I have been buying yellow page advertisements for more than 10 years, and this post is an accumulation of everything I have learned in the process. Hopefully it will help you buy the right ad at the right time to grow your business.

The Annual Contract

Before you can beat the system you have to understand it. Advertising in the Yellow Pages is an annual commitment. You are agreeing to pay a fixed amount each month for a total of 12 months because phone books are distributed annually.

Be certain that you can pay the advertising bill in slow months because many times the company that publishes the phone book has an agreement with your telephone provider to bill your for advertising and phone service on one bill. If you fail to pay the cost of the advertisement, your phones may be shut off!

How the Salesman Hooks You

Yellow Pages sales people get you in the door by offering you a deeply discounted price for your ad – usually 50% off or more. This allows you to purchase a pretty good sized advertisement at a reasonable price.

Enjoy the value while it lasts because this is usually the single best value you will ever get from your salesman – its the freebie to get you addicted. It also makes it impossible to compare your advertising budget to your competitors because you have no idea what their discount is, so stop trying.

When your annual contract is approaching its end, another sales man (yellow page sales people tend to work regions, so you vary rarely have the same one from year to year) will approach you to renew your ad.

When it is time to renew, you might be shocked that the price for the exact same advertisement has gone up 20-30 percent. When you confront the salesman he will tell you that they did not raise your price, they reduced your discount.

Sensing your mounting disagreement with the situation the salesman points out that if you increase the size of your ad, you will be able to maintain your discount.

After all of the numbers are crunched, you will be looking at a 5-10% increase in price for a larger ad that might give better results or a 30% increase to maintain the same size ad. Taking the better value, you will probably spend 5-10 percent more than last year and if the salesman is a good one, you will be happy about it.

How Big Should You Go?

Aside from figuring out how much you can afford to spend every month, the next most powerful question is how large of an ad should you purchase?

The salesman will show you all sorts of statistics that the larger advertisements get more phone calls. Remember that from the salesman’s perspective the goal of your advertisement is to generate leads (phone calls). How you convert those customers into profitability is completely up to you.

If you ask what your competitors are doing this year, the salesman will fall back on his strict ethical code of confidentiality (note sarcasm) and inform you that he can’t divulge the activities of your competitors.

Although maintaining confidentiality is admirable, this man is here to get a sale. He is paid on commission. He wants the biggest sale possible. If he can keep you guessing about your competitors you might just buy a bigger ad because you are afraid that one of them might out spend you – after all, bigger ads get more calls, right?

Remember that you are not trying to take over the world with your yellow pages ad. Never buy the biggest ads (double truck, full page, covers, etc) unless the discount is 75% or greater. The only time you see these discounts is at the 11th hour when they have unsold inventory and they need to close SOMEBODY in those spots. If you see these, move quickly because your competitors see them too.

Creating an Advertising Pattern

I am convinced that the multi-year approach is essential for small businesses who are venturing into the yellow pages for the first time. This approach lets you start small, track your results (more on this later) and then grow your ad in a planned way until that growth ceases to bring you a larger financial benefit.

The first step in this approach is to start with an advertisement you know you can afford. Because you are not going to buy the biggest advertisement, you will have room to increase it next year while maintaining your discount.

Next year when the ad man comes knocking, let him hit you with his best deal, see if it is better than your existing plan, and then execute in the direction that makes the most sense to your organization.

Keep doing this until the cost of the ad would be too great for your company to bear. When that happens, drop down to an in-column listing. This is the absolute cheapest listing available (usually under $100). While you will see a decline in new customers that year, take that opportunity to refine your existing customer mailing list. Use SMS text messaging, email, and direct mail to market compelling offers to your existing customers to offset the decline in new customer leads.

In the year that follows, you have essentially reset the clock to start increasing your ads again every year at the maximum possible discount. While it is defiantly better to have consistent advertising from year to year, the multi-year approach gives you the most cost-effective result until you can afford consistency.

Buy the Online Thing or Not?

Most yellow page companies have realized that a growing population of consumers uses the Internet to find local businesses. In response, many of them have added an online version of their directory that turns up near the top of many Google search result pages.

