Internet Marketing Tampa

Are you reaching these customers with the phone book?

The longer you wait to get involved with local Internet Marketing in Florida, the greater the risk you are going to fall too far behind your fellow local business owners who already using the Internet to find customers on-line. Everywhere you look there are signs that traditional ways of reaching new customers are dying off. This month alone, Florida, New York and Pennsylvania added their names to the list of 15 states that approved a request by Verizon to allow the company to stop producing the white pages phone book.

According to an article on Fast Company, the number of people using these directories fell from 25% to 11% and now there is a way for people to opt out of even having the Yellow Pages delivered to their homes. Cities no longer want to foot the bill for hauling the directories away or recycling them. If you think you are reaching new customers by advertising in the phone book you are sorely mistaken.

The companies that run directories are trying to adapt and they are shifting their focus to moving on-line but you have to ask yourself an important question before you decide to spend you advertising dollar with the phone book companies. Is being listed with all your competitors in an on-line directory a good idea? Why waste your small advertising budget to be listed next to all your competitors when you can spend that same money to have your own website with your own message appear on the first page of Google?

As we built our local business we became keenly aware that paying to be listed with all our competitors was a waste of our money. We decided that our marketing budget would b better spent working on getting our own website ranked on Google rather than contributing to a company that was going to work just as hard for our competitors especially if they paid them more. Why give a potential customer 10 choices of businesses offering your same product or service when you can get them right to you with your own personally crafted message? Marketing your own website and business on the Internet is just as affordable as working with a directory service and it can be much more effective.