Traditional marketing techniques are often overlooked when it comes to promoting your online business. One of my favorite methods of advertising my online businesses is through classified ads. Yes, online classifieds are a good way to promote your site, but have you thought about taking out a small ad in the local paper’s classified section?
A short ad will not cost you terribly much, but will drive qualified traffic to your site. The trick is to place them in the correct category. For a site such as this, I would place my ad in “business opportunities”. This is the section of the classifieds where people who are selling their business post.
Knowing the posts in a particular category will allow you to target your audience. I know that people reading the “business opportunities” section of the classifieds are entrepreneurial, looking for a new business to start or acquire and that they don’t really know exactly what direction they want to go yet. The perfect demographic for the content I’m writing here!
Another example of using classified ads to drive targeted traffic to your site; I do home loans. Tough market these days, but I have driven traffic to my home loans website – you can visit me at www.aboutcaliforniahomeloans.com – by running classified ads in the rental section of the paper. “Why rent when you can own, visit me on the web for more information”. No competition as not many people advertise in this manner, it is not a huge cost, and best of all - it works!
Going hand in hand with this marketing technique is a way to get your advertising in more papers for less money! A little known fact among advertisers is that each state has a newspaper association, usually called a press association. These press associations network a number of newspapers in that state. Instead of calling up individual newspapers and running ads individually, you can contact this press association and run ads across all papers in their network. Not only will this save you the time of having to call papers one by one, but it will also save you money. You will typically pay less for each ad going this route than going direct to the papers themselves.
Hopefully these are some good ideas that will help you think outside of the box. Give it a try, it will generate targeted traffic, regardless of what you are trying to promote. The biggest trick is to think outside of the box, put your ad in front of the correct demographic with the least amount of advertising competition. Good luck!
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