Did you know that a good web site can instantly add value to your off-line advertising. How? by allowing your potential customers to get more information quickly.

Consider this. You can only fit a limited amount of text on a regular newspaper, magazine or yellow pages ad. But direct readers to your web site and instantly they have detailed information about your promotions, products and services.

And did you know to have your existing web site updated to 'match' and provide more detail for your print-ad will often cost less than your print-ad.

I was recently talking to a client who purchased an 8 x 11cm ad in a 'special publication' from a regional newspaper. The cost: $209 (for that one day). My estimated cost to update a web page to complement that ad: $75. The next question you might ask is how do I know that people would visit the web page? I don't. But then again how do you know people will pick up the phone and call the phone number printed in the ad or visit your store after reading your ad. You don't. It's all done in hope.

My own advertising experience in the printed press demonstrates up to a 25 to 1 ratio between web page visits and phone calls. That's correct, for every 1 phone call a print-ad generates me, I get around 25 visitors to my 'matching' web page. For those wondering, I'm not talking about all visitors to my web site, I'm talking about visitors to the exact web page address mentioned in the ad. A web page address that is used solely for visitor tracking, and is not mentioned anywhere else, even on my web site.

If you have ever read one of my ads or mail-outs, you will notice that when I often list my web site as a source for more information, the web site address is usually something like "www.smart-itc.com.au/specials". The "/specials" is the key. Every time an someone views my web site using this web page address, I know they visited because they read my ad! There is no rocket science behind this sort of visitor counting, and anyone managing a web site will be able to do it. For comparative purposes, If I just included www.smart-itc.com.au in my ads, any visitors generated because of those ads would be mixed with visitors coming from search engines, visitors who saw my web site address on my car, business cards, etc.

So the nuts-and-bolts of it all is that a well maintained web site can nicely complement and value boost all your printed-media advertising. If you already have a web site and you're not doing something similar, you're missing valuable opportunities. If you don't have a web site - and you're not considering getting one, or you get told "this can't be done", you should at least consider using a short-term rentable web page (available through all good web development businesses) to get started.