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While marketing a website, most marketers tend to look online and spend most part of their marketing budgets on the Internet. In a way this strategy is good, since online is where most of the Internet audiences spend their time. But that does not mean one should not spend their advertising dollars offline. Offline advertising has its own advantages and benefits. If you are serious about marketing your site, you cannot afford to ignore offline advertising.

Here I am listing 6 new effective ways to advertise a website offline.

1. Automotives - Automotives are a great way for advertising your website. You can place a sunshade on the backside of your car’s windshield. Ask your family and friends to do the same. Now, every time you or your friends move on the road, people will get to know about your website. Make sure you provide the full Internet address and a telephone number, if applicable. Not just cars but scooters, bikes and even buses can serve as a good advertising medium.

2. Mobile Ring tones - Today, wherever you go, you will get to hear the sound of a mobile phone. Mobile penetration is increasing day by day and therefore marketers are thinking of new techniques to advertise through mobile phones. If you have a radio/television ad you can use it as your mobile ring tone. Also, set your ad as your caller tune, so when somebody calls your on your mobile, he hears your ad. You can also set caller tunes for your organization’s main contact number. Whenever somebody calls on your company’s front desk, he/she will hear your ad.

3. Advertising in community radio and pod casts - Now a days community radio and pod casts are becoming very popular. One can locate communities and pod casts, which are related to the theme of their sites and advertise on shows aired over radio and pod casts. This way you get to reach a very targeted audience. Also, this advertising method is very effective yet cheap when compared to traditional television and radio.

4. SMS Marketing - SMS has invaded our lives in a big way. It is a short yet effective way of communication. If you don’t wish to speak to people, but still want to get your message across, than there is no better way than an SMS. Off-lately, marketers have started recognizing the opportunity that it provides them to market their website. One can easily run a contest, build awareness, or announce special offers, new product launches or services by sending SMS to relevant audiences. The biggest advantage of SMS marketing is it is cheap and ensures that the person actually gets to read your message.

5. Alliances with newspapers and magazines - Today, many newspapers and magazines carry weekly supplements on specific topics that relate to niche audiences. A website marketer can look out for such opportunities which relate to his website. The website can power content of a certain section of a newspaper or magazine. The website thus can garner some good branding as the website address will be displayed next to the article. Also, a website can offer counseling or answering service for a newspaper or magazine, where a senior person or a counselor can answer questions and resolve common problem and queries for newspaper and magazine readers. This activity creates awareness of your brand amongst your targeted audience, which might result in people visiting your website and showing interest in your product or services.

6. Offline Communities & functions - Advertising in community functions and social get together is picking up with time. A website can look to sponsor such functions and get-together’s where they think their target audience would be present. This way they can reach their customers and at the same time provide on the spot information to interested people. Examples of such functions can vary from school/college functions; alumni get-together’s, wedding functions, job fairs, corporate parties etc. This is by no means an exhaustive list of places where marketers can look to advertise. It depends on the opportunity and the kind of audiences visiting specific functions/places which marketers believe can become customers for their website.

All the above advertising options may or may not be suitable/feasible for certain websites. It’s for the marketing team of your organization to determine which of the methods listed here could work for them. A proper feasibility study and marketing plan can go a long way in a successful advertising campaign, which will help your site attract more visitors and customers from the offline advertising space.

Getting good links to your site is very critical for SEO. One of the most important thing to be kept in mind while building links is that quality always prevails over quantity. If you get 20 links to your site which are highly relevant and focused towards your site’s content then they are always better than 100 links which lack relevancy or have nothing to do with your site.

Following are the things which I think are important for getting and locating good links for your website.

1. Know your keywords - Before going ahead for a link building campaign, it is very important to decide which keywords you to wish to optimize. This is perhaps the most important phase of any link building campaign. Group your keywords by most important, important and not so important.

2. Look at the content of the link page - Give a hard look at the page on which your link will be placed. View the source code of the page, look at the title, description and even the keywords. Try to locate your keywords there, more the occurrences of your keywords in title, meta-tags and content, more relevant it becomes for your site.

3. Try getting different kind of links - One should try and get different variations of the link. For example,

• Get some links from high PR directories.
• Some from authority sites in the same domain.
• Some through link exchange with sites, which are ranking well for your keywords.

Like wise from other sources such as article sites, PR sites, forums etc.

4. Look at competitor links - This is a well-known strategy that holds good even today. Try searching for your keywords and make a list of sites which are ranking well in google, yahoo and msn. Now go to yahoo and locate backlinks of these site, make a note of sites/pages with which you think you might get links.

5. Avoid link farms and bad neighbourhoods – You should avoid links from sites/pages with a lot of outbound links. Link from a page with less than 10 outbound links is ideal, but this rule may not apply in all cases. For example, a page with PR 7, and 20 links might be an exception to this rule. There is a simple formula for judging the value of a outbound link, the same is given below.

Value of 1 outbound link = (Total number of links on the page) / (Google PR)

The lower this value the better it is for your site.

The above formula is just for the sake of undertanding the value of an outbound link, in real terms things like content of the page, structure and many other factors influence this value.

This concludes the first part of my post on getting and locating good links for your website. Stay tuned for my future post which will cover more details and facts on this topic.

Many people believe that google’s search network provides better conversions and ROI than the content network. While that may not always be wrong, but in certain cases reverse is true. If you follow some rules for optimizing your content campaigns, you can get a pretty descent and sometimes better conversions than the search network.

Following are the main things one should keep in mind while optimizing for google’s content network.

1. Use lesser and more binding keywords in an adgroup - One should try and use very related keywords in an adgroup, do not add keywords which might dilute your theme in any way. There is no hard and fast rule for the number of words which one can use, but 9/10 times it should be less than 50.

2. Try more general ads on the content network - When you write ads for the search network they tend to be more specific in the sense that people use dynamic insertion and keywords in their ad title. But when it comes to the content network, one should be a little more general. Since content network has a very wide reach it makes sense to relate your ads not just to your most relevant audience but also to your semi-relevant audience.

3 Try negative keywords - Try and use as many negative keywords as you can, that do not relate to the product/service that you are selling. e.g. if you are selling gsm mobile phones you might wish to add ‘cdma’ as a negative keyword in your ad group. You can also you site exclusion if you don’t want your ads to show on a particular site.

4. A/B test your ads - Once your ads are live its important to analyse which ad are working and which are not. Try and perform this analysis for at least 3-4 days. This way you will get a clear picture about your ads. Experiment with your ad text that’s working by making a few other variations of the same ad text.

So try out this suggestions and I am sure you will get a descent return from the content network as well.