Introduction to Offline Marketing Writer: Rich B

If you're not promoting your business offline, you're missing out on a lot of potential money

If you're not promoting your business offline, you're missing out on a lot of potential money. Yes, marketing a website offline can be difficult and expensive, but you're not going to be buying TV ads, or full page spreads in the New York Times or anything stupid like that.

The key decision to make when marketing offline is whether to promote your URL, or promote a site directly (using a bonus code). Promoting your website has the potential for better long term results, but you can do very nicely out of just promoting one site with a bonus code. Obviously, you're not going to promote directly to a site that doesn't use bonus codes. The more convincing your offline promotion (an extreme example would be if you ran a seminar about how to beat the NFL pointspreads or something like that), the better it is to promote your site.

Offline promotion has an extra hurdle to online promotion, since people have to take your details (whether it's a URL or a bonus code) to their computer and be motivated enough to type it in. However, there is a lot less competition and people have a less anti-marketing mindset in real life than they do on the Internet. You can make your adverts appealing because they are interesting or appeal directly to the person's sense of greed. The best adverts appeal to both.

Here are some ideas for offline promotion:

Get fairly obviously fake $100 bills printed (one side only - cheaper and less dubious) with your bonus code for a site that offers a $100 bonus.

Fridge magnets - real estate agents know that nobody ever throws out fridge magnets.

Poker chips with your URL on them (and perhaps a message like "want more? Visit...")

Chalk on the sidewalk (usually tolerated at universities - which are a good place to promote anyway) with messages like "my grandmother is better at poker than you - yoursite.com" or whatever else you can come up with that is attention grabbing.

Putting business cards, or even CDs with your affiliate code in them (many sites will provide these for you) into related books at a bookstore (it helps if you know the manager, but it is usually OK if you don't damage the book at all.

As you can see, there's almost no limit to how you can promote offline, and this article has really only scratched the surface. There will be lots more to come as we try out various plans. For now, maybe you want to read about SEO or online marketing?