Internet Marketing

Promoting Your Blog Using Offline Marketing

Using traditional offline marketing techniques to market your online blog seems like it could be a daunting task, rife with frustration and needless papers and phone calls. However, by doing all of your marketing online, you leave out a huge number of potential readers. If you are blogging for fun or for money, the point is you want people to read what you write. Without readers, all of your work and fantastic writing is for nothing.

You don’t have to worry; though…integrating tried-and-true offline marketing methods with more modern techniques is not as hard as it sounds. There are 3 easy ways you can get started advertising your blog offline. Each of them is unique and helpful on its own, and they work well together. All of them are low-cost, and have proven effective time and time again.

Business Cards

One of the best ways to get the word out about your blog is with the use of good, old fashioned business cards. Keeping these handy in your wallet, glove box, and jacket pockets (don’t wash them!) will enable you to network everywhere you go. They are relatively inexpensive to print – you could even do them yourself, if you really wanted to save money. Here are 3 tips to help you with your amazing business cards:

Don’t print too many. Your contact information, address, job title, or logo may change. It is recommended that you print no more than 1000 cards at a time for the heavy distributor; 500 should be sufficient for the average at-home self-promoter.

Don’t be too flashy. The goal of a business card is for people to be able to contact you at a later date. Unless you can do it tastefully, try to avoid a multitude of sparkles, glitter, graphics, and logos. Utilize the free space on both sides of the card. Remember: people will contact you and have a better chance of visiting your blog if your business cards are neat, clean, and easy to read.

Do treat them like candy. Give them to everyone you know. Post them on community bulletin boards. Check out local businesses and schools; a lot of them have cork boards available for community and business-related information.

Fliers

Fliers can be an invaluable resource when you are thinking about reviving your blog with some updated offline marketing techniques. With virtually any option available in size, color, cost, and quantity, using and creating fliers is easier than ever. A number of popular office services companies are available to help you design a flier, or you can hire a graphic designer. Just like with business cards, you can post them everywhere. Be sure to do a little research with your city or county to make sure you are only posting fliers in appropriate areas.

Conventions and Lectures

Depending on your prime reading target, there may be conventions or lectures held in your area – or even outside of your immediate area if you are willing to travel relevant to your blog topic. Purchasing space – or getting it free – at a convention is a great way to draw potential readers to your blog. If you choose the right place, you are guaranteed to have patrons that are already interested in what you have to say. They did come to the convention, after all.

Regardless of the method you choose, remembering the many options available to you via offline marketing will be helpful in increasing your overall reader base. When you blog, you want people to read your blog. Taking advantage of some offline techniques will help to ensure people find you…even when they are away from the internet.

Jen Silva is a writer for Choosewhat.com. ChooseWhat is a company that provides product reviews and test data for business services and products such as business cards and PBX services. Their goal is to help small companies make informed buying decisions on business solutions that help their business.

Becoming Shareable – Let the People Talk!

Enjoy this guest post by Ben ~

Social media has become an essential part of web promotion. Not only is it effective and helpful for increasing the popularity of your business or website, but it is absolutely necessary! Proper use of social media such as Twitter and Facebook will not only help your site gain exposure, but it will act as a catalyst for making your content more prominent and even viral.

The easiest and most important step to take when stepping into the “social” scene is adding buttons to your site to help visitors share your content. In other words, make your website “shareable” because the last thing you want to do is inhibit their ability to advertise your business for you. People love to communicate and we also love to share. Social media is the Internet’s analogy for word-of-mouth advertising. Neglecting to add buttons on your site for visitors to share your content is a lot like stripping them of their voice – let them talk!

TweetMeme is a fantastic tool for making your content very shareable. It adds a simple button at the top (or bottom) of all of your posts that people can use to tweet your content with literally 2-clicks. A common trend you will notice when observing popular sites in almost every niche is the overwhelming amount of tweets in comparison to “likes” on Facebook. Tweeting is easier and faster, and in an online world where we skim almost everything we read, we need to have quick sharing options for our visitors.

A common and effective layout for making your site easy to share is to include a button at the top of every post for Twitter and/or Facebook, a set of buttons at the bottom for a few popular social sites, and also the presence of similar sharing buttons consistently displayed on your sidebar. For the sidebar, the most important inclusions are Twitter, Facebook, and your RSS Feed. You might have other sites like LinkedIn that you like to use or a series of videos on YouTube – these would be good additions for your sharing buttons.

To further emphasize the importance of properly using social media, lets cover a scenario:

Someone visits your site and reads an article. They really like it, but they don’t see any sharing buttons and so it may not even cross their mind to tweet it or like it, so they move on with their day.
This same visitor comes to your site and reads the same article. However, this time there are social sharing buttons featured prominently on the page. This visitor tweets the post and it is quickly exposed to all of this user’s followers (dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people).

And it doesn’t stop there. The people who see that tweet might tweet it too, they might look through your site and tweet another post, or they might follow you on Twitter and become exposed to all of your new tweets. Simple processes like this can quickly multiply and expand upon your daily traffic, and all of this happens simply because you have made your website shareable.

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