While promoting your website online is an obvious must, it’s surprising that some web owners overlook the potential in promoting their site offline as well. Although the internet has created another medium to convey ideas it hasn’t replaced the traditional methods, many of which can be done on a low budget with a limited amount of time involved.
The easiest place to start is your home office. If you have business cards make sure they have you web address on it as well. If you don’t have business cards and don’t want to spend the money getting them professionally made then you can make your own. You can get business card paper for around $10 at any office supply store and if you don’t have any printing software you can download business card software for free from download.com. Regardless of how you do it, every web owner should have their own business cards with their email and URL on them. Use them every time someone asks for your email, web address, phone number and any other opportunity that arises. Also look at other things you use for correspondence like letterheads and even envelopes. All these should have your web address on it. You can go further with promotional items such as pens or water bottles but the idea is that anything that is being given to a potential customer or visitors should have your web address on it.
Next you may want to look at print advertising. You don’t have to go out and spend a lot of money of a full page add in a paper or magazine. Most community papers will run classified ads for less than $20, and a lot of them no have a special web section for local business to list their web sites. Even national papers will have a relatively low rate for classified ads in their web directory. If you have a site that is targeted to a specific group, check to see if there are any print newsletters targeted to them. Many organizations still send out print publications to their members and advertising in these is much less expensive than magazine ads.
The above are just the generic basics that can be applied to most web business owners. You can more creative with ideas that fit your target market. If you did your market research you should have an understanding of where the attention of your target market is focused, online and offline, and you’re likely to get better results if you focus your efforts on both.
Related Directory Categories:
