Due to the nature of my work, I have only seen Internet Marketing as a way to promote Affiliate Products (Affiliate Marketing) and have seen great results all the way.

But I just witnessed a very simple implementation of Internet Marketing to promote an offline business and noticed some very interesting things.

This all happened in my trip to Calgary, Canada. I just came back from Calgary this morning and throughout my trip back, I kept thinking how can I share this experience with you all. Thanks to this blog, now I can share all that’s on my mind in one shot.

During my trip, I visited my friend Garry who just started his dental clinic for his wife, who of course is a dentist. Promoting an offline business like a dental clinic sounds pretty simple but if you don’t do things right, you will end up paying marketing and advertising costs through your nose and still not make enough money to cover these expenses up.

Here is what Garry did to promote his business.

He created a few web sites with different niches like Teeth Whitening Special, Emergency Dental, his dental office site, a site for his wife on her name, a few other landing pages. To get a good quality score he used LPGen, which of course was recommended by me. He setup different accounts with Google AdWords and on each account he created one campaign for each niche and used SpeedPPC to create ad groups for better relevance and targeted audience. Each campaign was setup to show up ONLY in a radius of 20KM from his work. (Not doing so would cost you so much money as you get a wider audience but not much conversions).

Once everything was set, he run his campaigns such that only the Emergency Dental campaign showed up at night hours and weekends, while the rest were only running conservatively to show up on long tail keyword searched not regular broad. This is something that can be debated, but after doing a lot of testing, he realised that keeping broad searches does not really get too many conversions as compared to the click through rate. So he had to slow down his campaigns during these hours.

Additionally, he hired my SEO expert in India to get all his sites optimized for Search Engines to get some organic traffic but guess what? SEO’ing the site also resulted in a better quality score and once I saw these results I said to myself, “Gees, Mark and I have spoken about it so many times, why didn’t we really dig down deep into it and do anything about this”. Anyhow, he also used my new tool “Search Term Extractor”, which I intend to launch in a few months from now. This tool allowed him to pull out the most traffic generating long tail keywords and he added these to his campaigns as exact match and that’s pretty much it. He is busier than ever.

Interestingly, I had suggested him to teach his receptionists how to use a chat software to communicate with their visitors and guess what? It helped them kick up the conversions. The chat software alone did the magic. This happened when Gary was visiting NJ in March and asked me to suggest something to help get his bounce rate down. People would visit his site, and leave within the first 30 seconds. So I suggested he uses a chat software to talk to the visitors while they are online. Since most of the users come from Search Engines (Paid and / or Organic), you are able to see what the users are searching for and hit the iron while it is hot. We researched a few chat softwares overnight and settled for the most practical one out there - cheap and good enough. I am working with this company to let me launch a private label version, if things work out, I will give you access to it. Even if not, I will definitely do a case study of this great tool and let you know.

So a mixture of all the components above gave him the traffic he was looking for and was able to demonstrate a successful way of promoting an offline business, online.

Since he used different Google Accounts to promote different campaigns, he also gets all his sites listed on organic search as well as paid search for same keywords. Which is great as one user hops from one ad to another and finally ends up finding similar information on the sites, resulting in a conversion. So in other words, all his sites are working differently to promote his work and they  are. Nonetheless, the emergency campaigns are the best converting and it makes sense because the ones searching for emergency dentists in their area, are in pain and pain here, means need. So his clinic does have to be opened up in the middle of the night to cater to one patient, but by doing that not only does he win the patient once, he gets to keep him / her as their regular dentist said “Sorry, you’re in pain, but I am closed, will see you in the morning at 10AM”.

Since I have assisted Garry from the scratch, upon his approval, I will do a case study on what all he did to become successful in getting the most traffic in that area, and make it available to users who would be interested in learning more on  how to promote an Offline Business, Online.