If you are a company who sells high ticket items that customers buy every few years, then buy the online component. It gets you one more placement in the search results for your company and increases the odds you will get the call.

If your company sells smaller, less expensive consumables that get re-purchased frequently, your money is better invested elsewhere.

What to Include in Your Ad

While this can vary greatly from industry to industry, here are some basics that I feel give customers all of the information they need to do business with you:

1. Your company name
2. Your logo
3. Your phone number
4. Hours of operation
5. Payment types accepted
6. Website URL
7. Address
8. A compelling offer

The first seven items are pretty elementary and may or may not apply to your business. But number 8 is the single most important and forgotten item.

Remember that your yellow page advertisement is designed to generate leads. If you don’t have a compelling offer in your advertisement you are assuming a lot of things:

1. A customer is in need of your services
2. That customer has no relationships with other providers of similar services
3. That customer has no friends to refer him or her to a provider
4. That customer will use the yellow pages
5. That customer will randomly decide on your ad and call your number

Instead of relying on such an improbable scenario you can use a compelling offer to boost your odds of succes. For example, if you are a plumber you might offer a “first visit free” coupon within your ad. This accomplishes a number of stunning things:

• It assures that customers WILL call you instead of a competitor
• It generates word of mouth. The customer you help will someday know someone who needs a plumber. They are sure to mention your free offer
• It helps you build a customer list for future re-marketing efforts
• It steals customers and revenue from your competitors by taking their current customers

Obviously you need to formulate an offer that you can afford to give, allows you sufficient opportunity to up-sell other needed products or services, and most importantly is compelling to your target customer.

**note** Place a dotted line around your compelling offer to make it look like a coupon. Studies show that a dotted line around an offer increases response rates by 25% because we are conditioned to look for coupons our whole lives. If the yellow page doesn’t make you remove it, try to slip the phrase “present coupon at time of purchase” in small font at the bottom of the coupon. This forces customers to cut your coupon from the page and that destroys one of your competitors advertisements on the reverse of the page (6)

Tracking Your Advertising Dollars

You will never know how well the yellow pages is working for you unless you track your results. You must ask your customers how they heard about you. If your compelling offers are clippable coupons, this makes life very easy.

If not, make sure you charge for your compelling offer on every invoice and then coupon it off. That way you can search in your invoicing program to see how many compelling offer discounts you have provided and that will tell you how many new customers you have generated.

There are other ways to track the results of yellow pages advertisements, and the most popular of these methods should be avoided at all costs.

DO NOT use a metered phone number if the yellow page company offers it. A metered phone number is a special number that forwards callers to your real phone number. The phone company then sends you a monthly report on the number of calls you received through the metered line.

This is a bad idea because at the end of the year you almost always lose your metered number. That means that people who use the old phone book, or those who wrote down your metered phone number somewhere will get a disconnected message when they try to call you next year.

Additionally, if you did get a metered number you will notice that the summary page on your report shows you received a huge number of calls. But if you mine down into the data, you will find that many of those calls are from repeat callers. Additionally, there is no way for you to measure IF those callers actually converted into customers, and if so, how much they were worth.

Is Yellow Page Advertising Worth It?

There is no answer to this question that works for every business. To help you decide if it is right for you, add up all of the money you will spend over the year on the yellow pages. IF you committed that money to some other advertising vehicle would it generate better results?

The Yellow Pages are great for some businesses and worthless to others. If possible, get your hands on a the phone books from previous years and look at the progression of the advertisements in your industry.

Do advertisers who go big one year, go missing the next? Are your competitors advertising consistently year after year (a sign of stability) or are they playing the system as suggested in this article?

I own a computer repair business and I can tell you that our yellow pages advertisement offered a free hour of computer repair labor to new customers and it brought in about 1,250 new customers ( in a market of 250,000 people) in 2008 at a cost of about $8.00 per converting customer.

You can’t beat that cost in ANY medium.

Typically these take the form of phone calls about trends or marketing ideas, but York Computer Repair is a whole different story.

Yesterday I received an unexpected thank you letter (yes the postal mail kind) from York Computer Repair’s Owner, Walter Oakhem. Here is what he wrote:

Thank you for all of the help you have given me with starting York Computer Repair.

