Offline Website Promotion Ideas [Page 4]

Print advertising strategies for cheap website promotion

Here are some ideas for free and low cost print advertising:

1. Before TV infomercials became dominated by "Internet opportunities", many of the "get rich quick" schemes involved placing tiny, low-cost ads in newspapers nationwide. I recently ran a small ad in 20 weekly newspapers throughout the country, and 1 classified ad in the LA times. The total price of the 20 weeklies was about the same as the single LA Times ad, but they got me about 4 times as many visitors. If you're going to try this, I suggest starting out with small test campaigns to make sure your advertising placements are effective.
2. Write free articles for newspapers. You've no doubt seen taglines at the end of newspaper articles that say something like "John Doe is an Internet author in San Francisco. He may be contacted at johndoe@Clicktropolis.com" -- there's your website promotion. Publications get the content they need, and your website gets exposure. Try your hand at freelance writing by submitting an article/story for their review, or suggest a story to one or more of their reporters. Also check out these services for offering press releases to newspapers: businesswire.com, marketwire.com, prnewswire.com, prweb.com, pressbox.com, webwire.com, massmediadistribution.com.
3. Magazines and trade publications are hard to beat when it comes to targeting a customer profile. Trade publications are good for marketing to other businesses, while magazine advertising allows you to target consumers that are interested in a particular subject. Go to a large bookstore, and browse the magazine selection to find those most targeted to your audience. Also, go through the signup process on your competitors websites to see if they ask "Where did you hear about us?". If they provide a dropdown list of publications, browse the back issues to see how long they've been advertising there -- this will be a good indication of whether the medium has been successful for them.

  

TIP: After placing even a small ad in a popular magazine, or on an inexpensive TV station, you can update your website with "As Seen on TV" or "As Seen in People Magazine". This may seem deceitful at first, but you've probably never questioned the credibility of many products, services, and websites that were doing the exact same thing for website promotion purposes only. You might consider running a 2am TV commercial in Timbuktu (think Google TV ads), or running a small magazine classified, just for this purpose.