Offline Advertising Intro
I talk a lot about offline strategies in my tutorials for a number of reasons:1. When they are successful, they are often massively successful and long term income.
2. Very little competition relative to marketing the same offer online.
3. Offline traffic is more responsive to direct advertising where as online traffic is very often in "research" or "surf" mode.
4. Statistically, an offline campaign to targeted traffic is three times more likely to be profitable to an online campaign to targeted traffic.
There's a large fear surrounding offline advertising which can be attributed to a number of fallacies including high costs, high risk, and high time consumption.
I can tell you without hesitation that offline advertising can be extremely inexpensive (less expensive than online in many respects), risk is no more than you would see in any other form of traffic, and once you get a few months experience under your belt, your rolodex is full with all the resources you need for any campaign and setup will be a breeze.
Not to mention the whole goal here is for me to lend my years of experience, past and current successes and just as important, tens of thousands of dollars in screw ups to make sure you get on the fast track to success.
The number one trait in a successful offline marketer is "open eyes open ears". You must understand that phenomenal advertising opportunities for you are EVERYWHERE, and you need to program your mind to recognize these at every turn.
Let's use a live example.
This is The Real Estate Book:
You've no doubt seen this free publication or one of their other brands such as Apartment Finder in your local grocery store or stand alone racks (If you reside in the US).
Passed by it a million times I bet, maybe even used it yourself to find a home or apartment, but what you need to do is program your brain to start recognizing these opportunities for massively targeted advertising.
I've run FreeCreditReport.com multiple times in brands like apartment finder with great success, I've run online mortgage quotes in brands like Real Estate Book, and I've done private deals with companies that specialized in services like raising your credit score by 100 points in less than 30 days to get that home loan or apartment rental.
I've also run a grant offer catered to home buyers. "The government wants to pay you to buy real estate". It pulled extremely well.
One of my favorite things to do is create my own offers and products for great traffic or just build an email list to mail future offers to.
For example, I can do a free report on 50 things you must know before buying a home in (state) using endless information that's already out there and completely done by our content creation staff which you as DIM members will have full access to.
The traffic goes to a high quality landing page offering the free report by email. The report would be filled with resources from loan quotes, to credit repair, and if you've paid attention to tutorials like "Legal Cookie Stuffing" you might already know that they are stuffed with all those cookies in the guide right on the download page before they even read it.
One thing I learned very quickly about email list building is that though a super targeted list is fantastic in many respects if the market is large and lucrative, any fresh email list is extremely valuable because of the old adage:
"Everyone wants to be thin, rich, and happy"
So basically, the list may have been built consisting of people interested in buying a house for example, but those people are nothing more than everyday consumers and I'll mail them anything from financial freedom products to weight loss and self development.
We'll talk in great detail about how to spam without having spam issues in coming tutorials.
One of the reasons people assume this is so expensive is when you look at a publication like real estate book, it's a national brand with 20 million readers per month.
People don't realize that almost no one advertises nationally, it's broken up into smaller local markets. I actually do advertise nationally, but only AFTER I've done some smaller campaigns in different regions which is very cost effective.
Many times it only costs me a few hundred dollars to see if my ad will be profitable. If it is, I'll expand into a few more markets, still good, then I'll go much larger.
This is one of hundreds of series I'm going to show you, but the process from start to finish is almost always the same:
1. Find the advertising opportunity: In this case it was as simple as leaving the grocery store.
2. Find the contact: Sometimes the advertising opportunity is listed right in the publication, sometimes it's on the website of the company that owns it, sometimes it's nowhere to be found and you need to call the company to inquire. For Real Estate Guide there is a phone number right on the front cover and there is also a link on the main website which goes to http://www.treb.com/treb/agentcorner/tre...es1&2.html
3. Get the pricing, placements, availability, and reach: We want to know how much this is going to cost us, what spots we can advertise on (if it's a publication), how soon we can get our ad up, and how many people it will be in front of.
4. Ask questions: How many advertisers have purchased additional ad spots? Who are they? Are there ad placements that have statistically performed better than others? ie half page, full page, back cover etc.
5. Negotiate: Remember that when buying advertising, as far as you're concerned whatever price they give you is too expensive. The sticker price serves one of only two purposes for the seller, it's either three times what they want to get for the spot because they know experienced buyers are going to haggle them to death, or it's a huge bonus because first time buyers are dumb enough to pay it.
6. Record all this data however you are comfortable: I use excel spreadsheets grouped in files by advertising type and demographic. So this contact would go on my sheet for Print Advertising/Free/Real Estate. The "Free" is because it's a free publication, the other two categories I use for print are one time cost publications and recurring which would be subscription publications.
7. Find the potential offers: It may surprise some of you that this is the last step in the process (at least how I do it). The offer is irrelevant to me initially because if I was to go in with a specific offer in my mind, I could easily be jaded by a number of factors including price if I'm not 100% confident in running it. For me the source is what is important because even if I can't find an offer today, I may come across one next week or next month, in some cases next year, or I may build my own to suit the traffic.
Having an ever growing file of advertising options full of information is the key to your offline marketing success.
Also important to remember are there are no limits to advertising type, great traffic is EVERYWHERE, and the ways of obtaining it are vast.
I personally advertise every month on/in:
Classified Ads
Newspapers
Radio
Major and niche magazines both free and paid
Free publications
Flyers
Coupon Packs
Counter Displays
Direct Mail campaigns
Grocery store closed circuit television
Local television
Scratch off cards - Very sneaky methods, VERY effective
Billboards....and wait till you see how cost effective these are now and how well CPA trial offers work on them :)
Placemats in Diners - One of the cheapest and most profitable advertising sources I've ever found.
My whole life is basically advertising, I'm consumed with it, it becomes like a drug addiction and when you see the power, effectiveness and easiness you'll never stop.
My fiancée after 10 years of knowing me and seeing me do this still can't believe all the stuff I pick up randomly and all the phone numbers I write down but that's a huge part of it, and it's paid for one hell of a lifestyle so she's not complaining.
The grocery store is like ad heaven to me, I constantly pick up those stupid horoscope guides for $3, and little rag magazines they have at the checkout, those are a gold mine and target one of the easiest demographics of people to sell to, women, 30s to 50s who quite frankly are completely retarded and will buy anything.
I think this is going to be massively fun for all the members here, and more importantly massively profitable.
This stuff isn't taught anywhere else mostly for the fact that 99% of the people who claim to be marketing gurus, have never really marketed anything besides their shitty products on how to make millions of dollars as a marketer. Every day you have new PPC spy tools and traffic courses rammed down your throat, but one of the easiest, least saturated, profitable traffic sources is never discussed, and that's what I want to bring into the equation.
I'm still going to keep a lot of focus on the online promotion and exploits as well, it's just as valuable and just as profitable, but what people don't realize because of so many myths and unfounded fears is that learning offline advertising is so much easier than learning online advertising and if I someone offered me 10 million dollars if I could take a know nothing bum off the street and make him a successful six figure marketer in under a year, it would be offline advertising for online offers that I would be teaching him, not PPC, PPV, Banner, or anything to do with online ads.
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