How much money does it take for you get a client? What are your advertising costs relative to the price of your product? Naturally, the cost of acquiring a customer is reflected in the price of the product. By reducing the cost of your advertising relative to your product price you can compete more effectively, and increase not only your profitability but customer satisfaction as well.

Using the internet skillfully, you can reduce advertising costs. Part of this is done by high rankings on the search engines for searches relevant to your business. Part of this is done by persuasive and appropriate calls-to-action on your site for potential customers when they do arrive at your site. This applies for whether they arrive from a search engine or from a business card that you hand them.

Seth Godin had some interesting thoughts on this topic.

If I can sell you something without a sales call or expensive ad campaign, I can sell it cheaper.

This not only applies your business, it applies to how we do business at AustinBusinessWeb. We sell by word of mouth. We also sell by getting search engine traffic from people that are actively looking for a new and improved website. Our advertising costs are very low, so we are able to charge lower prices than if our customers were subsidizing expensive advertising channels such as Radio/Print/TV.