Online - Offline - Marketing Your Internet Business

Why It's Important to Market Outside Your Site

So you have your site up and running; you've optimized your pages with keywords, descriptions, headings and more; you've submitted your site to 100,000 search engines and FFA sites; you have some good links established from other sites; you're prowling newsgroups and chat rooms to subtlety promote your product; maybe you have done some banner advertising; maybe some pay-per-clicks and now.....

In our rush to capitalize on the the internet market we get drawn into the world itself. We forget that there are hundreds of other methods of promotion and we could be promoting our online businesses in those areas. Television, radio, press, magazines, billboards (the kind standing in the farmer's field), and good old fashioned word of mouth or what's called toe-to-toe selling.

Take a look at any of the big players on the internet. Sure they have a great site, sure they have gazillions of links and sure they show up at the top of the list for every keyword worth having; but is that the only place you see them? Absolutely not. You see them everywhere!!

"OK" you say, "but who the heck has that kind of budget and staff?" Well surprisingly some of the players on the internet do, or at least they claim to. They seem however to focus all their efforts on including your name on a mail list and trying to sell you something every 4 hours. Great... Let's spend some money with somebody we never heard, of selling something that's completely intangible. and get all caught up in the endless excitement of "back end sales". Do you see them advertising anywhere else? I don't but then maybe I don't read the right publications.

The truth is, running an internet business is just exactly, precisely, no variations like running any other kind of business. You have to find a niche, you have to get people to talk to you, and you have to close the sale. Guess what...that's why salespeople get the big bucks. They don't rely on a website to close a sale. For promotion they use the internet, but when it comes to putting bread on the table, they're out there talking to people and closing sales. Most of them use the internet as just one of a variety of tools to get the prospect.

Maybe your product or service could easily be promoted offline as well. It doesn't have to cost a lot. Take for instance running a classified as in the local paper. It might cost you a few bucks, but it's probably nothing compared to what you spend on pay-per-clicks. Try it, you might be surprised.

You can get a lot of bang for your buck too. I just ran an ad in 10 papers with a circulation of over 900,000 for $117.00. If even half of them read my ad (450,000) and 5% of them actually get online and visit my site (22,500) and 1% of those people buy from me, I have 225 new customers costing me about 52 cents each.

How do I track the response? Good question. You could put a new page on your site, but chances are there will be some mistake in trying to go to abcxyz.net/mytrackingpageforadvertising. It would be better just to register a new name, build a one page site, point it to your main site and put a counter on it. abcxyz.info is so much easier to remember. It doesn't have to cost much to do it either. NicFair will register a new name for you for $8.70 or less. http://www.nicfair.com.

At the end of the day, the old fashioned way of advertising may be just the ticket. Let us not be so caught up in our monitors that we forget it.

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