M.L. Petersen asked:


I’ve always been impressed with those who could who could find ways of doing things other than the traditional ways. I’m referring to the promotion of an internet business or affiliate marketing business. No, I’m not going to discuss blogging, web 2, or article marketing, although they are excellent ways of marketing you online business. Some marketers are actually using offline marketing to promote their online business.

Two questions surface immediately.

1. How can offline advertising be as effective when online marketing can potentially reach many thousands more people than offline.

2. If offline promotions work, what do I do? How do I start. TV advertising reaches a lot of people. TV advertising is also very expensive. We probably won’t start our offline promotions with TV.

The first method of offline promotions and quite possibly continues to be the best is word of mouth. We still give a lot of credibility to what a friend says and tend to be more comfortable with a recommendation from someone we know.

Actually we are bombarded with hundreds of offline advertisements daily. If we watch TV we see ads, if we listen to the radio we hear advertisements. The news paper is full of ads as well as any magazines we read. If we park at a shopping mall and enter the mall there is a good chance we will be handed a business card by someone and then when we return to our car there may be a flier on the windshield. Driving home we see billboards calling our attention to a particular business asking us to visit their URL for more information. When we open our mail we see a postcard urging to us to visit a special site online. We open a envelope and find out how easy it is to restore our credit.

The reason we get bombarded like this is that ofline advertising still works.

Given the many forms of offline marketing, we will consider 4 ways we can effectively use offline promotions. Keep in mind that how you market and who you market too has a lot to do with the results obtained. You may not want to put advertising signs on your vehicle and park it at an old folks home.

1. The first way to consider promoting off line is with business cards. You will probably have business cards even if your aim is not necessarily off line promotions. A lot of information can be placed on a business. After listing the benefits of your promotion state that a free report can be obtained by visiting http:// www.mypromotion.org and that would lead to your splash page.

2. Fliers are another excellent and low cost way of promoting your affiliate program offline. It is probably best to stay with the standard 8 ½ X 11 colorful sheet. A lot of information can be placed on this size paper with room for some images. This may also be an opportunity to be creative. You want to attract enough attention for the recipients to look at it. If you intend to distribute the fliers to cars in a parking lot it is always best to find out if that is ok. Locate community bulletin boards in your area and place a flier there from time to time. With fliers you can keep the cost down by printing only the number you plan to use at that time.

3. Consider placing small ads in the local newspapers. The area I live in has several limited circulation news papers often directed to different interest groups. In some rural areas these free newspapers may be the only ones read. Using small classified ads it is important to find a way to track response. Different ads need to be test for effectiveness as a “good” ad can make a big difference. This holds true for all forms of advertising, test to determine which ad wording gives the best results.

4. Post cards are used by many offline marketers very effectively. A well designed post card sent to an address that could use the information will bring results. I know with printing costs, addressing and postage costs using post cards is more expensive than the other methods we have been discussing. Using post cards for your offline promotion you will need a mailing list. There are many list brokers available. Selecting a list is very important. Find out as much as you can. For instance, you would want to avoid sending to a list of people that did not have computers.

The above is only some of the ways offline promotions can assist your online marketing. You may not want to use all of these methods. Pick one or two that you enjoy doing and give you good results.

Hendro Iskandar asked:

By: Hendro Iskandar

As small bisnis owner, before knowing internet marketing, my knowledge about marketing only limited to offline marketing. Where we limitted by area of activity which we can achieve. Advertise our products or service, in limited area, as far as i can manage.While in offline marketing, the work area limited. But in internet marketing,which can be done at home or office, are not limited in area, you can reach people in the worldwide.

Which The Principle of marketing, strong brand image, positioning on the product or service and the difference with another product or service, all things that will help increase our sales, can be done with both marketing. The principles of marketing, can be applied to internet marketing much better, easier, faster and cheaper then offline marketing.

Offline Marketing in example is ‘Microsoft’. With the brand name ‘windows’, and the position as computer operating system, at most used, and the differentiation is inside the windows, quite a lot and user friendly (my individual opinion). Can you imagine, how much money that Microsoft spend just for advertise the product ?

For Internet marketing example is Amazon.com. With the brandname ‘Amazon.com’, the position of greatest bookstore, very famous, and the difference with another bookstore that Amazon.com sell the book online. And i’m sure that Amazon.com spend less money then Microsoft for advertise.

The internet marketing with a strong branding, can attract millions of people come to your website every day, allowing the total purchase existence also quite big. And if you know how to do it, you can have it too. In internet marketing, you don’t need to have your own website. But it’s better if you own one, because your credibility will be better in your customers side.

Run an internet marketing with your own website, will give you opportunity to get income beside your product or service. The best one is, maybe you didn’t know, if in Internet marketing, even you didn’t have any product, you can still get income. That the other difference of internet marketing.

Get to know more deeply the Internet marketing and exploit all the opportunities in it, because I see internet marketing is future business. Why not try to start at right now. . .