Remember the good ole days when placing your ad prominently in the yellow pages was the heart of a profitable business advertising plan?

Are you feeling like the Yellow Pages aren’t working like they used to?

Or maybe you think the Internet is taking over and no one uses the thick yellow book of yesteryear.

The truth is, the Yellow Pages are still alive and kicking – it’s just that advertising methods and understanding have not kept pace. At least not from the business owners perspective and understanding.

Where’s the failure?

One of the greatest marketing minds of our time “Dan Kennedy” called it “advertising incest” and that advertising just gets dumber and dumber simply because everyone is copying everyone else.

The danger in that is that the customer viewing the ads begins to believe that all of the businesses are the same (i.e. a commodity) and when that happens, the only way to differentiate in the customer eyes is to shop for price, and in their mind – the lowest price.

The take away here (and something I’ll be showing you later in this article) is that if you can separate yourself from the crowd (and it’s easy to do) you can get amazing results from your yellow page ad campaign. In fact you can charge the highest prices and get the most business if you are NOT perceived as a commodity.

Open up to any major market niche in the big yellow book and notice what Dan was talking about.

You’ll find that almost everyone is placing the same ad. All the ads say the same general thing – except the business names are different.

The general message is “Me Too” and “Oh Pick Me, Pick Me” – and some even have full page ads with photos, which go as far as to do nothing for the ad other than provoke a turn to the next page.

Quick Tip: You never ever want to let the yellow page salesman dictate to you how to advertise your business. They are not marketing experts. They are salespeople. If they were marketing experts they’d be marketing their own business and not selling you yellow page advertising.

What’s missing?

Direct response, headline driven attention getting ad copy which is trackable.

Here, let’s pick that sentence apart…

What I mean by direct response is; some form of direct response mechanism which says “you must take action now” to find exactly what you’re looking for.

I’m talking about “moving the free line” – which means NOT asking them to call your direct phone number and get a free quote or to speak to a salesman (who really wants to speak to a salesman anyway while their in research mode!).

By moving the free line, I’m talking about actually giving something valuable in return for exchanging their contact info.

For example, what about a free report titled “The Top 3 Things You Better Know Before Hiring A (your business service here)” – OR “Don’t Spend $1 On XYZ Until You Get Our Free Report First”.

Of course, I’m being very general here – but stay with me I’m building up to something.

I also mentioned writing a “Headline Driven, Attention Getting” ad. What I’m getting at is something that reaches out and grabs your target prospect by the shirt collar and says you better get this now before you move any further in the buying process.

You could use something like – “Warning! Free Report Reveals What You Should Know Before Calling Anyone On This Page” OR “Warning: DO NOT CALL Any Until You Read This”.

People are used to being told to DO something in advertising (“buy this”, etc.) so being told NOT to do something is unexpected.

And then there’s tracking. Don’t rely on your receptionist or secretary to record where every inbound call emanated from. You should either provide a web address which is trackable or a toll free number that is easily tracked. I’ll provide resources at the end of this article to do just that and show you how to implement everything easily for maximum success.

Ok, so that was pretty general – now let’s make something more specific and bring everything together so you can avoid the same mistakes everyone else is making when doing “me too” yellow page advertising.

Let’s use the “Home Remodeling” industry as an example.

If you were a remodeling contractor, you might place a yellow page ad which looks like this.

—————————————————————–

WARNING! Your Remodeling Project Could Be In Danger.

Your Local Zoning Commission & Local Suppliers Won’t
Tell You This – Until It’s Too Late.

Free 24 Hour Recorded Message 800-555-1212

—————————————————————–

Imagine someone flipping the pages looking for a home remodeling contractor, or maybe they’re already working on a project and have run into some problems. Do you think they will call a free recorded (no obligation) message to get a message they may be missing?

Most likely they will, and if you use a simple “call capture” toll free number, as soon as they call, you can have their name and phone number emailed to you instantly (more about this in the resources section at the end of this article).

OR, what if you offered a free report – instantly downloadable online in seconds by visiting your website.

Instead of the 800#, you could use;

Download Your Free Report Immediately At; www.yourwebsite.com/freereport/

Once the interested prospect arrives there you can ask for their name and email in return for the free report. Then, on the thank you page, you can provide the free report download link and make a secondary offer with a discount on your services and collect the rest of the persons contact info such as address and phone number when they take you up on the offer.

Do you think that would be a hot lead? I’m willing to bet yes, it’s extremely hot.

And guess what, if they don’t take the discount offer and become a full blown lead – they are still in your automated email follow-up system (more about how to implement that in the resources section).

I hope you see the power in doing this sort of direct response, attention getting, trackable advertising.

Now, let me show you some ideas and resources for making this an actionable task in your business the next time the yellow pages salesman calls. And don’t take any advice from your yellow pages salesman. Sure he will squirm when he hears what you want to do but trust me – your success will increase if you separate yourself from the crowd.

Maximizing Your Yellow Pages Advertising; Resources:

1. Begin thinking about why your prospect searches for your business or service in the first place. Try to enter the conversation already occurring in his head and provide the answers you know he can’t find anywhere else. Another great idea is to simply put a twist on information your prospect may already have, yet use your insider knowledge to re purpose the information for viewing in a different way.

2. Tracking: You can get a simple 800 number and forward all calls to your business number, and know instantly how many calls you’ve received, what number they called from and how long they talked. I prefer using the service over at www.ureach.com for an inexpensive 800 number.

For more sophisticated call tracking and to offer the toll free 24 hour recorded message you can use a service provided by www.800service.com.

To track a web address, it’s easy to have your webmaster create a “folder” on your existing website and name it “freereport” or “yellowpages” and then simply put your special offer page there and name it “index.html”. By doing it that way, when someone visits www.yourwebsite.com/yellowpages/ they will go directly to your offer page and if they take the offer, signup, etc. you can track conversion.

3. Make your valuable free report universally deliverable in Adobe PDF format easily by converting any word or text document to PDF using the free converter utility over at www.pdf995.com.

4. If you want to collect a persons name and email address before delivering the free report, you can find an email autoresponder service over at www.aweber.com.

Get Free Yellow Page Advertising Help & Setup

In the end, if you want help setting up your yellow page advertising and bringing together the recommended services to deliver and track your results – simply give me a call and I’ll help you setup and implement the entire ad campaign at NO COST!

Why would I help you for free? Simple – I’m very passionate about advertising and to be honest I’ve setup many such ads in the past and had great success. I’ll even go as far as setting up the webpage on your website, making sure the offer works well and give you a free email autoresponder service to follow up with your ad responders automatically. Really! All you have to do is call and I’ll help you get it all put together.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Warmest Regards,

Terry Lamb
Internet Marketing Specialist
703-574-4719

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