The Gympie Business Directory is an example of a local business directory listing small businesses in the Gympie region of Queensland. Searching for local services in search engines will usually show results that include the business website as well as the listing directory indicating the benefits of having links from local directories SEO.

One of the chief benefits to having your business listed on online business directories is exposure.People around the world can see your business’s details if you post it to online business directories.The more people who know about your business, the more money you can make.Such exposure helps with name recognition so that you can expect better sales and publicity.

By listing your business with online business directories, you take a look at other companies and what they sell and offer.This means that you and your business can stay relevant.This way, you can match such services and can take your company to the next level by thinking up new and unique ideas.This will only strengthen your business.

Online directories are great, too, because they are inexpensive.After all, posting to such area is inexpensive and even free and is a great way to reach people in an affordable manner.The Internet really does change the way people do business.Saving this money will help you refocus how you spend your money.

Mary Valley website is another example of directory website showing an easy HTML method of listing local businesses with links to their websites.

If you join online business directories, you will be able to meet and greet other people involved in the business industry.Thus, you can network and find out about government tax breaks and grants and can share your struggles and gain some much-needed advice.The more you know about other businesses and their owners and managers, the more you will know about your industry.Competition is strictly business: If you band together, you and your other competitors are bound to succeed.

Online business directories make it that much easier for people around the world to learn about your company.Visibility is the name of the game.The more people who see your business online, the more likely it is that they will invest in you.This is a smart investment for business-minded people who want to further their both their company and their career.

Here is another website showing an example of an automated local directory: Gympie Online Business Directory.

Of the five senses, sight is by far the most influential. In fact, researches discovered that 80% of what we learn is learned through the eyes. Most of the rest is learned through hearing. This means that radio ads must get the consumer to capture a vision, smell, feeling, taste of the product through words alone.

With 80% of what we learn entering our eyes, advertisers are wise to center their ads around the visual. If they can add sound, this is even better. Printed ads can be read over and over by many people. They can last longer and for this reason potentially influence more consumers than sound ads alone.

Visual advertisement uses words and pictures. Words are abstract representations of real objects. The word ‘mom’ brings to mind a person, and good or bad memories. Words can also represent products. Some slogans have become famous. One of the best know was the Wendy’s ad phrase, “Where’s the beef?” Though mostly heard, it sold millions of hamburgers.

The quantity of words is rarely as important as the quality.  People are busy and rushed. The message of the ad must be quick and catchy and informative, yet must give the message without boredom. This is a hard balance.

Humor, when appropriate, is an excellent way to capture the attention of the public. For example, Alaska airlines portrayed their company’s strength through exaggerating the competition’s weaknesses. It was humorous and kept people watching, and flying with them for several years.

Sometimes the ad is only a reminder of what the consumer already knows. A motto, a logo, or a symbol each might associate itself to a particular product. The colors of Pepsi alone will sell the product. In other words, the picture is all the ad needed.

So, we see that the use of visual and audio, of effective words, and of humor make an ad memorable. This takes time and creativity to achieve. Once this is in hand, the advertiser must choose where he will publish this written message. One creative approach is to fly the ad on a banner over a large group of people. Banner ads have been shown to be effective in taking a message to the public in a memorable way. When you consider that the drone of the plane engine adds an audio attention getter, you understand that this method incorporates both sight and sound to effectively drive the message home.

When you are confident your message appeals effectively, it is time to contact an airplane banner towing company and begin the process of getting it into the air. In no time, your well planned message will be presented to thousands of people and the impact for you will begin to be seen.

Advertising started a very long time ago when the Egyptians were the men of the world. Egyptians are famous for many inventions and inventing advertising seems to be another one of their most brilliant ones ever. They had already previously started to use papyrus (first paper) to record many things on. The Egyptians then did something that was quite remarkable, they started to write down advertisements on this paper and post it around the cities. It was this that kicked everything off with the rest of the world’s future generations.

It is also known that Pompeii, the city destroyed by the terrible forces of nature, actually had used adverts to show off commercial messages.The middle ages took on the idea of advertising in their own special way, as they invented the image form of advertising.Town criers were also introduced to advertise things such as fruit and vegetable carts.