I especially appreciate the information and advice you have provided, and the contacts you have shared with me. Your assistance has been invaluable to me during this process. I just wanted to say an extra thank you for your mentoring and kindness.

Again, thank you so much. I greatly appreciate your generosity.

What Did I Do to Deserve Such Kind Words?

I have never really talked about Walt, his company, or what I have done to help him get things rolling in York, PA. Even my employees don’t know the details of what we discussed. In one of our calls Walt suggested I document our conversations because he felt other computer repair company owners might benefit from them.

I am going to preface this by stating that no consultant, no home study course, and no business model can bring you success unless you are willing to implement it.

From day one, Walt has had a flame of passion that I have seen in few others over the past few years. While this post will name off some of the suggestions I gave to Walt, by no means am I trying to take any portion of the credit for his work. Anyone can talk, but only an entrepreneur can transform talk into results like Walt has in Pennsylvania.

The Meat & Potatoes of Three Phone Calls

Over the course of our three phone calls we covered topics raging from starting up to scaling to a retail location and everything in between. Walt and I discussed:

• The absolute NEED for a sales model (and how easy it is to make one)
• How to target a small niche in your marketplace and expand outward from there
• Yellow Pages advertising techniques that are proven to bring in hundreds of new customers each month
• How to build an inventory of repair components for next to nothing
• How to hire employees as inexpensively as possible in the first few months
• How to value your time and get your customers to pay a reasonable price for it
• Every reason you should NEVER try to be a low-cost leader
• The need for a work flow management system and where you can get one specifically designed for computer repair shops
• How you can create brands for your physical products and service products and why it is a VITAL step than is often skipped causing others to fail
• Who the key low-cost hardware providers are and how to do business with them (if you think NewEgg is your best value, think again)
• The need to continually remind your customers how wise they are to choose to do business with you

Walt paid me my normal $200 an hour rate over the course of three calls. With the information he had, he was able to accelerate the growth of his new operation, and had the best month of his company’s history in June.

How Can Just Talking Help a PC Repair Business?

Walt first heard about me and Schrock Innovations from a podcast I did with PodNutz about starting a computer repair shop. In that podcast I stressed that most PC repair technicians try to penetrate a market as a low cost leader. That approach dooms them to failure. I spoke about the need to charge a fair price for your service, not just the hardware you are selling.

Walt heard that podcast and called me for followup. Because of our three phone conversations his PC repair shop is rapidly growing. His Q4 marketing plan looks like a home run, and even if it under performs his larger population base in PA will make it a bigger success than the 162 new customers Schrock gets every month by following that same model.

I have made a lot of mistakes, learned form them, and modified my techniques to gain the best return on my efforts. It is entirely true that another person can learn the same lessons I did the same way I learned them.

However, it is also true that if a person like me existed 10 years ago when I started Schrock Innovations we would have cut 5 years off our growth curve, had an easier time doing it, and would have earned tens of thousands of dollars more.

Does Your PC Repair Shop Need Some Fresh Insights?

In the coming weeks I will be blogging about the bullet points I covered with Walt. Subscribe to my RSS feed to make sure you don’t miss any of the topics. If you need more immediate or involved assistance give me a call at 402-212-5393 and let me know what challenge you are facing. I might be able to give you the piece of advice you have been missing!

Over the past few months fake-alert malware infections have become more sophisticated at preventing the installation of common security products like MalwareBytes, AdAware, and Spybot S&D.

Fake Alert infections are those pesky pop-ups that tell your customer that their computer is infected with a ton of nastiness, when in fact the only infection is the fake-alert its self.  Typically these programs ask consumers to pay between $25 and $100 to activate the software (stopping the popups).  Unfortunately this also leaves the computer infected and under the control of the malware writer.

The Early Days of Fake Alert Infections

In early 2009 removing these infections because a profit center for many computer repair shops.  Simply rebooting in Safe Mode, installing a free scanning program, and removing the infection was all that was needed to earn an hour of labor and seed a security software sale.

As the year progressed however, these infections became more advanced.  Most of today’s fake alert infections run in both regular and safe mode, and will actively thwart any installation of common security or scanning software.

