5 Patterns To Circularize Your Local Business.

Advertising has changed dramatically and evolving consumer habits can no longer be ignored. Handling online advertising is a vital component of doing business today and essential to success, but taking on your own online advertising campaign is no easy task. Costs can add up quickly and taking the time to learn to negotiate today's complex electronic world can take a business owner's focus away from sales. So what are your alternatives when it is just not cost-effective do it by yourself?

Some local businesses turn to a professional advertising agency, but at what cost? The solution is My Zip, Inc. which offers a local advertising program that is not only comprehensive and effective, but extremely affordable. With My Zip your advertising costs go down while sales go up. My Zip ties you to your entire community long-term with its Buy Local ZipTag Program, Mobile Marketing and Be Found service. There are many more benefits included and you cannot afford NOT to be one of My Zip's Exclusive Partners. Exclusivity means that My Zip promotes only two businesses per business category per zip code. In other words, only two realtors, two plumbers, two dentists, two book stores and so on per zip code.

Highlighted in this article is one of My Zip's featured bundled advertising services that submits businesses to over 140 local directories and then maintains the process. This service is available with or without a website, as My Zip develops a landing page for each business and also includes the local business in its ZipTag Directory. To make matters even easier, My Zip provides a local Community Specialist to take care of it all for you!

It's time to move up to a full online profile that you can control. The My Zip Be Found Listing service gives you the ability to list your business profile one time, and My Zip will then submit your business listing information to multiple local search engines such as Yahoo! Local, YellowPages, Super Pages, Google Local, in fact all the major online directories, search portals, data aggregators, and to the national 411 database. My Zip is all you need to get your business listed.

You may ask why a local business needs to be submitted to so many local directories. The answer is clear. Statistics bear out the fact that 54% of search users have substituted the Internet for phone books (ComScore Networks). 70% of U.S. households now use the Internet when shopping locally (The Kelsey Group/ConStat). 43% of search engine users seek a local merchant to buy something offline (Kelsey Group). 74% of Internet users perform local searches (Kelsey Group). 60% of activity online is one way or another "related to local content" (Google). For every dollar U.S. consumers spend online, another 5 or 6 are going to offline purchases that are influenced by online research (MIT Technology Review, April 2005, E-Commerce Gets Smarter). 97% of U.S. Internet users gather shopping information online, and of those consumers 51% explicitly characterize their behavior as "Shop Online, Purchase Offline" (NPD Group).

It makes perfect sense. Not everyone wants to take the time to drive all over town to shop. It is a fast moving world and it seems that we all want things to be quick and easy. Using the Internet is a quick and easy way for people to access information about products and services from the comfort, convenience and privacy of their own home. No fuel costs, no traffic jams and no time wasted! Therefore, you need to make it easy for the customer to find you instead of your competitor.

Marketing on the Internet is not really a choice anymore, but has become a necessity in today's marketplace. If the search engines can't find you, you basically don't exist! Even if your business doesn't sell online, you MUST be available online so customers can find you. Here are two words that make having a web presence even more of an imperative: local search. Local search is increasingly replacing the phone book or dialing 411. Even when customers don't expect a business to have ecommerce capability, like a restaurant or dry cleaners, they do expect to be able to find you online, with product offerings, directions and a clickable phone number.

The good news is that you don't need a fancy and expensive website. If a website is not a priority for your business, with My Zip, you don't need to go through the time and expense of building and maintaining a website. With the Be Found service, a strong internet presence will be provided and you will have a webpage that delivers all the vital information the consumer needs to understand your business, and most importantly, to find you.

Diversity of presence makes all the difference. Internet marketing is growing every day. There will come a time when you will lose business, simply because you lack an Internet presence. For many businesses, that day has arrived. Those businesses without an online presence are missing out on a goldmine of potential customers.

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