Driving traffic to local business

I find that true for the majority of search terms in a small town (3,200 residents in my town) and the same is true that nearly everyone already knows every business around here. Not 100% but very close.

The value of the Internet for small towns like ours is that we can reach out to the surrounding areas. Like an art dealer... I know a guy who travels across the country to look at a certain type of glass. Anything made with this glass he wants to check out. He buys & sells it. So, art dealer I would think would have the potential to bring in people from a great distance if they have something unique to offer.

Are you wanting to only use Internet Marketing for this?

The reason I ask is because when I work with a local business I use a variety of methods. Actually, I find it more enjoyable than digging through all of the junk on the Internet.

Anyway, if you are talking about purely online here are some things you can try:

• Classified sites (Craigslist, USFreeAds)
• Local sites (Merchant Circle, Yelp, HotFrog, Manta, Allpages, AreaConnect, MagicYellow, Ask.com/local)
• Forums
• Blogs
• Regional & National Associations
• Make a video or three and put it on the Video sharing sites

Basically just find where the target audience is going online and get in there and network.


If you are open to the idea of offline marketing...

• Look for area events (outside of your town) and see if you can get the art dealer's name out there (perhaps as a sponsor or a prize donor)
• Check into advertising in nearby local newspapers
• Find closely-related but not directly competing businesses and set up a sort of trade where the art dealer carries their flyers and the other business provides the art dealer's flyers. This can be provided as a stack of free promotional flyers sitting on a counter with a big FREE TAKE ONE sign and each shop can drop one of the flyers into their customers bag / package. If you make it act as a coupon saying 5% off that is even better. Because now you have built-in tracking of where this person came from.
• Basically just keep your eyes & ears open and look for opportunities to get the word out in the areas near your town. I occasionally drive over to nearby towns and do some scouting for such opportunities.
• If you have family, friends in the nearby towns see if they will put a link on their Facebook account for your videos of the art dealer's shop.

There are many low cost and no cost things you can do. But it is frame of mind more than anything else. This is why I find this kind of thing so much more logical than SEO and backlink building. ha ha

Good luck!

If the population is really that small, and I assume, an even smaller percentage of that population can afford "art", perhaps a direct mail plan would be the best. PM me to discuss a perfect approach to acheive this.

Surely you misspoke here? If not, https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal will quickly show you the error of your thoughts.

Is there some rule that says he can only sell to people within a certain radius of his physical location?