Boost your Online Business Offline
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It’s easy to get caught up in the tidal wave of Internet Marketing. You can spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars promoting your little online site, only to get a relatively low return on your investment. Or, it may be that you’re in a terribly competitive market, and getting your piece of the online marketplace is like pulling teeth.
It might not occur to you naturally, but some of the best ways to promote your online business are actually through offline means. You see, once you hit the online marketing realm, you’re competing with every other online business in your niche. In the offline marketing realm, however, the competition tends to be much less severe.
Here are three ways you might try promoting your online business offline:
Take out an ad. When eHarmony entered the online matchmaking world, the market was already pretty saturated. Rather than rely on AdWords campaigns or affiliate marketing, eHarmony took their message directly to consumers. They saturated both radio and television airwaves with advertisements, and it paid off. While your small business isn’t in a position to create a national campaign on that scale, you can take an ad out in your local paper or on your local radio station.
Network. Before there was online social networking, there was offline social networking. Make sure your friends and family know about your online business. Be involved in your community, whether it’s through a local business group or civic organization. Sponsor a tee-ball team. Think about some of the businesses and groups in your area, and see if you can come up with a mutually beneficial arrangement. Perhaps you can help promote them online while they help promote you online.
Use traditional sales techniques. Whether it’s direct mail or cold sales calls, the tools of the traditional salesperson can help boost your online business offline. Take a course on sales and marketing at your local community college, or immerse yourself in the writings of offline sales and marketing gurus.
Not every niche can benefit from all of these techniques, but most will.
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teresting posts which I would like to share with you: 7 Die-Hard Ways to Get More RSS Subscribers by Janith on BloggingTips. The 7 Secrets To A Successful Podcast by Yaro on Entrepreneurs-Journey. What would a professional do? by Seth on Seth’s Blog.Boost your Online Business Offlineby Jonh on JohnCow. Know Your Demographics by Jonathan on Jonathan Volk’s Blog. Enjoy!
tr td a:link, table#itemcontentlist tr td a:visited, table#itemcontentlist tr td a:active { color:#000099; font-weight:bold; text-decoration:none; } img {border:none;} John Cow dot ComBoost your Online Business OfflinePosted: 31 Jan 2009 09:35 AM CST It’s easy to get caught up in the tidal wave of Internet Marketing. You can spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars promoting your little online site, only to get a relatively low return on your investment. Or, it may be that you
I’m trying on to sell my photos online from my blog. I’m quite positive about it.
This is a method that I have recently been experimenting with. Its very true, offline is a huge market not to forget about.
In fact, a internet business model that is very successful is helping offline brick and mortar (mom and pop) businesses and help them get online. Help them set up a website, set up a blog, a list, ect. In the internet marketing world, even those of us that have a novice exposure to Internet marketing know much more than most and have a potential service to offer folks.
Cheers!
Jeromy
Another great addition from JohnCow. I recently joined my local Chamber of Commerce. It has been a great source of networking, leads, and ideas of those that do not live online all the time.
Too often – online busines owners forget that there are non-online-junkies out there. By finding their needs and their habits, you can drastically increase your own online success.
Chambers of Commerce are great.
I’ve been a member in my local chamber of commerce for a year now and it’s totally worth the $500 annual fee.
Cheers,
Alex
Offline marketing is essential to any internet marketer that wants to tap the unseen cache of new potential virgin customers and affiliates. Especially with all markets being the way they are if you create your own within an offline gala you will sure reap some pretty awesome benefits, much less establish a larger, but local more direct network to take advantage of in the future.
It amazes me how many business cards lack a web address! Some people just don’t get it!
See for my offline advertising i uses pens… but that is for my free gaming on myspace website as promotion.. It has worked for me decently
I completely agree with this strategy. You should promote your business both offline and online to increase traffic and awareness.
Good offline examples are –
Newspaper classified adverts in national papers or if you are on a lower budget you can advertise in local papers for free
Leaflet distribution either with hand-outs in a town centre or by distributing to households in the area you want to target (often these can be packaged up with free papers)
It also works the other way around. If you have an offline business you can actually increase your footprint and customer base by advertising online.
Bigger businesses are becoming increasingly aware that there’s nothing magical about the Internet. It’s just an advertising channel.
Depending on your demographic, it may even be the best one. Older demographic groups often won’t search for solutions online but will gladly go online to find a specific website that they find through offline channels.
It’s interesting that you say big businesses are becoming aware that there is nothing magical about the internet.
I have to disagree with you. I work at a Web Design/Marketing firm and we have discovered that most businesses are realizing that promotion dollars go much further online than they do in the real world. For example a $3000 radio spot that will have your ad played a few times over the course of a month just doesn’t have the staying power of making $3000 worth of improvement to your website which will be seen by many beyond the one month time frame.
Maybe I missed your point but, from my perspective businesses are shying away from traditional methods (ie print and radio) and moving towards the magic of the internet.
Networking is the most important thing ever to build a business, whether it is online or offline. However, if you’re shy like me, tough luck
-Mike
Yea being shy can definitly be a factor.. Having good pride in your business can overcome ur shyness.
I think both offline and online should be taken as a big network. The other benefit of offline networking and promotion is that it attracts a slightly different kind audience, hence diversifying your network not just in quantity but also in quality. The offline network contains a different kind of people but within the boundaries of your niche. Your network becomes more well connected , otherwise it will be a very closed but densely connected network. By diversifying your network you bring in the ’small world’ effect where the separation distance between you and other contacts reduces dramatically.