If you were then to think foward many, many years the invention of the radio came into play and of course with this came the quirky jingle advertisements. The next revolution in advertising was of course the television, which in turn heralded the design agency started to come about.

Of course nowadays advertisement is used in almost everything from video games and public transport and even used in public schools. It has also comes in many different forms ranging from direct mail to twist banner stand so things are really starting to come along.

What is the future of advertising? It seems that with every new invention, advertising is not far behind, sneaking its way into everything and everyone.

When we study survival, we of course are reminded of Charles Darwin’s studies in the Galapagos Islands, and “survival of the fittest”.

But most people forget what is even more applicable to your practice or business right now was that Darwin found that it was the species that had the ability to quickly adapt that was even more important to survival than the species fitness. So what is even more important to survival of your business is your ability to quickly adapt to our new changing and emerging economy.

So how does a practice or small business adapt their Yellow Page ad design and small business marketing quickly to outperform their competition and rake in more than their share of the profits?

The first thing you need to do is look at your marketing and advertising budget and make it accountable. What is your Return On Investment (ROI) on your advertising?

You should be able to accurately track what each ad each campaign returned 1) in number of incoming calls generated, 2) in number of incoming calls converted to a sale, and 3) what dollar amount of sale was generated by each advertisement? This is Marketing and Advertising 101, but many people ignore what is going on in their advertising and marketing only to find that their marketing consistently underperforms their expectations.

So what is the first step to making your advertising accountable and a lot more profitable? The first step I use in my marketing agency is to use the new special call tracker phone numbers that are now available. This allows you to accurately track what each ad is returning automatically by simply putting a different “tracking phone number” in each ad. You can actually track in real time on the Internet how each ad is performing with the best call tracker phone numbers.

But not only that, these call tracker phone numbers also record all your incoming calls automatically. This lets the business owner know if the person who answers your incoming calls is doing what you want them to do to turn the incoming call into a sale. So the second thing you want to do is begin treating the incoming call as priority #1. And you want to make a very specific incoming call script that is used EVERY TIME by your top incoming call person to try to convert the incoming call to a sale.

Now having these calls recorded is ingenious for several reasons. The first reason is the one I already mentioned that you can listen and learn if your incoming call person is sticking to the script. The second reason this is smart is you can improve and upgrade the incoming call person’s results by studying where they are losing the sale and make adjustments to your incoming call script.

And the best reason to record the incoming calls is now when you have to train a new person to be a shark on closing the sale on the incoming call; you already have calls for your new person to listen to for training purposes. This makes training a new person for this valuable position a breeze.

There are a lot more things I use in my marketing agency you can do to quickly adapt to attract your ideal target prospect and build the practice or small business of your dreams. I’ll cover the next one, “How to Upgrade Your Marketing Message” in the next blog post.

I have clients reporting 900% and even 2000% ROI ON THE FIRST SALE from their Yellow Page advertising. Does that happen in a “dead Media”?

There has been a “thinning of the herd” in Yellow Pages competition as small businesses have built websites, and tried to get them to work. Most are just online brochures that do no selling.

When I review a client’s website, I always see many problems. 99% of all website fail to do basic things like gather contact information on their visitors, set appointments, answer questions in real time, etc… When you look at their website ranking, you see that many times their sites are set up in a way that Google’s bots cannot crawl or even review their site. This fails to get it indexed with Google so that site will not show up in the search results in a favorable position, EVER. Getting your website to work can take years of studying Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Google’s AdWords and many complex sciences.

Yellow Page ads are simple to place annually, and still a very lucrative marketing strategy to build your business or practice. Dan Kennedy teaches that you should have “overwhelming evidence that you are the best choice” in all your advertising. Success in Yellow Page ad design depends on how you stand out from the other ads in a favorable way, and prove that you are the best value with overwhelming evidence right in your small business marketing.

When you can get new clients and make money, you can build your business at a rate your competition can not. And when you design an ad that stands out from the competition and gives overwhelming evidence that you are the best value, you get 300-400% more response and profits than your competition gets on the same size ad. Now you get new clients at 25-33% of what your competition has to pay which is AN INSURMOUNTABLE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE.

