 Overture has created a product that will take this trend and, for the local advertiser, use it for highly targeted local advertising. Local portals have paved the way, adding local value to the world wide web, but now things are about to get really interesting. Some "local" observations over the past year Chances are, if you're reading this web page, theres only about a 1% chance you're physically near our office. That's the beauty of the Internet when your business has no geographical limitations. So I encourage you to click on the next link, study what SoutheastTexas.com is doing as a regional portal. Identify who in your local region is offering this kind of resource. Start there, because thats the fastest way to establish a local web presence. As a reference, our tiny little basic non-bold ad on SoutheastTexas.com, buried way down in the directory under web designers costs about $65/year and drives a huge amount of traffic to this web site.We're members of the Beaumont Chamber of Commerce, we cold call on local businesses, use telemarketing, some direct mail, of course the internet advertising you're reading now, and we keep hearing the same thing over and over....Which is something like this: "Customers will come to us with printouts in hand, showing us exactly what they want. When we ask them where they got the information, they say from the Internet." Just the other day I was talking with a client and she said, "Lately, when people call to book parties, they almost always ask us what is your web address?" You see, there's an assumption these days that if you're in business, you have a web site. When you tell a customer you're not on the web, they are disappointed. Two years ago these same customers were telling me that they didn't need the internet. That the internet would drive sales for their business. That may have been true then, but with Local Match, and their competitors, it is different now. That was a nice little rant, but back to Overture Local Match, to kinda start wrapping this page up, Local Match is a way of tying your ad to local content on the internet. It's a great idea, and it's curious that it's taken so long to get here. Overture's ability to display targeted ads to an audience that is from 0.5 - 100 miles from your location is extremely powerful. Though it is so new that it is considered unproven, I bet this is going to be the best offering from Overture ever. Local Match will get people to your door, and secondarily, it will deliver hits to your web site. Once you have well chosen search terms you will probably get more traffic than you expect. But if you truely want to be an internet entrepreniour, if you want to be an internet success story, if the idea of growing your revenue 20% is nice, but what you're really after is a 20,000% increase, then here's another secret to internet marketing. You've got to be the go-to-guy. You've got to be the all knowing source of information for your chosen product or service. I don't know what you're going to sell yet, but I can assure you that someone out there is delivering it cheaper and faster, and they are smiling when they do it. If you're going to be the 6,745,983rd entry into the low price concumer electronics arena on the net, well, I am especially am talking to you right now. You better have a web site that is filled with content. Excellent content. The kind of content that makes the people that read about products want to stay up late at night reading your site. And while you're doing that, you might want to consider joining some affiliate programs to help supplement your sales. You should really think strongly about surrounding your core product with peripheral products that ad value, complement or enhance your core product, and that you can get paid a referral fee for when a sales is processed. On top of that, don't be afraid to promote your affiliate program with a little cash. Search engines are great, but spend a little money with Overture to discover what works. Overture delivers immediate results, rather than waiting for weeks to see what changes to your website do to search engine rankings and traffic. I don't mean to be discourageing here. Actually just the opposite. The Internet is the fastest and cheapest way to test new marketing ideas, products, and strategies. If you're already successful in business, we're quite sure that you will do what it takes to be successful with your e-commerce marketing. If you're just starting out, well, we did that too at one point, and we're still learning. Having an e-commerce enabled virtual storefront doesn't mean beans the potential customer that is picking your site to visit out of a list of thousands. And consider this, your site is now competing, not with the electronics store down the street, but against the best talent from Austin, Seattle, and Silicon Valley. Be ready to learn new things. Stick with the winners that have survived the past few years. As we're half way through year 2004, new alternatives to what works have been entering the marketplace lately. We, as business web site development company believe and expect that the best idea for retailers wanting to generate income from the world wide web to have come along this decade, so far, is a focus on local marketing. Overture Local Match is going to make the process a lot easier. Our Experience with Local Match - 7/10/04 Well, looks like we made it through editorial review today. We funded our account a few days ago with the minimum amount, and now have some decent search terms, and our listing approved. Triangle Web Sites.com, by the very nature of our business, has practically no walk in traffic. We're a little sceptical that this is going to work for us. However, we have a couple clients that have heard about it, and started asking us questions. As always, we don't like to recommend anything we haven't used ourselves, or had direct experience with. So we set up an account. Briefly though, I'd like to mention a couple of businesses that we think would benefit. In Beaumont, there's a bicycle store we're very fond of, and have become friends with everyone in the place. They recently moved into a new location. This is an example of a need for highly targeted local ads if I've ever heard of one, and I'm going to email the owner a link to this page when it goes online. In this case, I would not target just the obvious bicycling and bike trail keywords, I would fill the search terms list with all things sports. It's reasonable to assume that the same people that play golf on the weekends also ride bikes. How about kids in AA little league. You could target your keywords to make associations between sporting events and the bicycle shop. Something like: Pick up your Texas Texans Hockey schedule at ___ . You get the idea. There could be some really loosly associated keywords that I'm sure Overture wouldn't have a problem with. Another business we feel that Local Match is ideally suited for is a law firm that we're developing a web site for in Orange County, TX. This firm also is relocating to a newly remodeled building down the street and a block over, and launching their web site at the same time. What a powerful way to reinforce the move in the minds of current clients, while promoting their new web presence at the same time. Both of these businesses, by their very nature, are somewhat limited in practical marketing scope geographically. We expect that Overture Local Match is really going to fill the much needed and long ignored gap in local internet marketing services. This product is so new that I doubt anyone can say what the results of Local Match will be. The $20 minimum deposit seems like a excellent wager in a world full of wasted advertising dollars. And truely, if you value your time, you're going to spend a lot more than twenty dollars coming up with a thousand combinations of search terms to promote your business. That's the real start up cost with any pay-per-click advertising. Triangle Web Sites.com has spent lots of money on ads that have had poor conversion. We've got high hopes for Local Match, but we want to stress that, as we understand this product, it is designed to get people in the door of your bricks and mortor business. Please check back here in a month or two as we will be reporting our real world experience, expose any success secrets we discover along the way, and update this article to make it reflect our observations specific to Local Match. |
