Local Trader - Profile

Yes, I have.

It works by linking the data from people's Facebook profiles into the ad database, so only specific people (AKA your targeted audience) see the ad.

For example: let's say you were advertising a bridal shop in Manchester. You could set your target audience as: Women, in Manchester and (say) within a 10 mile radius, aged between 18

First Concorde, then the QE2, now the VC10. I hear Land Rover is going to discontinue the Defender. They call it progress, but to what?

If you want to design sites in Wordpress, check out Artisteer. It's a software program to design Wordpress themes (templates). Netbeans is another open-source Wordpress design tool. I've heard good things about it, and have downloaded the software but haven't tried it yet.

You could try a targeted direct mail campaign, but you'll need to be innovative and think outside the box – otherwise your letter will go straight in the bin.

The best example of an "outside the box" direct mail campaign I can think of was one I received from a real estate agent many years ago when I lived in the US.

As I recall, it was a plain white envelope addressed to me with just the return address (but no company name) on it. Inside was a narrow piece of card with a plastic disk roughly the size of a poker chip attached. The disk bore a single word: “TUIT”.

Puzzled, I did exactly what I was meant to do and removed the disk to see if there was anything written on the other side. There was. It said: Now you've got “a round tuit” give us a call... and had the realtor's phone number. Clever!

There probably is some mileage in them. There's a woman who runs a stationers and printers not far from me who publishes a monthly printed ad. booklet. It's two colours, 4 or 5 pages of A4 folded in half and stapled. I reckon she probably runs off two thousand copies at a time, and she distributes them via petrol stations, chip shops etc. who give them away free. The advertising probably pays for the paper and ink (with a bit left over), and there's a plug for her business on every page. She's been doing this for two years now, so it must be working.

Personally I would go ahead. After all, if the other site is a) in Russia and b) the owners are not doing anything with it, it's not going to be much competition for your site. If the owners are not doing anything with the domain, there's a good chance it will expire and you can get it that way. I believe GoDaddy has an area on their site where you can register an interest in a particular domain and they will alert you when it expires. I'm sure other registrars have similar services.

If you're looking for paid, online advertising, Facebook ads are probably a better bet than Google Adwords as you can really drill down and target only those people who fit your target market profile. Classified ads in journals or publications read by your target audience are also a good bet, especially if you can put a website URL (or better still a QR code) in the ad so people can use their smart phones to visit your site as they read.

For free advertising, as Ideas Reaction says: teach yourself SEO and get free traffic from search engines. Download a copy of Market Samurai (the trial version should be enough to get you started) and look for some long-tail keywords that have plenty of searches, but low competition. Target those first.

Having a Facebook fan page for your business is also a good source of free advertising.