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Search Engine Advertising Video

An area you may not have considered being a source of decent traffic is offline advertising.

By offline I am talking about newspapers, business cards, trade journal magazines, etc.

This can be an excellent niche for your website if used properly, although you need to ensure you do your sums with this method quite carefully because the costs can be quite high, and it is easy to lose a lot of money if your not careful.

What you want to do is have a think about where your customer base hangs out when they are not online, what they read, etc.

It can be incredibly beneficial advertising your products offline, because most of your online competition is probably not doing it. To me this is just screaming “untapped market” !

To start the process, research popular trade magazines, periodicals, newspapers (specifically if there is a regular “section” for your niche market in a particular newspaper, etc).

For example, if your product is computer related, many newspapers have a computer “section”.

If you take the time to do this, you will find a number of areas where potential customers can be found.

Now, obviously the process is a lot more complex for offline ads since there is no simple method of clicking a link to get to your website.

Rather, they have to read your ad, find your link, remember it and/or write it down, and then get to the computer and find the piece of paper and/or remember your link and type it in. In today’s fast paced world with most people having a million and one things on their minds it’s not an easy ask, so you need to make it as easy as possible for your potential customer.

Firstly your URL needs to be as small as possible, to reduce the chance typos, but also to make it stand out.

Which one of these links stands out for you?

joebloggs.com/affiliates/make-me-mega-bucks/overwhelmingtraffic

Versus: -

dollarsonline.com/special

I am sure you will agree the 2nd URL would look a lot better for the potential customer. I hear you ask why not just make the URL getmore.com instead of the special? The reason for that is tracking.

Because of the investment required, you need to make sure when investing offline, that you carefully track the number of visitors arriving on your website. Probably the best way of doing this is to have a unique URL that you only use in a particular type of offline ad, and that is not linked from your normal website. E.g. Other parts of your website should not link to this URL (although it would obviously be ok for this URL to link to other parts of your Website).

By adding a sub-directory to the URL, it can give you an easy way to track the response for a particular ad or type of promotion. e.g. the /special in the above example.

Alternatively you could have used a sub-domain as follows: -

http://special.dollarsonline.com

Tracking where your customers arrive from is always important (we discuss this in future chapters in more detail) but in this case it’s imperative for you to know where they came from so you can make decisions in the future about where to best spend your offline advertising budget i.e. which offline ads are generating the best response.

I recommend the following with each campaign

1. Have a unique URL for each campaign or type of offline ad
2. Have a special offer to the potential customer that is only available if they go to that exact URL.
3. To make sure that the URL you specify is not linked to from other pages on your site (and therefore not indexed by the search engines) so you can make a special offer if need be to those people (and only those people) who visit that URL. Remember that getting people to visit that URL helps you in tracking the overall success of your campaign.
4. Offer a special incentive (discount, coupon, free report, etc) to all visitors.

How about sponsorship? This is where you get behind a local club or organization and in return you get the ability to place an advertisement in their newsletter, or a sign in the club rooms, etc. Club members tend to get behind their sponsors so if your product is of interest to people it could be an easy sell.

Whenever looking at marketing articles; we suggest you do some diligent research first and try and use the services of professionals.

Something I have done in the past is to have a URL on my car and an attention-grabbing headline. Yes I have made sales from this, obviously not hundreds of visitors a day, but for a once off cost it can really pay off, stickers for cars are usually pretty inexpensive.

Visit local council and see if you can pay for an advertisement in their newsletters, or what about schools? Plenty of scope here so long as your product and/or information is relevant!

Give offline marketing a try; remember most of your competitors are probably not doing it, so it could be a goldmine for you. Increased web site traffic is but one of the benefits of using this approach.