term results.... so start now. Make sure your site is listed in as many external sites as you can find, if you were to target getting you site linked into 5 sites per week from now until Christmas you would have around 250 incoming links to your site. Why is this important? A major part of the search engine rankings is links that are incoming to your site, the more you have the more important the search engines see your site.
2. Email Marketing. Store the email addresses of anyone who buys from you, encourage people to sign up to newsletters, get peoples email addresses and permission to use them! You are now in a position to regularly get in touch with them and give them offers.
3. AdWords Campaigns / PPC. Get started on an AdWords or pay per click (PPC) campaign.
4. Make sure your website has a Call to action, a telephone number to call, enquiry box to fill in and make it easy to buy your products. Don't be shy put these calls to action all over the place, shy bairn get nowt as they say here in Newcastle.

Christmas is coming! Well not quite but it is time to start thinking about it

A reminder popped up in my calender today telling me to start my campaigns for Christmas. 'Its only September', I thought, 'Fenwicks haven't even started to clean there windows for there Christmas Display'. However I new my reminder was correct as Christmas does have a habit of creeping up.

This year I will be telling all my ecommerce clients to check their AdWords campaigns to ensure they are allocating the correct budget and are testing the campaigns so they are getting a maximum return on investment (ROI).

It is amazing how well AdWords campaigns perform at any time of year, but during the Christmas season it is the only sure way to get traffic to your website. There is another reason why you should be spending time now on getting this right - AdWords and the keywords you choose are ranked based on how much you want to pay per click (PPC) and also the 'quality' of you advert - if your advert has a high click through rate then it is likely that it will appear higher in the list of adverts. The higher it appears the more likely you will get someone clicking on it - so if you get started on your AdWords campaign now then come the crucial months of November and December you will (hopefully) have good quality ads showing high on the left hand side of the page.

I love Adwords. I really do believe it has been a revolution in marketing (not just online, any form of marketing). Of course if you are not sure what to do about getting your site promoted using adwords then get in touch.