Mark Twain was quoted as writing this upon seeing his epitaph in the newspaper, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” The same is true with Yellow Page advertising. The truth is there is still tremendous opportunity to build businesses and make money when you do Yellow Page ad design and advertising correctly.

I had never seen anyone turn down $50,000 cash to do anything, so this impressed me. There are very few direct response marketers who are so successful that they do not work for anyone but themselves. TJ is one of the very few. He began in direct response marketing in 1988 and has made over $100 million dollars.

So that was the first time we met. Then serendipity came into play the following day, and TJ wound up sitting right next to me on the shuttle to the airport. We had a chance to chat and struck up a friendship that has grown over the years. I look to TJ as my Mentor as he has helped me build my marketing agency, even though he is actually 1.5 years younger than me.

This month, I went to Wichita, KS to celebrate TJ’s 50^th birthday and he gave me this book he published for his 50^th birthday. TJ has written many good books that can be found on Amazon.com if you just search by author. But his “50 in 50” is a quick read with the 50 greatest things TJ learned in the first 50 years of his life. Then he adds another 50 for good measure, so there are really 100 of the things that he learned that has taken him from obscurity to success. This book is full of good advice for small business marketing.

If you are a small business owner who is not happy with the level of success you have achieved so far in life, then this book has some great shortcuts and tips. And if you are a small business owner who is successful and still desires higher levels of success, then there are many good lessons in here for you too.

There are a lot of great sayings to post where you can see them daily like, “The best product does not always win, but the best marketing always does.”

There are also 2 key ways to deepen your relationship with your customers, 9 Major Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them, the 10 Main Things that Made Us Millions, and lots of sage advice throughout. As a print and Yellow Page ad design expert, I can tell you there is always something new to learn. TJ’s book is a shortcut like a “Cliff’s Notes – How to Succeed in Business” for all small business marketing.

TJ is an articulate, intelligent, world-class direct response marketer that can teach you a lot, if you just read his wisdom in his books.

Handwritten notes are a smart marketing strategy to increase ROI on ALL your print advertising. You can use them to make certain points stand out, and you can even use them to differentiate salesletters in a marketing sequence. You can do that by simply putting “2nd Notice” or “3^rd Notice” your second and third contact or mailings.

In the past, you had to go through a difficult process to achieve this handwritten look. Now I have software which has many handwritten notes and drawings in many colors and styles. And just recently, there have been accommodations made so that I can custom create these handwritten notes in many colors and typestyles. They can be made to virtually any size to fit any situation.

These are great to bring attention to key points in your copy. I think the first place they should be used is with your offer.

They can also be used effectively to drive and control eyeflow in print advertising, Yellow page ad design, salesletters, websites and even landing pages. I tried to add some examples to this post and it didn’t appear in the blog, so there’s one place you can not use them. You can see how I used them at my landing page at www.InstantYellowPageProfits.com

These colored, hand drawn notes really jump off the page and demand to be read. Using handwritten notes is something that your competition is unlikely to understand the benefit, and unlikely to have a vendor to get these so your ads will really stand out from the competition when you use this print and Yellow Page ad design marketing strategy.

Colorized handwritten notes are a profitable marketing strategy that you can even add to very successful marketing pieces to increase ROI. I have simply never seen a time when this marketing strategy does not increase ROI on print and Yellow Page ad design.

It is important to designate a key person to answer the incoming call and tell them that the incoming call is a priority. Sometimes office personnel are told to do filing or some other task and they perceive that to be more important than the incoming call, so they do everything they can to end the call quickly. This is an expensive mistake!

When you analyze what it costs you to get the phone to ring, you’ll quickly see that it should be a top priority. Ideally, you should designate your top person to be you incoming call expert. They should be advised that the incoming call is their #1 priority. The world stops when the phone rings.

Then it is advisable to create an incoming call script. Basically what you want to do is answer the callers questions, then move to asking alternative choice questions until you have booked the appointment.

