Promote Your Internet Business Offline!
Jason Wolf asked:
Promote Your Internet Business Offline!
Yes you heard me correctly. Promote your internet business offline. Usually you hear how you can take your offline business and bring it online, but I’m going to show you how to do the opposite. Why promote offline? There are a lot of reasons. Increase sales, reach more people, and grow your websites bottom line. Big businesses are marketing offline and you should be too. Your probably on a small marketing budget just like I am. That’s why I’m going to show you how to effectively market your online business offline with minimal cost.
Offline marketing is more expensive than online marketing, but it can be very effective to tie online and offline marketing together. There are a couple of different ways to tie-in offline marketing. What I’m going to cover here is using postcards and/or brochures to increase your sales. I personally use postcards to help promote my website and to sell my products.
Mailing Postcards work great if you have one or two products that you’re promoting. Any more than that and you should be mailing brochures, which I’ll talk about a little later. I like postcards because they are cheap to mail. It costs 23 cents to mail a postcard 1st class. Online marketers will realize that this is a cheap sales lead.
If you have more than one or two products to promote, you will want to use a 2-sided sales sheet or a small catalog. These will cost your 41 cents to mail, plus you’ll need an envelope. Your marketing price will at least double, but it can still be effective. Especially if you’re selling higher priced items.
Where will you get prospects for your mailing? The first place, I suggest you market to, are your existing customers. People who have purchased from you before will more than likely purchase from you again. As long as your selling products they need or want. Example a mail order company can sell mail order programs for their front end products. Then they can mail back end products, like mailing lists, labels, and other items that the customer will need to mail out their program.
After you market to your existing customers and you have a good sales piece working for you. Then is the time to get a mailing list. I recommend you test a mailing list before you do a mass mailing. Order 500 to 1000 names. If you make a profit from your mailing, chances are you have a winner on your hands and it’s time to order 5000 names. Send that mailing out and get ready to process some orders! Don’t stop there. Continue to market on and off line and you’ll have a great marketing mix. One more thing I’d like to mention about mailing lists. Don’t waste your money on cheap mailing lists. It’s Plain and simple. You will not get the results you need. Make sure the names are fresh 30-90 days old. Stay away from companies that offer you free names with your order. Like buy one get 2 free or companies that offer free names if it’s not deliverable. The free names will probably be just as bad as the rest of them.
When you write your direct mail pieces. Make sure you use proven formulas. Get a good book or report on writing direct mail pieces. You can find advertisements in business opportunity magazines that offer programs for free or a few dollars. You can answer a few of those ads. You’ll get some good and bad examples mailed to you. You’ll be able to tell the difference. Pay close attention to the ones that grab your attention. Those are the good ones. The poorly written and the poor copy pieces end up in the trash and probably won’t hold your attention. You’d be surprised at what some people mail.
A mixture of online and offline marketing is a more rounded approach to marketing. Using these two methods for your business can work very effectively.
Promote Your Internet Business Offline!
Yes you heard me correctly. Promote your internet business offline. Usually you hear how you can take your offline business and bring it online, but I’m going to show you how to do the opposite. Why promote offline? There are a lot of reasons. Increase sales, reach more people, and grow your websites bottom line. Big businesses are marketing offline and you should be too. Your probably on a small marketing budget just like I am. That’s why I’m going to show you how to effectively market your online business offline with minimal cost.
Offline marketing is more expensive than online marketing, but it can be very effective to tie online and offline marketing together. There are a couple of different ways to tie-in offline marketing. What I’m going to cover here is using postcards and/or brochures to increase your sales. I personally use postcards to help promote my website and to sell my products.
Mailing Postcards work great if you have one or two products that you’re promoting. Any more than that and you should be mailing brochures, which I’ll talk about a little later. I like postcards because they are cheap to mail. It costs 23 cents to mail a postcard 1st class. Online marketers will realize that this is a cheap sales lead.
If you have more than one or two products to promote, you will want to use a 2-sided sales sheet or a small catalog. These will cost your 41 cents to mail, plus you’ll need an envelope. Your marketing price will at least double, but it can still be effective. Especially if you’re selling higher priced items.
Where will you get prospects for your mailing? The first place, I suggest you market to, are your existing customers. People who have purchased from you before will more than likely purchase from you again. As long as your selling products they need or want. Example a mail order company can sell mail order programs for their front end products. Then they can mail back end products, like mailing lists, labels, and other items that the customer will need to mail out their program.
