As an affiliate marketer, there are many ways to promote your business online, but the biggest problem you’ll probably have is getting noticed in the first place.Email open rates can be notoriously low. Pay-per-click can be extremely expensive—and unless you get it absolutely right, it can lose you money hand over fist.Pay-per-view can be even worse. With PPC, the visitor has at least shown some form of interest, but with PPV he may not even notice your ad—yet you are still paying for it.Banners can be costly, too. And, a flashing banner is pretty annoying.
So what else can you do to promote the products you are marketing? The answer, my friend, is to go offline. Believe it or not, offline marketing still works extremely well. If you stop to think about it for a moment, major corporations still pour a lot of money into offline marketing methods and it’s not stopping anytime soon.
Direct Mail
Yes, good old-fashioned direct mail still works. You can buy or rent lists in exactly the same way that you do for solo ads. You will also very often find that buying a list is actually less expensive than a solo ad.
In fact, your letter or postcard is much more likely to be read, or at least glanced over briefly before being thrown away. So if you think about it, open rates are a lot higher than with email.
You can also do a lot more with a direct mail piece than an email. It is not unusual for a print sales letter to run to 16 pages, and believe it or not, they still get read.
However, there is another way to use direct mail that involves far less printing and gets a 100% open rate.
It’s called postcard marketing. You can use a postcard as a teaser to get people to visit your website.
One way to achieve this is to offer a free report. This also enables you to build a list, since they have to enter their details to get the report.
Your free report will give some information about the product/service that you are promoting, and at the end will say something along the lines of “if you want to get to know all of the details about XYZ, just click here [on your affiliate link].”
Telephone Sales
Telephone sales are still used extensively by major corporations because it works. They wouldn’t use tele-sales if it didn’t. It can be more expensive because you have to pay people to do it, and they need training. However, it is also possible to hire people who are self-employed and simply pay them a commission for every sale that results.
Leaflet Distribution
This is more of a shotgun approach for certain geographic areas, and won’t work for something in a very small niche. However, it can work well for things that a lot of people might be interested in.
You can get 5,000 or 10,000 leaflets printed very cheaply. Of course, you have to allow for the cost of distribution. You can use leaflets to direct people to your website for your free report, or you can send them directly to the product you are promoting.
Personal Networking
Perhaps you belong to a club, a gym, or a chamber of trade. You can get people interested in your product simply by telling them about it. Of course, you won’t make a high volume of sales this way, but it is an effective method of promoting high-end products.
Magazine and Newspaper Advertising
People still buy local newspapers and magazines. Just look at your local newsagent to see how many magazines are on the shelves. Your product has to be of interest to a particular niche, of course, but you can still get people to visit your website for the simple reason that you KNOW they are interested in the subject.
Advertising in newspapers is also a shotgun approach, but can still work for some products and services.
As you can see, offline advertising does work, and works very well indeed for many products. Think about the right method of approach for your product, and then give it a try.
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