Offline Marketing – Self Promoting

By Ian, April 15, 2007

If you’re looking for innovative methods of marketing your on-line business, start thinking like an off-line marketer. The tried and true marketing practices employed by traditional businesses represent significant value to your on-line venture, you should think about offline marketing.

There are so many ways to create traffic or in other words advertise. Well I have been reading several articles about offline marketing, and it seems the popular one is to have your logo or banner where ever you go. Such as

Bumper Stickers
Hats
Newspaper Ads
Business Cards
Outside Signs and Banners
T Shirts
etc

If you put your website, phone number, or address on a t-shirt, you could end up getting a lot of people to look at it. You can create the shirt yourself, or get it professionally done for just a few dollars, which I did.Â The great thing is depending on where you go, for just the price of the shirt you can get a lot of people to look at it. Think about it, if you were walking around a crowded mall, a lot of people might get a look at your shirt. If it said something striking or interesting, they might be convinced to go to your website, or call your number to order your service.

Another cheap way to get traffic to your website or business is to put an ad in the local paper. It usually doesn?t cost too much to put an ad locally, and you will usually still have a good amount of people who will see the ad. This can be a great way to get people to see your website or find out about your business.

If your town has a welcoming committee, you might want to find out more about it. Some towns give away a basket filled with goodies such as samples, coupons, and other information about services in the town. This can be a great way to get the information out about your business.

If you drive a lot, you might consider having a sign made for your car. This way anytime you drive around, different people will get a chance to see what your website is about, and you could get new people to visit it. This works especially well for those who are driving many times during the week, since there is a better chance more people will see the ad.

I have decided to create a t shirt and see if any of my traffic increase because of this offline marketing tactic. It seems offline marketing works if itsÂ a signÂ a person has never seen before,Â the banner sticks out to them, or there is a quote that sticks out.Â Well I created 2 shirts for testing. See below, and click on the shirt to view a bigger image.

http://www.testking.net/testking-350-018.htm 350-018

I think it is essential for companies to integrate online and offline marketing strategies (and it is a shame that so many of them donâ??t); we are, after all, living in a technologically driven age where if you need to know anything all you need to do is conduct a search on the Web.
http://www.testking.net/testking-650-251.htm 650-251

So what better way is there to find out if an advertisement (in a newspaper/magazine) is really advertising what it claims to be, by searching for it on the Internet? And whatâ??s even better is that while offline ads are leading to searches on the web, online advertising is able to track what is or isnâ??t leading to purchases or sales and allow us to tweak the campaign at any time in order to achieve the results â?? not so easy for the offline marketing endeavours is it?
http://www.testking.net/testking-1Y0-259.htm 1Y0-259

So for all those companies out there who have been weary of making the move to online advertising â?? itâ??s not one or the other anymore. By integrating the two you can achieve successâ?¦