After you market to your existing customers and you have a good sales piece working for you. Then is the time to get a mailing list. I recommend you test a mailing list before you do a mass mailing. Order 500 to 1000 names. If you make a profit from your mailing, chances are you have a winner on your hands and it’s time to order 5000 names. Send that mailing out and get ready to process some orders! Don’t stop there. Continue to market on and off line and you’ll have a great marketing mix. One more thing I’d like to mention about mailing lists. Don’t waste your money on cheap mailing lists. It’s Plain and simple. You will not get the results you need. Make sure the names are fresh 30-90 days old. Stay away from companies that offer you free names with your order. Like buy one get 2 free or companies that offer free names if it’s not deliverable. The free names will probably be just as bad as the rest of them.
When you write your direct mail pieces. Make sure you use proven formulas. Get a good book or report on writing direct mail pieces. You can find advertisements in business opportunity magazines that offer programs for free or a few dollars. You can answer a few of those ads. You’ll get some good and bad examples mailed to you. You’ll be able to tell the difference. Pay close attention to the ones that grab your attention. Those are the good ones. The poorly written and the poor copy pieces end up in the trash and probably won’t hold your attention. You’d be surprised at what some people mail.
A mixture of online and offline marketing is a more rounded approach to marketing. Using these two methods for your business can work very effectively.
Merging Your Online and Offline Marketing
Kaye Z. Marks asked:
There’s no reason for you to consider your offline and online marketing completely separate entities.
There are those companies out there who think that to achieve success online you need to use a completely online approach to your marketing and anything else will be counter productive. You’ll also find those who avoid the internet like the plague and think you don’t need to have any part of their business online at any time.
To avoid one or the other is to lose a good potential for additional business. Both approaches target different people, and you are able to gain support from both types of people if you know how to best combine these two forms of separate marketing.
Who says you can’t have ads online that direct people to your physical location? I’ve seen plenty of ads online that are for completely offline businesses. Now, you can still often find a website for them that gives people additional information about the business, but still directs them to the actual store.
This is easily accomplished, especially since it is rather cheap to set up a website that can provide people with extra details about your company.
Offline companies taking advantage of online approaches happens far more often than the online companies doing the same. Instead they try to avoid printing anything for their advertising if they can help it, but the offline forms of marketing are often going to work well with the same people who spend a lot of their shopping time on the web.
Try some greeting card printing that you can use to send people your web address along with a request to give you a chance. The great thing about this is that because an online business is so easy to gain access to, you’ll have a much better chance of gaining a person’s attention, and getting them to immediately log onto your website.
Because of that ability to immediately try out your website, your greeting card printing will be particularly successful, even more so than if you had a normal offline business that people needed to drive to in order to check out.
And this is just one way of taking advantage of offline marketing to boost up your business. Brochures can be just as effective for an online company as they would be for an offline one. If you avoid anything but internet advertising you’re losing access to some very long standing and great styles of marketing.
No company should ever block themselves off from effective styles of marketing no matter what kind of business they use. Take a look at the entire marketing field and decide on what will work best for your company.
You don’t want to fail to capitalize on a great style of marketing simply because you didn’t think it would work with your company.
There’s no reason for you to consider your offline and online marketing completely separate entities.
There are those companies out there who think that to achieve success online you need to use a completely online approach to your marketing and anything else will be counter productive. You’ll also find those who avoid the internet like the plague and think you don’t need to have any part of their business online at any time.
To avoid one or the other is to lose a good potential for additional business. Both approaches target different people, and you are able to gain support from both types of people if you know how to best combine these two forms of separate marketing.
Who says you can’t have ads online that direct people to your physical location? I’ve seen plenty of ads online that are for completely offline businesses. Now, you can still often find a website for them that gives people additional information about the business, but still directs them to the actual store.
This is easily accomplished, especially since it is rather cheap to set up a website that can provide people with extra details about your company.
Offline companies taking advantage of online approaches happens far more often than the online companies doing the same. Instead they try to avoid printing anything for their advertising if they can help it, but the offline forms of marketing are often going to work well with the same people who spend a lot of their shopping time on the web.
Try some greeting card printing that you can use to send people your web address along with a request to give you a chance. The great thing about this is that because an online business is so easy to gain access to, you’ll have a much better chance of gaining a person’s attention, and getting them to immediately log onto your website.
Because of that ability to immediately try out your website, your greeting card printing will be particularly successful, even more so than if you had a normal offline business that people needed to drive to in order to check out.
And this is just one way of taking advantage of offline marketing to boost up your business. Brochures can be just as effective for an online company as they would be for an offline one. If you avoid anything but internet advertising you’re losing access to some very long standing and great styles of marketing.
No company should ever block themselves off from effective styles of marketing no matter what kind of business they use. Take a look at the entire marketing field and decide on what will work best for your company.
You don’t want to fail to capitalize on a great style of marketing simply because you didn’t think it would work with your company.
