Off Line Marketing Strategies

If you just built a new web site, or if you follow my advice — a business blog — you should announce it to everyone you know to attract them to visit. Although you can and should use opt-in email marketing systems to send an announcement to your contacts, I’d like to propose an “off-line” marketing strategy as well: postcards or greeting cards!

If your budget allows it, I recommend sending postcards to your existing clients asking them to promote your new blog to their contacts. To create personalized postcards, or greeting cards, I use my SendOutCards system which costs me $0.62 + postage for a postcard with a custom design ($0.31 for a stock card).

The design can be an advert for your new blog, and then on the flip side (or inside of a greeting card) you can ask the recipient to give a unique URL to their contacts, e.g. NewBlog.com/Joe, etc. where Joe is the real name of your client.

Using a unique URL will allow you to track new visitors/signups, and then award the one client who sends the most traffic to your new blog. You need to give your clients an incentive to promote your new blog, say a chance to win an iPod or something, or something more expensive, depending on your business model.

Follow this link if you’re interested in the SendOutCards business opportunity. This can become a lucrative second income or a full-blown career, all depends on you.

Although email marketing is still the most effective way to promote your business, there are other ways of generating leads or getting more business from existing clients.

What if you could combine the strengths of an online, automated system, which works very much like an Email Publishing System with the

• deliverability of snail mail, and
• benefits of sending your prospects and customers a tangible item?

Would you be interested in trying this almost perfect business-generating system?

Couple of years ago I started using Send Out Cards, an online on-demand printing and delivery system that works very much like sending personalized email, only it prints,personalizes and mails real postcards and greeting cards in any quantity. Want to add a gift card? No problem! Cookies? Candy? Yes, and yes, it’s so easy.

You can use this system to send automated, but personalized postcards and greeting cards. Thousands of great stock designs are available, but best of all, you can easily create your own designs as simply as uploading a digital photo and adding a voice bubble or a caption.

Using Send Out Cards is a great way to get repeat business from existing clients. Additionally, you can use this system is to split-test different cards on a small sample, to see which one to use in bulk, if you’re planning to ultimately send a large-scale mailing (1,000 or more cards).

On top of it all, if you’re looking for a source of additional income, SendOutCards offers a very lucrative business opportunity as well. Contact me if you’re interested in testing it out – I can set you up with a gift account so you can try the system and send yourself a few cards on me.

Finally, once you have your products or services you’d like others to promote, and you have a system in place to track visitors, sales and affiliate commissions, you’re now ready to start promoting your affiliate program.

A good place to start is a list of your own clients or customers. If your clients promote your stuff, their credibility is going to be very high, since they’ve purchased from you, so they can talk from first-hand experience. You may even consider running a closed-door affiliate program by only allowing your clients/customers to be a part of it. A good example of such closed programs is Audio Acrobat (for recording and hosting audio and video online) and SendOutCards (to send automated postcards and greeting cards – the real ones, with a stamp and all).

Obviously, you’ll want to have your affiliate program featured on your web site and in your ezine for example.

In case you’re looking for products & services related to email marketing, you may want to join my own affiliate program, it pays up to 50% commission on products and 10% on services.

Promoting your affiliate program is like building a list: you can use the same tactics and strategies. Try visiting and contributing to online forums and blogs where your potential affiliate partners hang out. Write articles. Run a pay-per-click campaign. Contact people of influence you think may be interested in promoting your stuff. To get on their good books, buy their product or attend their seminars, then contact them by phone or send them an evaluation copy of your product by post.

Once you’ve recruited a bunch of interested affiliates, who have access to lists of thousands of people you may find that you don’t need to promote your affiliate program that much anymore as your affiliate partners may be just the ticket for your business’ success!

It’s bonus time!

Last couple of weeks I’ve been busy writing, recording, sound-editing, re-writing, and then re-recording my new special report: “The 4 Biggest Mistakes to Avoid in Marketing Your Small Business.” It’s now ready in audio format you can listen to on line, or download an MP3 to your PC. I personally prefer to listen to this kind of educational materials in my car.

There will be a printable PDF version as well, hopefully by the end of the week. For audio recording I used Impact Web Audio and the files are hosted by AudioAcrobat.

This is an off line method of building your list, but you will be driving traffic to your web site, where your prospects can sign up. You will achieve best results if you can find a newspaper or magazine whose readership is your target market. For example, if you were a matchmaker you could place a classified ad in the “Personals” section of your local newspaper.

Bonus tip: Start small (i.e. cheap) to polish your ad, then work up to display ads which are more expensive.

Make sure you track the effectiveness of each of these marketing techniques. I recommend you use ad-tracking software, which allows you to assign a unique “ID” to each article, listing, or classified ad. This way you will be able to track your subscribers, see where they are coming from, how many are converting to clients, etc. This kind of information can help you eliminate marketing strategies that do not work, so that you can concentrate on the ones that do.

If you’d like to add ad-tracking features to your existing Email System Provider, I recommend HyperTracker.