So I haven't posted a thread of value in a little while so I figured I would re-cap on some offline to online marketing methods I've planned for myself over the next couple of month and what they could mean for a lot of people who think that online affiliate marketing is all about SEO, PPC, ect...
When in reality online affiliate marketing can also be done using offline marketing methods which can be fairly cheap if you know where to look.
Anyway what I'm about to explain is nothing new but in my online affiliate journey I've learned that a lot of the times people overlook how simple it can be to advertise offline and make money online by doing so.
The most current offline to online marketing method I've planned for myself has actually been done by a lot of people in the past and a lot of people still continue to do it but that does not mean it isn't profitable.
What I've done is simple, you see I live in a small town with a current population of about 12,000 to 15,000 people and about 30,000 to 40,000 in total if you include all of the surrounding populations.
What I did was went out and did some readily availble market research about the demographics of the town I live in, I've found the average unemployment rate, the average household income, the average age of people, but more importantly I've also found out some demographics about the people who read our local newspaper.
From here I've determined that in my surrounding area the unemployment rate has went up a fair bit during the past year so I've decided to run some offers related to making money online, this is not the only niche that has been suited to my location but we will use this one for this example (I'm actually testing out about 8 to 10 different offers via this method right now).
Once I have determined what the demographics were for my town and learned a little about the demographics of the people who read our local newspaper, I went out to see how much it would cost to advertise a few of the online affiliate marketing offers in the paper and I found out that for a full 1 page spread it would be $1400 for my local area and surrounding areas and about $3400 to reach a lot more people (Approx 1.2 million readers in total).
I figured this was a bit much to spend for an initial test so I took a step back and decided to see how much it would cost to place a classified ad in the paper instead (Simple Text Based Ad) and learned that it will cost me a minor $65 to run a text based classified ad for 3 weeks (Monday - Friday) in the paper and on the weekends the online ads would be shown via there website.
Now we are getting somewhere $65 is extremely cheap to test out various offers in the newspaper.
Next I created a bunch of ads which I think would do well and from there I went out and found a few really brandable domain names (.ca cause I live in Canada but only cause the .com's were mainly taken).
From here I registered a few via GoDaddy and made my info proxy safe so people in town wouldn't do a WHOIS lookup and ask me a billion stupid questions once they find out who is doing this.
Now on the domain side of things I set up a few simple PHP redirects which basically instantly place the visitors directly on the merchants landing page, this is called direct linking and is not recomended to do via online methods.
Anyway what my domain does is give people a way to easily remember a name to tell there friends and family about, when they get to my domain I do some tracking stats and place the domain name into a sub-id of my affiliate link so I can determine which offline marketing methods are making me the most for which offer I'm promoting but when its all said in done the user will type in a name and instantly redirect to the merchants page and be none-the-wiser (Did I mention a large majority of the population in my town will never notice they typed in one domain and landed at another and if they did realize they wouldn't know what the fuck it meant anyway).
So now I'm running a direct link campaign via various classified newspaper ads and am able to track the entire thing online because of my domains, the total cost per niche or offer test comes out to be about $75 Canadian dollars but most of the offers payout at $35 bucks each so 2 conversions out of a 3 week ad campaign will mean I broke even, should easily be able to nail that goal, if not oh well its only $75 bucks who cares.
So that is one very simplistic (But drawn the fuck out) offline to online advertising method, this can be done with any niche, in any town, anywhere in the world so don't think you can't find a place to advertise the online offers.
But this is not only what I'm doing, if you look around your town like I did and really look at the advertising mediums you should discover some local magazines or publications related to major industry sectors.
For instance my town is big for tourism (hunting and fishing) and there are lots of local fishing and hunting guides and a lot of local and smaller scale magazines related to this industry around my town which offer advertising for fairly low prices.
What you can do is also use this simple buy a brandable domain (Even if it has no online type-in or SEO value), set up a bit of tracking and place this brandable link into various offline marketing sectors around your town or find smaller towns to advertise in and do a redirect to the merchant when your domain is typed in.
You can track each seperate medium by having a seperate domain for each place for instance lets say I wanted to test a classified ad in my newspaper but also wanted to test the same offer in a local magazine ad, what I would do is buy 2 different brandable domains which point to the same offer, and for your affiliate links sub-id you would insert the domain or ad source.
What this will do is restrict people from having to type in something like mysite.com?id=2 or mysite.com/sectionA, its better to have just mysite.com its easier to remember and looks better in an offline advertisement.
By doing this you can track exactly which source the offline person is coming from and determine which one is the most profitable based upon which medium you are using to advertise with.
This is just a very small (Just drawn the fuck out) way to promote online offers offline and to see which is more profitable or un-profitable, its very very easy to do and takes just as much if not less time then you would spend running a full out campaign and website online.
I'll continue this thread with my own statistics and I'll supply you with PHP tracking code examples along the way as I begin to test different offline advertising mediums to promote online products and services.
If you want to share an offline to online marketing method with the community then this is the place to do it, don't worry about hi-jacking this thread of creating an example much better then mine, this post was to encourage more dynamic ways of thinking and to show people that online affiliate marketing can be done in an extremely wide variedy of ways.
P.S. One last thing you could also do is to take out ads in various local colleges and schools with grade 12 students to promote online college grants and student loan programs, there are lots of those floating around.
Also if your really curious grab your recent local newpaper quickly flip to the classifiedes and look for ads which direct you to a domain name and type it into your browser and watch for the redirect I bet you'll find this is being done by a few people in your commuinty already, if not then the market is yours to dominate.
And don't be shy to look at the marketing methods of your local businesses which merchants have offers for online as well.
When in reality online affiliate marketing can also be done using offline marketing methods which can be fairly cheap if you know where to look.
Anyway what I'm about to explain is nothing new but in my online affiliate journey I've learned that a lot of the times people overlook how simple it can be to advertise offline and make money online by doing so.
The most current offline to online marketing method I've planned for myself has actually been done by a lot of people in the past and a lot of people still continue to do it but that does not mean it isn't profitable.
What I've done is simple, you see I live in a small town with a current population of about 12,000 to 15,000 people and about 30,000 to 40,000 in total if you include all of the surrounding populations.
What I did was went out and did some readily availble market research about the demographics of the town I live in, I've found the average unemployment rate, the average household income, the average age of people, but more importantly I've also found out some demographics about the people who read our local newspaper.
From here I've determined that in my surrounding area the unemployment rate has went up a fair bit during the past year so I've decided to run some offers related to making money online, this is not the only niche that has been suited to my location but we will use this one for this example (I'm actually testing out about 8 to 10 different offers via this method right now).
Once I have determined what the demographics were for my town and learned a little about the demographics of the people who read our local newspaper, I went out to see how much it would cost to advertise a few of the online affiliate marketing offers in the paper and I found out that for a full 1 page spread it would be $1400 for my local area and surrounding areas and about $3400 to reach a lot more people (Approx 1.2 million readers in total).
I figured this was a bit much to spend for an initial test so I took a step back and decided to see how much it would cost to place a classified ad in the paper instead (Simple Text Based Ad) and learned that it will cost me a minor $65 to run a text based classified ad for 3 weeks (Monday - Friday) in the paper and on the weekends the online ads would be shown via there website.
Now we are getting somewhere $65 is extremely cheap to test out various offers in the newspaper.
Next I created a bunch of ads which I think would do well and from there I went out and found a few really brandable domain names (.ca cause I live in Canada but only cause the .com's were mainly taken).
From here I registered a few via GoDaddy and made my info proxy safe so people in town wouldn't do a WHOIS lookup and ask me a billion stupid questions once they find out who is doing this.
Now on the domain side of things I set up a few simple PHP redirects which basically instantly place the visitors directly on the merchants landing page, this is called direct linking and is not recomended to do via online methods.
Anyway what my domain does is give people a way to easily remember a name to tell there friends and family about, when they get to my domain I do some tracking stats and place the domain name into a sub-id of my affiliate link so I can determine which offline marketing methods are making me the most for which offer I'm promoting but when its all said in done the user will type in a name and instantly redirect to the merchants page and be none-the-wiser (Did I mention a large majority of the population in my town will never notice they typed in one domain and landed at another and if they did realize they wouldn't know what the fuck it meant anyway).
So now I'm running a direct link campaign via various classified newspaper ads and am able to track the entire thing online because of my domains, the total cost per niche or offer test comes out to be about $75 Canadian dollars but most of the offers payout at $35 bucks each so 2 conversions out of a 3 week ad campaign will mean I broke even, should easily be able to nail that goal, if not oh well its only $75 bucks who cares.
So that is one very simplistic (But drawn the fuck out) offline to online advertising method, this can be done with any niche, in any town, anywhere in the world so don't think you can't find a place to advertise the online offers.
But this is not only what I'm doing, if you look around your town like I did and really look at the advertising mediums you should discover some local magazines or publications related to major industry sectors.
For instance my town is big for tourism (hunting and fishing) and there are lots of local fishing and hunting guides and a lot of local and smaller scale magazines related to this industry around my town which offer advertising for fairly low prices.
What you can do is also use this simple buy a brandable domain (Even if it has no online type-in or SEO value), set up a bit of tracking and place this brandable link into various offline marketing sectors around your town or find smaller towns to advertise in and do a redirect to the merchant when your domain is typed in.
You can track each seperate medium by having a seperate domain for each place for instance lets say I wanted to test a classified ad in my newspaper but also wanted to test the same offer in a local magazine ad, what I would do is buy 2 different brandable domains which point to the same offer, and for your affiliate links sub-id you would insert the domain or ad source.
What this will do is restrict people from having to type in something like mysite.com?id=2 or mysite.com/sectionA, its better to have just mysite.com its easier to remember and looks better in an offline advertisement.
By doing this you can track exactly which source the offline person is coming from and determine which one is the most profitable based upon which medium you are using to advertise with.
This is just a very small (Just drawn the fuck out) way to promote online offers offline and to see which is more profitable or un-profitable, its very very easy to do and takes just as much if not less time then you would spend running a full out campaign and website online.
I'll continue this thread with my own statistics and I'll supply you with PHP tracking code examples along the way as I begin to test different offline advertising mediums to promote online products and services.
If you want to share an offline to online marketing method with the community then this is the place to do it, don't worry about hi-jacking this thread of creating an example much better then mine, this post was to encourage more dynamic ways of thinking and to show people that online affiliate marketing can be done in an extremely wide variedy of ways.
P.S. One last thing you could also do is to take out ads in various local colleges and schools with grade 12 students to promote online college grants and student loan programs, there are lots of those floating around.
Also if your really curious grab your recent local newpaper quickly flip to the classifiedes and look for ads which direct you to a domain name and type it into your browser and watch for the redirect I bet you'll find this is being done by a few people in your commuinty already, if not then the market is yours to dominate.
And don't be shy to look at the marketing methods of your local businesses which merchants have offers for online as well.