Offline marketing just adds connections to nodes, and thereby increasing the small world effect–commonly understood that there is a maximum of 6 degree of separation between any two individuals on an average.
Unfortunately I don’t tend to do allot of offline marketing in regards to my blog, I did however tell my wife about my blog, and she said “oh thats interesting”!, she also said the same about the day I painted the house and she stood to watch it dry!.
Maybe offline marketing is something I need to try more off!?, thanks for the post:).
I liked a couple of posts here, but no one mentioned free stuff , we like it online people also like it offline, imagine adds in shop windows news agents etc mentioning your giveaways it has potential and will get a new stream of people to your auto responder and they will love how you write, just to them so often lol.
Great article.
You really need creative to get on it.
BTW, you could place an ads at your local newspaper that direct to your LP.
I feed my on-line business via an off-line marketing method other than spoken about above. With this method I can get 50 to 60 targeted calling me prospects for pennies on the dollar compared to any PCC, and no SEM.
Thanks for the great post and the corresponding conversation it has sparked. One way that I build my relationships with both current clients and prospective clients is to send them personalized greeting cards (not ecards).
I use this system to send cards reiterating the benefits of doing business with me to prospects and then I use this same system to follow up with them including sending birthday cards and special occasion cards to both the prospects and clients.
This separates me from my competitors and this system allows me to stand out and build my brand. This is also great for people who attend networking meeting or Chamber of Commerce meetings – what better way to stand out than to take a picture with the client or prospect and upload that picture and send them a card with that picture as the cover to the card. Or take a picture holding their product or at their business and send the card as a testimonial.
To try this system out for yourself, you can visit http://www.sendoutcards.com/keepitpersonal and send out a card out on me to see how this can benefit both your online and offline business.
John,
Definitely agreed with you on this strategy, but i strongly recommend to do market research first on your target market before laying out advertising campaign
Great post about remembering about offline (local) business. As you point out, there’s a lot less competition, and it’s always good to diversify. ~` Steve, the trade show guru
You bring up some very good points. Some online businesses are easy to promote and integrate into offline marketing success. Depends on the type though.
“Site Flipping” for example is an easy one to translate because you can compare it to Real Estate and thus easy to explain in offline setting.
Good post, moo moo
offline can be a handy way of driving traffic its often forgot as people concentrate on online but a combination of both serves one well.
you can also do bumper stickers with your dot com on it, business cards to hand out at conferences and even post up a small flyer type piece of paper at bulletin boards at places that allow you do it, maybe even a classified, you can even find classified online as well.
a lot of traffic is also by the old school “word of mouth” method so yes let everyone you know, know about your site or online business and wait for it to come….its like seo organic traffic well be there long term even tho the pick up is slow
Great post,
offline marketing is also recommended but it’s only .00001% for the total population of online users…
great post…
offline marketing is also recommended but it’s only a little percentage of the total population of online users
I take all your point that you mentioned above but don forget that you can still promote your business offline by spreading the paper off the street so not only in the radio, magazine and television you can promote
Networking a key element to any successful businesses especially on the Internet. Blogs are largely tied to communities. Those communities send traffic via Digg, Stumbled, links to your work.
Yeap… we can make use of offline media to gain more exposures to our blog / site / product. If it can bring more $$$, why not ? give it a shot
Most people who does online advertising on their website, didn’t do offline marketing, so offline marketing have less competitor and traffic from offline marketing is much better in conversion.
There are two offline techniques I like to use.
1. Personal consult. It allows me to get into my customers brain, while at the same getting paid for it. Even if you’re driving insane amounts of traffic, this one is still a must.
2. Niche magazine ads. If you do proper test on this, it can work miracles. It may not be as targeted as adwords, but at least you don’t have to constantly refine it. Depending on the magazine, you can only change it only after a certain amount of time.
Sounds crazy but I never really thought much about offline marketing or put any effort into it. Makes so much sense now that you mention it. It’s so easy to get caught up in online methods we forget about the obvious. Haha. Nice article. : )
Very helpful post for helping people grow their businesses online. Hope you will have more details in your following posts. Thank you again.
The trouble with offline stuff is that it can be very expensive and hard to track the uplift. It can work very well for some people so you make a more than fair point.
yeah2..
whatever…
online and offline.
both are important.
but u need to make sure that what kind of business that suites both of the method.
btw, johncow it was too long that u didn’t update ur blog. What happened? Broadband problem. You never have this kind of problem b4 this..
True. One should never forget the potential of the market offline. If you go out, you will find out that there are people who prefer to do business the traditional way.
Im currently deciding the best ways to advertise my small biz offline. Im currently deciding between newspaper ads and direct mail. But also im trying to figure out more affordable ways of doing it. Your right though, it is still very important to advertise offline. Keep up the good work!
Great idea, but the first important thing is doing a simple research in the market… just dont wanna waste my money putting in a wrong place…
If the blog contains something that can be bought..hmmm it’s okay then..
But how can I promote my blog which contains Tech articles??
Really I want to get the next lvl of the pagerank
Offline media may be very effective depending on the price….
Everything comes down to what you pay up front…
Is there an online exchange for offline advertising?
Have others found an increase in traffic for online business opportunity type sites in this ecconomic climate using offline sources?
Good concept i too feel offline marketing works online but i never gave it a serious thought, even spreading word works out well. Good article.
It amazes me how many business cards lack a web address! Some people just don't get it!