I know what it is like to be busy running your business, and then the phone rings. It is difficult to shift gears and be in “salesperson” mode immediately when the phone rings. So what I did in my business is make an incoming call script for my last business that I carried in my shirt pocket. That way I could shift into salesperson mode just by pulling out my incoming call script from my pocket. When I implemented an incoming call script, my conversion to sale went from 33% (which is average) to 79%!

Only 84% of incoming callers buy, so my 79% conversion to sale turned all but 5% of incoming calls into a sale. I found that about 5% were not reading the clues in my ad that I was not the cheapest choice, but called me looking for the cheapest price. Once I identified this type of caller, I would tell them that I was not the cheapest choice and refer my competition that was the cheapest choice.

But by increasing my conversion to sale from 33-79%, I more than DOUBLED the profits from my existing advertising. If you are not converting at least 50% of your incoming calls you have one of two possible problems. Either your ad has language which attracts price shoppers, and/or you do not have a good system or script to turn the incoming call to a sale.

Once you fix this problem, ALL your advertising will be more profitable and you will have a competitive advantage over your competition who probably does not understand the value of implementing an incoming call script to increase profits from their advertising.

But I do copy intensive ads in my advertising and marketing agency, and having 1 box works just fine. Boxes tend to contain the reader’s eye as it bounces around inside the box. This makes the eye get stuck here. If you want your reader’s eye to get stuck anywhere in the ad, I would put the testimonial section at the top of the list of where I want their eyes stuck reading my testimonials over and over and over.

Use Times Roman font with quotation marks around the testimonial. Then use bold and a different font for the person’s full name and city. A lot of my clients are squeamish about using the full name and city, but when you ask people about this, most are thrilled to be quoted in print. I have had my testimonials lead the friends, relatives and neighbors to the ad to see their name in print! This only improves your ad’s response because now they are spending more time talking about your practice or business.

So don’t make the mistake of using initials. Your testimonials are far more credible when you use full names and cities. I do feel that using their phone numbers is going too far and leaving them in control of what is said later about you if you have a falling out with that person.

These tips are sure to make you testimonial marketing strategy more effective whether you use them in print, Yellow Pages, magazines, newspapers, direct mail, postcards, websites or landing pages.

If you are limited on space in your print or Yellow Page ad design, just display the testimonials that are short and to the point. These are some good examples. Notice that I feature the testimonials of industry leaders for the highest credibility possible with the prospect.

“When it comes to profitable Yellow Page advertising, I give Larry Conn my highest recommendation.”
- Dr. Tom Orent, 1000 Gems Insiders Circle

“Larry is an absolute master at Yellow Page and print advertising!”
- Ed O’Keefe, President, Dentist Profits

“Larry is a very bright marketer. He’s become an expert on how to maximize the results of Yellow Pages space.”
- Joe Polish, President of Piranha Marketing

But if you have the space to be using larger testimonials, this is where the testimonial headlining is really powerful. I’ll give some examples with longer testimonials below.

Increased Competition in My Field Doesn’t Worry Me a Bit!

“Larry, I’m glad I had a chance to meet you in Cleveland at the Glazer/Kennedy Information Marketing Summit. I read the manual and listened to the CD’s I really enjoyed the materials and the simplicity of the system you created. Thinking I don’t need your system almost cost me tens of thousands in profits, per year! Thanks for being patient with me. Now the increased competition in my field doesn’t worry me a bit. Thanks!”
- Tom Nardone, Pre-Foreclosure Marketing Expert

Received 144 Callers Wanting to Sell their Home to Him in Just the First 8 Months!

“EXCELLENT advice! You have far exceeded my expectations and this has been one of the most powerful, informative and potentially profitable relationships I have been privileged to participate in since I started my real estate business several years ago.”
Update: From my new Yellow Page ad I received144 callers wanting to sell their homes between September 1, 2006 and April 30, 2007. I am very impressed with your speedy ad review, great suggestions and ongoing support. You are one of the few marketing experts that actually continue to deliver on your promises long after the sale. Thanks for helping me increase our call volume over last year and for the great articles in the Instant Yellow Page Profits newsletter!”
- Brian Urbanski, Abbrey Homes

So headlining your testimonials is an insider marketing strategy that my marketing agency and small business marketers can use to make their marketing and advertising ROI the highest possible.