The efforts I put towards marketing helped me maximize my sales potential. My main method of marketing was called the “hustle”. Hustle is my version of simple hard work. I printed several thousand flyers. I went to every hotel concierge and notified them of my service. I went on a bi-weekly basis for about 1 year. By the end of the one year, you were able to go to any hotel concierge in Las Vegas, ask them where there was an internet café, and they mentioned my store. This was the most valuable marketing method.

Another method was using rack cards. Rack cars are those large racks you find in hotel lobbies. There have about 50-60 flyers in the rack. They are generally tourist related ads. This worked well. I placed a one dollar coupon just to track the effectiveness. In reality, the one dollar off coupon was not that beneficial to my company. The reason is, most people who see the add will come to the store to use the internet. However, they wont come to the store simply because of one dollar off. So, in reality, I potentially lost one dollar every time a person came in with the coupon. (just some food for thought).  A great place to get cheap logo and graphic design is http://www.99dollars24hours.com/ .  Their a great company because they will do your work within 24 hours.  Whatever you need, brochures, logos, flyers, screen interface, business cards, brochures and more.

Barter exchange with local magazines also worked for me. I noticed that they had a great magazine. The ads started at $250/month. I also noticed that they had a sister website business. I saw a potential trade. I contacted the company and offered to make all my internet café default pages go to their website. In exchange, all I wanted was a simple ad in their magazine. This deal lasted for over two years. They ran large ads for me, worth around $1000/month. This one idea gave me over $30,000 in free advertising. Not bad J

Signage is another important ingredient to a successful Internet Café Business. At times, adding or taking away a sign could shift sales 80% or more! Depending on where your placing your sign, there are factors to consider. The general rule is to study your surrounding and build to suit. You don’t want to put a big neon sign in a Hyatt. You also don’t want to put a fancy Hyatt sign on the streets. Wherever your signs are, you need to make sure the key words, INTERNET, EMAIL and PRINTING are mentioned. Some people don’t realize that internet and email are the same thing. Placing the word PRINTING may spur business. The current trend is for people to print their boarding pass before going to the airport. At some locations, especially with older folks, you may have 40% of your business from boarding passes.

I built a website for my internet café, however, I did not update it and keep it up. This was my biggest marketing mistake. The power of the internet is simply awesome. A few years ago, I built a re-vamped website, and I landed some big clients from it. BUILD A PROPER WEBSITE, IT WILL PAY OFF MANY TIMES. ALSO KEEP IT UPDATED AND ANSWER YOUR EMAILS.