Advertising Your Web Site Offline

The most obvious place to advertise your Web site is in literature you already use every day: your business cards, stationery, and printed brochures. Adding your Web address to them is no big deal. Indeed, it is becoming such a normal part of printed business material these days that its absence will probably be more noticed than its inclusion.

Sometimes Cooperation Is the Best Promotion

If you have a small or new business, you are going to have to display a little more imagination than the big companies IAB's information is aimed at. Here are some ideas for promotion using online advertising that cost almost nothing:

• Find other online business people who sell to the same customers you do, but don't sell competitive products, and exchange links or ad banners with them. There are a number of formal exchanges that do this sort of thing, but they generally limit their exchanges to banner ads only, and about half the banners they run on your site will not be cross-promoters, just plain ad banners unrelated to your business. This is how the banner exchange companies earn their money. You can much better on your own job if you're willing to do your own research and make direct contact with non-competitive merchants or information providers to set up your own swap arrangements and if you make your own deals you won't be limited to ad banners, but can work with text links, mutual testimonials, and whatever else you and your swap partners dream up together.

• If your primary "product" is news or information, content sharing arrangements can help boost traffic. NewsForge (www.newsforge.com) has agreements with the U.K.-based online IT publication, The Register (www.theregister.co.uk), and with NewsFactor Networks (www.newsfactor.com), neither of which competes directly with NewsForge's concentration on Linux and Open Source software news, but goes for more general information technology audiences. Competition is good, but so is cooperation. For niche-oriented news sites, especially, a chance to broaden coverage at little or no cost is a bonus over and above readership gains that content sharing can produce. The original, pre-commercial Internet was built on cooperation. It's still a good idea and not only online, either.

The next phase is to add your URL to all your advertising. Whether you're a solo entrepreneur or an executive working for a world-wide corporate empire, you need to make sure that as many potential customers as possible see your Web site, because it is the least expensive, easiest-to-update piece of customer contact material you can possibly have, so the more people you can get to go to your Web site, then bookmark it and return to it over and over, the more effective a sales tool it will become. But this should not be a one-way street. If you run regional newspaper inserts or run one-store specials, your Web site should point back to these specials, and should even suggest buying the newspapers where you consistently run sale ads, because customers can easily carry your paper-printed sales notices into the store with them, while they are unlikely to carry their computers when they go shopping.

Yes, you can (and should) include online coupons on your Web site that customers can print out and take with them, but you should also use your Web site to help boost your offline promotions whenever possible, just as TV station Web sites put their schedules online to help boost viewership. This goes right back to the basic philosophy of using your Web site as a business tool, rather than looking at your Web site as a business in and of itself.

But your Web site is a valuable business tool, and drumming its address into customers' heads is worthwhile. That address should be on the sides of your trucks, if you own trucks. It should be at the bottom of the screen during the entire run time of all your TV ads. It should be in every print ad you run, perhaps placed more prominently than the lower right hand corner, where it often ends up in ads run by companies that haven't yet learned how to use the Internet effectively. That Web address that URL, that domain name is as valuable as a storefront sign on a busy commercial street, and you must not only choose it as carefully as you would choose a retail location, but you must make sure it is as easy to find as a store you own.