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charles
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Posts by charles
Offline Marketing Tactic No. 3 for Your Home Business
Mar 18th
Since late 2010 I have been mildly obsessive about offline marketing (as you might have noticed from many of my blog posts!) When on vacation recently, I noticed just how much good old fashioned street scape marketing is forging a comeback.
So after covering Flyers and Newspaper Advertising on my blog last week, I thought I would share my knowledge on free public signage here at EzineArticles… Now, I could have the terminology wrong but within the States they are called ‘Bandit Signs’. These have not been big business in Australia and I suspect NZ is similar, but I saw quite a few on my trip and thought it worth a mention. And when we see just a few of something in a major city… and none in the regional city like mine, I know exactly what I am doing this week! I’m getting a pile of board, I’m creating a couple of dozen signs and then next week in my marketing slots in my DMO (Daily Method of Operation), I’m leaving them at vacant blocks on outstanding thoroughfares, which by the way, I have already scoped out, and I’m hammering those little babies in!! I’ll also be attaching a few similar signs to street posts while I’m at it just to capitalize on my time.
This is definitely prime advertising space that in Australia and would be worth a small fortune as a billboard site. So let’s put our own ad there in the form on the ‘bandit sign’.
Here are some tips to keep in mind when producing your Bandit Sign:
* People have only 3- 5 seconds to read your sign.
* Make the message memorable but short, just several emotive words and of course a website and phone number.
* Use a simple website url. Even if this means you will have to buy a domain name for the task and then have it redirected to your marketing website or funnel.
* The most successful sign size for this purpose is… 18 by 24 inches (sorry metric Aussies!)
* Use dazzling colors and clear large fonts…
* Set a margin around the edge if you are making them by hand in Adobe or even Word
* Obviously every one of the principles of advertising that I have mentioned in my other training on my blog applies.
Now I am making my signs having a free Mac program called Paintbrush but you could just use Word and find a cool clipart image to import.. include your website and phone number and off you go!
I print my design onto heavy card then I laminate it (you might have this done, but a laminator is under $100 AUD) from there, I have sourced a cheap plastic frame that it slides into with a spike on the bottom. Purchased in bulk, they are inexpensive and the complete operation is far less expensive than having it made for me.
I’m sure you can actually think up some low-priced and cheerful solutions to print off your message and fix it to board using a stick at the underside!!
And when you’re at it…. I also seen a proliferation of similar type of signage simply stapled on wooden telephone poles!! How effective if positioned at heavy use pedestrian locations and traffic intersections.
So, an intimate knowledge of Internet marketing is not necessary to have people find your home business opportunity. Home business marketing can be as simple or as complex as you make it. To illustrate this point, I made a $14K net sale from this type of signage last month! Get inspired!
3 Tips For Offline Marketing: Enhance Your Business!
Mar 18th
There are broadly three offline ways to grab someone’s attention. It may be a vendor you are trying to impress. It may be an affiliate you are trying to promote and get them on board. Or thank someone because you want to build a relationship with them. I have tried it for all of them. There are three quick tips I wish to share with you.
Tip1 – Avoid sending letters in boring United Postal Service envelopes: If it is important enough send a FedEx envelope it gets opened far quicker gets a lot more attention. Why? Beats me. But if I have a bunch of mail and a FedEx envelope is sitting there, I open the FedEx envelope. It cost a little bit more money but it carries more impact.
Tip2 – Why don’t people use postcards anymore: It’s really cheap, for 75 cents a card they’ll produce it and mail it for you at random time. You have a launch coming up? You got something you need from people. Put it on a postcard its cheap it’s effective and people don’t get as many anymore. It’s better than email because we get emails all the time.
Tip3 – Gift People: When someone does something good for you, acknowledge it. It helps you build that relationship with them more. I just did that recently, I was in India. This is a true story. Somebody took a whole week out of their very busy schedule to take me around and introduce me to some amazing people. One of whom I am the biggest fan of and I have been trying to contact for a year. He took me right into his home to meet with him. It was one of the coolest things ever but the bigger part of it wasn’t that he made that connection.
It was that for that week he took all his time and just dedicated it to me. During that week I heard him say over and over again that he wanted an iPad. So when I came back to the US, I bought him an iPad and I sent it to him as a thank you. I was just around five or six hundred bucks. Now that relationship is that much stronger and he knows how much I appreciate the things he did for me. So in the future we both can work for a better tomorrow and we build a relationship of trust & appreciation.
So buy gifts do what you need to do. It’s not bribing, it’s showing appreciation. Using offline stuff and thank you email is not enough. You want to be remembered do something different. My tip for the day use it. I bet you’ll get a lot out of it.
This doesn’t have to rob your bank initially – just use it on KEY people to help your business grow. Believe it or not, it’s the MOST important when you’re just starting!
Merging Your Online and Offline Marketing
Mar 17th
There is 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 will also find those who avoid the internet like the plague and think you do not 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 cannot have ads online that direct people to your physical location? I have seen plenty of ads online that are for completely offline businesses. Now, you can still often find a website for them that give 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 will 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.
In addition, 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 are 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. Look at the entire marketing field and decide on what will work best for your company.
You do not want to fail to capitalize on a great style of marketing simply because you did not think it would work with your company.
