Does online advertising work for tradesman?

Im thinking of going with Yell.com but if there are better sites any feedback would be great. Thanks

Many tradesmen don't believe in advertising online because they themselves do not spend a ton of time online however their target audience does.

If you have a website then you are probably far ahead of many people in your field as it is. If you are looking to advertise your website and get your potential customers to call you then you have a few options.

If you don't have one, get one. This will allow you to advertise your business 24/7 and give you an additional point of contact when passing out your printed materials or driving down the road with magnets or vinyl on your truck.

To get people to go to your website effectively, you have two options, spend time or spend money.

For gaining traffic to your website without cost, you will be looking at some time being spent.

Back links are very important and can arguably be the best way to increase your website exposure. Effective back links are one way links (meaning not a link exchange) from other websites to yours. For example, had you put a link to your website in your question, you would have created a back link as yahoo instantly indexes the Q&A section of their website. Even Google picks it up. You can build back links in placing your url in ads such as craigslist, creating or comenting on blogs on wordpress and myspace as well as other blogging websites. These are all methods that give you white hat back links.

Caution: do not pay for your back links through back linking companies. This is considered black hat SEO and will actually drop your ranking or get you suspended all together from the big boys of search engines.

As far as paid methods, look at pay per click as a great option. PPC is the process of advertising your business on a search engine within the sponsored results. You choose what keyword phrases you are willing to pay for being in, I.e. Website design.For cost effectiveness, consider narrowing your results as much as possible. For example, Sacramento website design instead of website design would be a more focused result and would by proxy cost much less than the broad term.

SIA Professional Services has an articles section in their website which has a ton of website marketing tips that should help you at www.siaservices./articles

Be sure you are submitting your website on a regular basis, especially whenever you are doing some good updates on your site. The search engines will see your site being updated on a regular basis and index you accordingly. There are some free submission sites, but I have seen in my experience that those don't nearly perform as well on a regular basis as professional SEO and marketing companies.

There is plenty more that you can do, but hopefully this give you a good starting point.

Good Luck and hope this helps

Yell.com does work well for trades, but as an alternative with a better 'return on your investment' try http://www.thomsonlocal.com.

Yell.com generates 28 million 'Classified' searches every month in the UK which is pretty good, but ThomsonLocal.com and their network of partner sites generate 46 million 'Classified' searches, plus if you opt for their 'Total' internet package which includes putting your business/advert infront of 'Key Word' search sites they are generating 275 million results every month... nearly 10 times as many as Yell.com, but for around the same cost.

Yell.com is one single classified search site, but Thomsonlocal.com has a network of over 30 partner sites across the internet who share the Thomson Database (your business details), so your info comes up pretty much anywhere they search. (Tiscali, MSN. Skype, Multimaps, Google Maps etc)

Let me know what area/town you are in and I will do a search to show you how many people did a search on Thomsonlocal.com for Painters and Decorators in that town last month.

Also another tip... register your business on http://www.bttradespace.com
A FREE social networking type of site devoted to promoting your business.

If someone searches for a trade or business online, most customers (over 80%) eventually buy from someone who has a website that they can visit.

The reason is one of credability and expanded advert. If you have a website, get links to it off Yell.com and Thomson Local.com so customers can see the type of work you do and see testimonials from happy customers of yours.

yes, i think Yell is a good idea and you could put an ad on gumtree.com too

Yes, online advertising works.

First do some research and try finding out which Web sites are being visited by your Target Market. Having your presence on such Web sites will only help.

I am a medium sized subbie
I get a lot of enquiries from my own web-site.It all depends how the web-site is set up so that the "searcher" can find what you are offering.

I do not get a great deal from yell or any of the other directories,most of the people that have found me this way,seem to waste my time

Have you tried checkatrade? Found a tiler to do my bathroom on it, and he gets loads of work from it.

Set up a Facebook group for tradespeople that the public can access.

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