Off-line Marketing for Your On-line Business

With the exploding numbers of on-line businesses, it is increasingly more difficult, and far more expensive, to market your business effectively on-line. Internet businesses are now turning to the off-line world to advertise. Here is what you can do to market your on-line business, in the off-line world, without going broke.

Off-line marketing consists of print, direct mail and TV/Radio advertising. Although TV and Radio are the most effective means of off-line marketing, they are cost prohibitive for most on-line businesses. So for the purposes of this article, we will concentrate only on Print and Direct Mail.

Print ads include everything from simple black & white flyers, distributed by hand at the mall, to a full-page color ad placed in a magazine. If you are a member of an industry organization, you can advertise in their related industry publications. This is the natural first choice when deciding which magazines or periodicals to advertise in.

When placing print ads, you will need to place the largest ad you can reasonably afford. And you will need to run it consistently over several weeks in order for it to be truly effective. Depending on your type of business, you can place ads in local "Penny Savers" magazines and in local and regional newspapers at fairly reasonable rates.

Additionally, posting or handing out flyers at malls, supermarkets, parking lots, etc. is another surprisingly cost-effective method of offline marketing. For example, if your site targets a certain industry, lets say