You know, with all of the free advertising you can get online with SEO, Newsletters, Blogging, Social Media, Email, Article, Community, etc…. you sometimes forget some of the most effective and reasonable means of advertising that exists.
With the exception of Q4 right now where everything is seriously expensive, a lot of people, especially newer people to Online who have never had an offline or traditional background or even seasoned Marketers who have all of the basic traditional Marketing and Media skills forget is that you cannot always rely on Online to drive your sales.
If you always rely on Google, what happens when someone bowls you, what happens when your SEO dissapears, what happens if you looks your backlinks and traffic from other sources like if you change all your urls when you change servers or shopping carts and forget to use 301 redirects or mess up something to where you loose your backlinks? What happens if your articles all get reclaimed or you get booted from the article engines? Well, you need to diversify the way you promote your websites and here are a few key pointers for people with all budgets and abilities.
1. Get business cards for your website. You don’t even need to put your contact information on them, there is good and bad for this but for this case lets do cards without your contact info.
Order yourself free business cards online through any of the major card sites like vistaprint or any other ones and instead of all of your contact information, do something like smart shopper, concerned parent, cool ass college student, dj intraining, future hair model, future fashionista, future actress or something that relates to the person you want to bring to your site. Then, below it put you-rnu-mber or something like that that would be funny and make sure on the back or clear across the front is your url. The url is very important and make sure you capitalize the first letter of each work and make sure that you also put what people will find there underneath. You can make it the design, just a solid colored card with the url across it, etc… If you have a coupon site do mycouponsite.com with coupons, deals, discounts, etc… If it’s an acting site do myactingsite.com with tips, tricks and advice to be a star, etc…
Buy traditional media space, it is not only cheap right now, besides in Q4, but also very effective.
Newspapers, Radio Stations, Local TV, etc… are starving for advertisers right now. Almost all of them have reminant inventory for the advertising and all of them need money. The other thing is that they still get a ton of readership and they are dirt cheap to advertise in.
You cannot always rely on the traffic they drive, but you can use it to get people to sign up for your newsletters, get the word out about your site for a first view and you can also get it to let people know you have discounts, etc… They can also be used to drive traffic to drive up impressions on your site to sell more ad space and increase your SEO with the traffic on site benefits for when you are being crawled, not to mention you usually get a backlink when it is in a newspaper since they go online too….you may even want to work that into your contract if you go for a longer run with your ad space.
Don’t forget about industry publications and newsletters.
Almost every type of site has a non profit or industry association that is relevant for it and all of those need not only new members but sponsors and supporters and more importantly advertisers.
These Associations and Non Profits not only make amazing backlinks, but if you show the people who you want to come to your site that you support their industry or their Non Profit, they may be more inclined to want to buy from you or continue to come back and visit you, if they have a blog or site they may give you more backlinks and more importantly, help to boost your business. Not to mention you get to post their badge on your website which speaks worlds to their members that you support something they believe in. Many of these Associations are under $500 as well to join or advertise with so it really can be a very good and smart way to spend some of your ad budget.
Advertising offline is just as important online and can be a great way to reach your audience that most online companies forget to do. Print handouts, post cards in grocery stores or anywhere else you would want your audience to find you.
Best,
Adam
