Advertising Your Local Business Directory

Posted on December 12th, 2007 in Local Directory, Promotion

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So Nickycakes is almost finished building his local business directory site.  The business database is populated, the template is almost finished, domain purchased, hosting taken care of.  While taking a break and watching a few episodes of The Office (best show ever, besides seinfeld), some ideas came to mind about how to get in touch with local businesses.

Spamming all the businesses with emails telling them to come pay for a subscription may work, however, a) not even close to all the businesses have email addresses listed, or even a website b) spam laws are retarded these days.  Probably shouldn’t bother with that.

Phone calls….that could work.  But seriously, the only people Cakes wants to deal with on the phone are his family, his girlfriend (sometimes), and his AM telling him how much of an increase he’s going to give him on his best producing offer.  Cold calling dickhead owners of local businesses is anti-interesting.

Mail.  Mail seems like a good idea.  Stuff an envelope or whatever, write up something about how you want them to update their information and then when they go to do that, the website will offer them a paid listing for $50 a year or something.  Easy.  Until you realize how much it costs to send mail.  41 cents a piece can really add up.  So your best bet is probably postcards which only cost 26 cents.  Postcards have the added benefit of delivering the message to the customer before they open it.  Lots of people will see junky looking mail and just throw it out, but a postcard they can see before they throw it away to see if they’re interested.

All you have to do is export your listing database to excel (easy with phpmyadmin) so you can print out address labels, order some postcards for cheap, get postage, and send em.  Where can you get postcards?  Vistaprint has some 100 postcards free offer right now so Cakes will likely be ordering those when the time comes.