eCommerce Tycoon

**johniman7** · 11-05-2008, 07:12 PM

Sorry for my vagueness in my title, I wasn't sure how to be specific enough in the space provided. I need some advice from someone who does complete development jobs for local business and such. (not online clients, template sites, forums, etc) I would like to start advertising. Where do you think I should advertise offline?

I am thinking the newspaper would be my best bet in the classified ads section. What works for you?

**andrei155** · 11-05-2008, 07:25 PM

Word of mouth is really the best, especially when you're working with the people face to face.

Also, although I have never tried, knocking on door to door could prove to be useful! Is that like real life spam?

Just throwing some ideas out there.

**Nigel Lew** · 11-12-2008, 11:01 PM

One really powerful method of getting your name out is to get some pens printed up with the info and logo on it. Hand them out all over the place. The beer store is pretty good for instance because folks always walk off with pens. Any place that takes a credit card with do just fine. Folks will always take a handful of pens and they are pretty cheap to get produced in bulk.

The newspaper is ok. The local radio stations work pretty well also.

hope that helps,
Nigel

**thesuperhero** · 11-13-2008, 04:33 AM

As ecommerce is meant to transform physical business to online, I greatly think that offline advertising is necessary to bring people that buy offline to online.

Newspaper will be very very costly. The audience is so general and you can hardly find your target audience. You can try the advertisement magazines and handouts. In our place we call it Advertisment Magazines.

Other method that I know is if you have phsyical shop, you can try to hang a big banner that says "We now open 24 hours". See my blog here http://www.how-ecommerce-helps.com/2...4-hours-a-day/

**Feydakin** · 11-14-2008, 10:49 AM

You didn't mention your advertising budget.. And didn't mention where you are and what your demographics look like.. Big city is different than small town, etc etc..

Classifieds are a waste of time and money for what you want.. Think about it.. When you want to hire out a professional service, plumber, mechanic, dentist, do you look in the classifieds??

Advertising on place mats at restaurants has been successful for a few friends of mine.. And it's cheap..

But by far the best results I have ever gotten when I was doing this type of work, morning drive time radio.. A bit more expensive but if you are on the right am / talk radio station in the mornings you'll find great results..

You might also consider billboards.. I ran a couple boards downtown where I could catch people walking more than driving.. Got one of my biggest clients ever that way..

I'd also stay away from big yellow pages ads.. I ran those for 7 years and got exactly 0 clients from them.. But I did get a lot of phone calls from people wanting free advice..

**SportyDog** · 11-18-2008, 02:49 AM

why would you consider any kind of local advertising for an e-commerce store. That is backwards thinking. I have people approach me every day to put ads in their local papers or magazines, for say $500 because it is going to hit 30-60K people.

Instead I advertise in national magazines at say $2k a pop and hit Millions of potential customers.

If you're e-commerce you should focus just as much on the customers on the other side of the country as down the block from you.

If you go Brick and morter that's a different story.

You don't have to take out $2k ads either, but you can advertise online, and hit everyone. and by the way, your local grocery store still carries those magazines so you're advertising locally too.

If you have an e-commerce store in witchita kansas, depending on your business you may do better to advertise locally in L.A. or New York, or wherever the majority of your customers are.