Advertising in a newspaper or having your own website? Which is the better value?

If I had a dollar for every business person who said that websites are too expensive…

Yet many of these same business people will take out full page ads in their local newspaper and even some of the major ones.

Let’s look at the cost and effectiveness of the average newspaper ad.

I was recently offered a 2” by 2.8” colour newspaper ad, to run once a week for 16 weeks, at a cost of $1000. How much information about any business can be presented in that amount of space? And it’s unlikely that a one-time ad is going to get you noticed. It takes repeat exposure for someone to decide to call or come into your shop. When those 16 issues of the paper are in the recycling box, so is your ad.

Now, how about a website?

For the first 20 years of websites they used to be really expensive too – each page had to be coded and that was beyond the skill level of most small business people – and updates had to be done by the coders as well. Large companies could afford to have staff who could do that but the smaller business couldn’t.

A WordPress website designed by Digital Insite starts at $1,200 (plus the cost of your domain name and hosting, which will run you under $100/year) – pretty close to the same cost as that 2″ x 2″ newspaper ad mentioned above. That price includes a couple of hours of training and two weeks of support so that you aren’t alone while you learn how to update your website.

That was then – this is now!

Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress make it easy for anyone to manage their own website. The biggest cost is having the site set up and a custom theme designed, and possibly receiving some training but after that, you have an advertising vehicle that keeps on going.

You can add your weekly specials, have a sign up form to capture addresses of potential customers. We can help you set up an email marketing campaign so you can send out weekly or monthly emails to these prospects who have opted-in, who want to know what’s happening in your business. How great is that!

How about getting found? Well, it takes time to get your page to the front page of Google, but we build top-notch SEO into every site we create. For a small extra fee we can set you up with a Facebook page that will have the same look as your website – and will drive clients to that site.

Print advertising used to be the only affordable game in town. Not anymore!

Oh, and by the way – that newspaper offer I mentioned above? It was posted online.