SOME people say you can't teach the old economy new tricks. But an old timer in Singapore is proving the age-old saying wrong.

Steel trader Sin Aik Hardware is easily one of the first few small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) here that took advantage of the vast reaches of the Internet in the mid-1990s.

Its 60-year-old boss Sim Ah Ban is convinced that younger business people would rather go online to search for deals rather than look up a directory book.

The family-owned trader of galvanised iron and stainless steel products has been in business for 33 years. From a smallish local setup at a Bishan warehouse in 1975, the firm has grown to become a $35 million business with 12,141 square metres of warehouse space storing 50,000 tonnes of steel at any single time.

Today, more than 40 per cent of its business comes from overseas, with key buyers from South-east Asia and India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. This is thanks to far-reaching modern web advertising techniques.

Sin Aik had traditionally relied on directory service Yellow Pages to get the word out on what it does. It served them well at first when the business was mainly domestic. But as the firm expanded, Ah Ban realised the limits of the medium.

"Yellow was very expensive. The hard copies were heavy and could not reach my overseas customers unless they came to Singapore," said Ah Ban in Mandarin.

More than 20 per cent of his business came from nearby countries like Indonesia and Malaysia in the 1990s. At that time, he was making in excess of $25 million in sales a year.

After the Internet was introduced in the mid-1990s, Ah Ban started listing his business on the e-Guide online directory to better market to overseas buyers.

He also moved with the times when new kids on the block like Yahoo and Google rose in prominence.

While e-Guide is a local brand, Yahoo and Google are recognised globally and could help Sin Aik spread its wings, he said.

In 2003, the steel trader bought search advertising from Yahoo via a local reseller Activa Media.

Search advertising allows paid ads to appear alongside users' search results. So when Yahoo users type keywords like steel and hardware, they would see Sin Aik's ad with a link to its website.

Ah Ban paid $5,000 for 10 keywords for that year's campaign.

The next year, however, he switched to Google's platform, called AdWords, as it was more "cost-effective".

AdWords uses a pay-per-click model, in which advertisers pay only when users click on their ads. If no one clicks, advertisers pay nothing.

In contrast, Yahoo's cost-per-metric model charges a flat fee based on impressions or the number of times an ad is viewed. This method will incur a fixed cost regardless of ad effectiveness or click-through. He declined to reveal how much he spends on AdWords, but his entire marketing budget goes there now.

Today, Sin Aik receives more than 10 phone, e-mail and fax queries a day from potential buyers, most of whom are overseas. This compares with about seven a day when he was using Yahoo ? despite Yahoo's lead in Asia as the most popular search engine, according to Internet research firm comScore.

"Paid search advertising is not cheap but it works," said Ah Ban.