Fake Alert Infections are Smart, but not too Smart

Although the fake alert infections are getting smarter, they are still only programmed with a fixed set of “detections” designed to kill the process of installing security software. Much like the early days of anti-virus software, fake alert infections do not scan for types of activity – they scan for specific files, processes, and events.

In my service center we use MalwareBytes to remove many infections.  In our opinion it is much more thorough than Spybot and it doesn’t have all of the annoying extras like the resident shield that complicate advanced malware removal.

There are some specific steps you can take to make certain that you have the tools in your shop, car, or briefcase to thwart any fake alert infection, as long as you come prepared.

How To Defeat Fake Alert Defenses

1. First, you are going to need a blank CD.  Your flash drive won’t work for this procedure because newer fake alert infections prevent the installation of new storage devices.  When you plug in your drive, the infection will block its installation.
2. Next, download a copy of MalwareBytes and save it on your desktop.  Rename the installer to some name other than its default.  Many of the newer infections will scan for the na,e of the installer and kill it when it is found.
3. After you have renamed the MalwareBytes installer, you need to download the latest MalwareBytes detections.  It is common practice for infections to block access to update servers, so having the latest detections on hand is essential to a complete removal.
4. Now burn the files to your CD and reboot the infected computer into Safe Mode (this is more a safety step than anything else – Safe Mode is the safest possible environment for removing infections) and disconnect its internet connection.
5. Install MalwareBytes on the infected computer from your CD.  After the installation completes you will most likely receive an error message.  That is the infection killing the MalwareBytes updater.
6. Double click on the detections file you downloaded to install it.  Disregard any error messages.
7. Re-launch MalwareBytes and check that the detections date is the current date under the Update tab.
8. Run a Quick Scan – not a thorough scan.  Some infections will detect a scan in progress after some time and kill it.  GO for the quick scan and after it finds a few infections, stop the scan clean the results, reboot and repeat.  Once your Quick Scan comes back clean, do a thorough one afterward to ensure a complete removal

Preventing Reinfection – IMPORTANT

We are in a service business, so it is important to realize that even though we have removed the infections that our customer will not be very happy with us if they get reinfected again tomorrow.  In fact, they will probably accuse you of not doing your job the first time!

Most fake alert infections come from the following:

• Pornographic Websites
• Infected Torrents
• Free *anything* websites
• Websites about music lyrics
• Search Engines displaying infected websites within results for currently hot topics

The bottom line is that if your customer got infected once, it is because of their Internet habits.  That means they will get infected again.

I strongly recommend to all of my customers that they install Norton 360 after recovering from a fake alert infection.

There is honest debate among technicians about which anti-virus software is better.  There is a valid argument that can be made that AVG is better because it is free.  In my service center we warranty our customers against reinfection when we remove malware *if* they install Norton 360.

We use it because things don’t bounce back under warranty with infections.  I can honestly say that using AVG people – especially high risk users – get reinfected constantly.

This is a SERVICE industry, so I would rather recommend a product that I know is going to work rather than get a high five for saving my customer some money up front so they can pay me again in the future.

What are your opinions on preventing reinfection?

Family Member : “No, the pointer moves a little bit when I move the mouse, but I can’t get the pointer to go any further to the right of the screen”.

Now I’m thinking they must have one of those old ball mice and it’s probably clogged with dirt. But their next statement really threw me off.

Family Member : “My mouse is the whole way to the right of my desk and I don’t have any more room to move the mouse”.

At this point I’m confused and trying to picturing what on Earth they could be talking about. I thought to myself, “surely they know they can pick up the mouse and move it back to the middle of the mouse pad?” No, they couldn’t be that dumb. I proceeded to ask “can you pick up your mouse and place it in the middle of your mouse pad?”

Family Member : ” Yes I can……the pointer moved a little bit……. Ahhh yes, now I can move the mouse around again.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or tell them not to touch the computer again.

Walt from York Computer Repair in York, PA emailed in this story.

We all love our customers, but sometimes their problems with computers can make even the most serious technician crack a grin.

Email us your story and we will feature it here!