I often see signs, trucks, apparel and other marketing materials with multiple phone numbers on them. Why? Are you not organized enough to set up call forwarding? Perhaps you have a partner and you are hoping half the call volume goes to her. Maybe you just plain don’t like phone calls, and you are hoping that your confusion with what phone number to use will carry onto the customer and get them not to call you.

There is only one reason why you would want two numbers on the side of your truck, if you have two locations in different area codes and you want to offer the customer the option to call their local number. Even this is sitting on thin ice with me - get a toll free number.

The truth is, you want your customers to call. How do you get them to do that? Most importantly is to make it easy to get your number. When you give them an option you do two things:

1. You make the number smaller. This is both literal and figurative. If you have limited space on a vehicle for example, you must make the numbers smaller to fit them both on there. It also shares the importance of your phone number - therefore making it less.
2. You may confuse your customer. They may not know which number you want them to call. A confused customer will not open their checkbook.

So what do you do? Pick one number.

• Pick a number and have it forward to whoever can answer the phone at that time. You might change where it forwards depending on who’s available.
• Put the second number in the voicemail of the first. Give customers the option to call down the phone list after they have written down and tried the “main one”
• Use a service like phonepeople.com and get a toll free number with a virtual pbx.
• Hire an answering service to answer your main line and text you when you have a message.
• Use the easiest to remember number. Zeros and repeating digits make a number easier to remember.

These are just a few ideas. Get creative, but stop using two phone numbers. I promise you, it’s not helping your business get double the calls.

Hand out your business card to everyone and everything you know. You couldn’t give me a good reason why all your friends and family don’t have one in the bottom of their purses or in their car cup holder. Don’t be stingy. Order a ton of them, and give them out like they didn’t cost you a thing.

I once heard that a good Real Estate agent could be measured by how many business cards they handed out in a year. The best go through hundreds, if not thousands a month.

Don’t forget to use the back. “We Love Referrals” goes a long way.

Local online advertising is becoming more and more important. Customers are spending more time online to find local businesses than ever before, and the trends will keep rising for foreseeable future. It might be time to take some money out of the paper yellow page ads and put them into local listings online. If your not ready to budget for local online advertising, fear not! There are plenty of places to listed online for free.

Here are a few places to get started with local advertising:

• Google Local (Google Maps) - List your business for free. You can advertise on Google Maps through your Adwords account on a pay per click basis.
• Yelp - A local review site. Yelp feeds some Yahoo Local and other local search results.
• Yahoo Local - Another local review site. Huge in many areas.
• CitySearch - Ask.com and Live.com get some of their information from here.
• Zillow - Free Real Estate listings. This would be a great place to advertise for home services such as lawn care, plumbing, contractors, etc. It costs $.01 per ad view and can be targeted by zip code.
• Craigslist.org - We all know what this one is. Use it! Post a new ad every 3-4 days about your business.
• BackPage.com - Another free, local classifieds site.
• Facebook - This one might be a suprise, but you can get some pretty cheap advertising targeted on a local level.

This is by no means a complete list, but it is a good start. If you get one potential new customer a week from each of these sources, imagine how fast you could grow!

P.S. If you want more search engines to pick up on your website as a local site, you might try adding your mailing address to the bottom of each page of your website.