Offline Advertising

Just because you are online, doesn't mean you should ignore offline advertising for your site.

You are able to track your results in ways that direct marketers in the past could only dream of... -- Tim Kerber

There are still cost effective opportunities to generate sales and branding for your online business.

The thing you obviously want to avoid is wasting your efforts or money doing it.

Tracking Your Results

In "the old days" it was difficult tracking the results of advertising. Unless you only had one ad campaign promoting one product, it could become a challenging tracking real results.

You are now able to track your offline advertising results in ways that direct marketers in the past could only dream of.

You can literally see:

• how many people arrived at your site from a particular ad
• how many of those people actually became a customer from that ad

and most importantly

• whether that ad was profitable so you know whether to run it again or not

With every ad you run (online or off), you should be sending people to a unique link on your site. That link is made specifically for that ad.

If you have an affiliate program for your site, you are in luck. You can track exactly how many people responded and how many sales were achieved from the response.

Let's say I wanted to advertise the Venetian Plaster DVD I produced. For an ad going into the June issue of "Better Homes and Gardens", I would create an affiliate account. I would give this affiliate account a descriptive name. Something like "bhg06" (Better Homes Gardens 06 = June)

I would create then an affiliate link leading to the sales page for the product:

http://www.mysite.com/venetianplaster?affID=bhg06

Notice the ?affID=bhg06 at the end of the link. That's how my site knows which affiliate (in this case which ad) sent the person to my site.

I would want to shorten this link however. That is too long to have appear in an offline print ad.

Instead I would create a redirect page such as:

www.mysite.com/venetiandvd

This page would redirect anyone who went to it immediately through the affiliate link ( http://www.mysite.com/venetianplaster?affID=bhg06 ). This not only sends them to the correct sales page, but just as importantly, it tags them as having come from the Better Homes and Gardens ad from the June issue.

Setting Up The Redirect

A redirect page is very easy to set up.

This page has only one purpose. When someone visits the page, it immediately redirects them to another link on the site.

All you have to do is include the following code in the meta tag (header) section of the html from your page:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://www.mysite.com/venetianplaster?affID=bhg06">

(The above code is all on one line)

If you notice, it has the url of where you want the redirect traffic to go to.

Another Option

You can also set up what is called a subdomain redirection.

This would appear similar to:

http://venetiandvd.mysite.com

Notice the "venetiandvd" ahead of the domain name, separated by a period.

Some sites let you easily set up such subdomain names right from the control panel of the site. When you create the subdomain name, it will ask you where you want to redirect the traffic to that asks for that page. You would enter the link to the sales page with the affiliate link ID tagged on the end.

Important!

Make sure you check your links to make sure everything is working properly.

Nothing would be worse then having an ad run where the link wasn't working right. That's would be a complete failure.

Once the ad is out, you will see exactly how profitable it was. This will let you know immediately whether it is worth continuing to advertise in this magazine or publication.

Through various testing you are going to narrow down which ads are worthwhile and which ones are a waste.

Very smart and effective!