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Philippines Business Advertising

Page 1. Philippines Business Advertising

Why Advertise With Us….?

Ok we all know that you can have the best business in the world, stocked with products people would kill for, but unless your potential customers know where you are or even that your business exists then I’m afraid it would not matter if you were handing out bags of gold.

In this age of technology, more & more people are turning to computer search engines & websites for the information they require, whether it be a new car, a new bike, a wedding dress, jewellery, the best hotel in a particular town or city etc.

Just with Google alone there are approx 7,488,000 searches per month for the term ”Philippines” and by anyone’s standards that is a huge amount of potential customers. Now if you could get your business noticed by only 0.5% of those monthly searches, that would be 37,440 people discovering your business and if only 0.5% of the 37,440 were actually interested in your business, then you would be looking at a potential client base of 187 new customers per month. This I am sure you will agree is a huge potential earning for your business.

But you have your own website..!

Yes we understand that many of you, especially those with medium to large businesses, may already have your own websites or may be in the process of getting a website built. But simply having a website does not mean the flood gates open & you get swamped by stampeding customers, there are many aspects of running a website that a large percentage of business owners will be unaware of;

1.Search Engine Optimization

This is one of the key elements to a good website & many large businesses have an annual budget of approx $20,000 in order to ensure their SEO is up to the mark and they maintain a high ranking in the search engines. If your website is not getting listed on the first page of results with Google, Yahoo or MSN then you are lucky indeed if any potential customers ever find your website.

2.Hosting Costs

Every website has to be hosted on a server somewhere, the costs of this can range between a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars, depending on the size of the website & the hosting package chosen.

3.Maintenance of the website

Yes websites need maintenance & regular checks to ensure there are no corrupted files, all links are functioning correctly, images are being displayed correctly, there are no hardware problems etc.

4.Protection against Malware

Every website has a potential threat from malware, spyware, viruses & hackers. This has to be guarded against otherwise your website could be destroyed overnight.

5.Backing up your entire website

Taking full backups of your entire website help minimize any potential damage that could be caused by any of the above problems. This however can be very time consuming & is often a job for professional IT persons.

6.The cost of having a website built

This is usually a one off cost although there are companies that will place annual charges in exchange for a reduced initial cost. The initial cost can range between a few hundred dollars for a small website, to a few thousand dollars for a more sophisticated setup.

When everything has been taking into account, it is not quite as simple and straight forward as just forking out a few dollars & then the customers come running !

Your Website Not Pulling In Customers

Yes unfortunately this is a very common problem encountered by many small to medium businesses & by following our example below, you see exactly why this keeps happening.

Lets look at an example

Ok Joe is living in America and has never been to the Philippines, he knows nothing at all about the country, the islands or the cities. However he has recently met a young woman online who lives on the outskirts of Iloilo City in the Philippines & he has decided he is going to have a 2 week holiday & fly out to meet her.

The problems he faces

Ok Joe’s first problem is he has never heard of the Philippines never mind a place called Iloilo !

1. He needs to see exactly where Iloilo is in relation to any international airports.

2. He needs contact email addresses or telephone numbers for airports, ferries etc so he can plan his trip & book any necessary tickets.

3. He needs maps so he can judge the best route he should take and where he is going to have to take any stop over etc.

4. Having spent many hours sifting through numerous pages on the internet, he finally has some sort of route planned and now needs to book a hotel, first of all in Manila as that is where he flies into & then in Iloilo for his 2 week holiday.

5. Now in Manila there happens to be a very nice hotel called, (as an example) “The Palace Hotel” & funnily enough, they have just spent a lot of money having a nice new website built !

So does our friend Joe find the nice new website of ” The Palace Hotel “, unfortunately he does not, because he does not know the hotel’s name so his search on the internet is limited to “Philippines Hotels” of which there are literally thousands! Add to this the fact that “The Palace Hotel” would come way down the list because all lists are stored alphabetically and it starts with the letter ” T “. Therefore it is extremely unlikely that our friend Joe is ever going to find this hotels website.

So even though this hotel has a nice new expensive website, it has done them no good at all because our potential customer could not find it! This is just the same as having 5,000 nice new business cards printed and then locking them away in a cupboard! * YOUR CUSTOMERS WILL NEVER FIND THEM *

This situation does not just apply to hotels; it applies to every single business that hopes to attract customers from outside their own immediate area. This problem is further compounded by the fact that very often those that build websites know very little about marketing & those that know about marketing usually know very little about computers or web design.