How to Use traditional advertising to enhance your Web Marketing

Knowing how to use offline advertising in internet marketing can give you a significant advantage over your competitors, since many do not use offline methods to advertise their products.

Offline advertising is particularly relevant if you are selling a product, or offering a service, that attract customers locally. For example, you could offer a fitness aid at your local leisure center. Many leisure or fitness centers will allow you to put a free poster offering your product, but even if they charge you for it the price is usually small. Perhaps you have a golf training aid that you can advertise at your local golf club.

Local classified ads are also a good means of getting your product some local publicity. The classified ads pages or even adverts placed on selected pages of your local press, frequently provide you with local orders. The beauty of these is that they are very easy to follow up, either with back-end products or new ones. You need not even restrict yourself to the local press. How often have you seen an internet marketing advert on the national press? They are not uncommon, and although expensive, they must produce a good return.

If you have a niche website, it could be worth your while browsing round your local newsagent and checking out the magazines on display. You know the kind - all these racks upon racks of magazines on every topic you can think of. Have a word with the newsvendor and find out some of the more popular magazines that cover your niche. These could be good publications for placing your adverts, especially if they are not too expensive and they have a good circulation.

Poster campaigns can also work well. You can advertise with posters in many shopping malls, and some stores also offer you the opportunity place an A5 poster for only pennies a week. Have your own business cards printed with your internet business contact details, such as website address and email address in addition to your phone number. Put your website address on everything, and have a signature that use on all correspondence. Not just emails and forum postings, but also offline correspondence such as letters, invoices, receipts and anything else you send to other people.

Another form of offline marketing that most people have never heard of, let alone use, is buzz advertising. This type of advertising has been growing in popularity recently, especially by offline businesses. It is used extensively by some auto companies and by cosmetics companies. Buzz advertising involves getting a verbal buzz going about your website or product. Some companies pay people specifically to verbally promote their products by approaching strangers, striking up conversations and bringing up the product in the conversation.

“Say, have you heard about the latest perfume from —-!” While not yet common it is getting more popular. Of course, the buzz need not be started off by someone you have employed to do it, but you can do it yourself. You can get your family and relatives involved as well. Before you know it, everybody might be talking about your product or your great new website. That’s how YouTube and MySpace got so popular.

If you have a van or pick-up get your business name and website address painted on the site. It’s easier to get a buzz going if people see your website in their face all the time, on vehicles, on posters, in newspapers and magazines, and even chalked on walls! Well, perhaps not the last one, but that would sure get people noticing your website! Do you get the idea? Get your website name known in every way that you can.

How about a local radio slot, with you explaining the virtues and benefits of your product, service or website? Stress the benefits, and you need not restrict it to local radio. Try for a national radio slot or even TV if your business is sizeable enough. There are no restrictions to the advertising methods you can use. Hire a loudspeaker and shout it from the rooftops!

Online advertising methods are very effective in internet marketing, since they can be visible to people all round the world, but if you know how to use offline advertising it can also work very nicely for you, and bring you a lot of business you would not otherwise have.

Epicado Serp’s reports presents your current rank and the top sites using easy to read, intuitive tables. The websites are shown in (customizable) colors for easy differentiation between your websites and your competitor’s.

Different tables are generated and displayed in real time when you pick a different keyword or search engine. The tables can be interactively sorted by multiple columns.

Current Rank Report

The Current Rank report shows you the current position of your website compared to your competition. An alternative mode of operation for this report is to include all the keywords at once, for a quick overview of the websites positions in the selected search engine.

The Current Rank Report is tied to a date: the date when the project was updated. That means that the report will display (for each website in the given Search Engine/Keywords combination), the Position, Previous Positions, Change, Page, Best Position - all for the date when the update took place.

You can find detailed information about the Current Rank report in the User Guide.

Keyword Rank Report

The Keyword Rank report shows the position of your website for each keyword. You can see the rank information for all the keywords in your project in a tabular report. This information reflects the selected search engine - website combination. The Chart view contains information about the rank evolution of the selected websites, on the selected search engine, with all the active keywords in your project.

Search Engine Rank Report

The Search Engine Rank report shows the position of your website for each search engine.

Top Sites Report

This is a tabular report that presents the list of all the websites (and their positions) for the selected search engines and keywords. This is the same information you would obtain by manually searching in a browser window, except that the Top Sites report can also give you information about what happened in time.

HTML reports only - This report also shows historical information about the search engine results. To see what happened at a certain date, all you need to do is select the date you are interested in from the Date drop down. The Compare To drop down allows you to compare the currently selected date with a previous date, to see what was changed.

Overview Report

The Overview report aggregates all the available information into one single report. It is split into three parts, corresponding to each of the three entities that it deals with: Websites, Search Engines and Keywords.

HTML reports only - In this report, you can select multiple items in the input panel. This will allow you to compare the results between the selected inputs. In the report, a new column will be displayed that will contain the inputs you selected.

HTML reports only - Also, you can sort any column in the report by clicking on the corresponding column header. This will sort the items in that column ascending or descending. For Keywords, you have advanced sorting options in the Keywords tab of the Project Settings dialog. The Overview report will display the keywords in the same order they appear in the Project Settings dialog.

Visibility

The Visibility report gives you an overview of the visibility of your website in the search engines.

On the left side, you have the three entities that you can select as input: Websites, Search Engines and Keywords. On the right side, you have several criteria for comparison between the websites available in your project, such as: First Result, In Top 10, Ranked, Moved Up, Moved Down, Visibility Score, Visibility Percent, Site Rank, Average Site Rank.

The visibility score is the sum of all visibility points for each keyword based on their position and is calculated for each website for the selected search engines and keywords. The site rank is a number that tells how well a website is ranked, and is calculated by a formula for the selected search engine and keywords.