Offline To Online Marketing Methods

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rgordon83 said:
Keep in mind the papers themselves get 1 mil circulation. Let's say 10% read the classifieds (these are smaller town papers, so that could be low. For a regular paper that's high). And let's say of that 10%, another 10% see your ad. So thats 10k impressions.

Of that 10k, lets say 10% go to your URL. Thats 1000 visitors. Of those 1000, maybe 2% convert (if they have to pay) and 5% convert if it's a form of registration. and 20% convert if it's just a zip submit.

So out of that 1 million, 20 people may buy.
50 may register for free
200 may give you their zip.

Now those numbers were made up. But they're pretty close to typical response rates at each-step of the process. So those numbers are probably not way off.

Obviously there are other factors than can improve or hurt these numbers (mainly your ad copy, landing page copy/ design, and overall message consistency).
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I agree, that was the way I pretty much broke it down when I was deciding if the cost might be worth the risk. The offer I'm going to try out breaks even at 6 buyers, it's in local newspapers not the pennysaver. I'm also targetting a make money offer at an area that has some high unemployment right now.
 


I'm not sold on the classified ad way to market this... direct offline marketing works but is really something different.

I've worked for both a magazine doing local publications and a business resources company who specialized in mailout / brouchure type advertising. Taking from that I've got like 7c to hand out to everyone

1st thing, I don't think these inserts discussed are a flat $60/thousand. It's probably $60 to place the insert but the design & printing is not included. Getting this stuff produced is probably 3x that cost

Direct mailings can work if you use the right list. Do something like gather sorority contact info (filetype:xls works well for list building) from universities across the nation and send cosmetics, birth control, sex toys type of offers. Use postcards, they are cheaper to print & mail.

Perhaps the best advice I could give is to pick yourself up some of those "free take one" type publications you see in gas stations & supermarkets. Every major city has one for restaurants, entertainment & a few real estate ones. Make your ad fit in this niche

restaurants = eat for free, be a secret shopper
entertainment = pick up artist or dating offers
real estate = mortgage loans, credit reports, etc
kids / parents / family = loads of possibilities

These guys are not major corporations (for the most part) and print out only what is circulated, you will have very little unused publications. 10k circulation = 9k actual ad impressions and it's all targeted traffic.

Another HUGE benefit would be that if you are thrifty, you can work out some huge discounts. Magazine type publications are printed in sets of pages. 8, 16, 24, 32 .... with the cheaper prices being clips of 16 pages. So what happens if a publication sells 34.5 pages worth of ads? They print a 40 page issue and run 5.5 pages worth of "freebie" ads (public service, special interest, etc). They all hate losing money to this shit and will gladly work something out with you so you can have overspill if there is some available. It might mean that you have to skip a few months due to full books (it happens) but in the months where there are a few pages left over, they will happily sell you the spot at 60-70% retail.

The best way to get this is to find out their deadline for placing ads then call that day and see if there are any spots available. If you call them at the right time, you will often be looked at as someone who helped them out in a jam instead of the guy looking for the discount.

Depending on the circulation, real estate magazines charge anywhere between $300 & $1200 for a full page ad ... much cheaper for business card or 1/2 page. These ads will hit the eyes of 1000's of people who are looking for niche information instead of randomly browsing the classifieds. It sounds like a wiener to me, will probably try next month.
 
Spades said:
Please do keep us posted on the 1mil results. I ended up spending $60 on a couple smaller weeklies here in FL, total circulation of ~ 200k. Wrote targeted ads for each city which I'm sure will improve results. They drop next Thursday so I'll have some results to post up.

I was thinking about setting up a cheap toll free voice box (minus the voice mail feature) with a quick message re-stating the web address and that online is the ONLY way to get the "deal." I would think this would give the offer a little more credibility.

Crazyfish, I agree that it seems too good to be true BUT personally, the pennysaver shit that hits my mailbox goes straight to the trash. That's exactly what a lot of these papers are, so I'm pretty sure out of those huge circulation numbers the amount of people who actually read them is quite a lot less.

Lets keep this thread going.
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I remember Ruck from CashTactics did something similar and it increased his profits. I found some decent info on classified advertisement from richadfreak. The book would of been shorter if the author didn't include a lot of his personal life. Decent book for those new to classified advertising. But you can find pretty much all that info just search Google
 
Don't forget the niche publications. College newspapers have pretty cheap adspace and insert costs. There's normally a local business publication that goes out where you could push a "how to do local advertising online" seminar or video.
 
erect said:
1st thing, I don't think these inserts discussed are a flat $60/thousand. It's probably $60 to place the insert but the design & printing is not included. Getting this stuff produced is probably 3x that cost
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For my own local newspaper this is correct its $60 per thousand inserts, you still need to create and print off the inserts yourself on whatever paper you would like to use and then you need to physically drop them off before a certain deadline, I think it was like 9 days before the paper goes out (The main paper) and 2 days before the other one they have in my area because they only print one paper locally and have the other one done in a seperate town.

But still its not much to print out 1000 flyers on cardboard paper (5000 pieces of paper == about $50 to $60 bucks and a new color printer is about $70 with new ink at about $50).

I'm holding back on the newspaper inserts for now but am looking at magazines, ect...

I will post more details soon.
 
Just had a bit of an idea, but unfortunately, it's only relevant to people in major cities, and even then it might not be all that great.

Do you guys get free mini-magazines in trendoid type shops?
They're basically a wank piece started up by the editors as a uni-project that end up taking on a life of their own. They are literally nothing but ads, or advertorials (splogs in print, basically). They run because the editors get enough money from it to continue on, and enough freebies to make it fun.

Anyway, if you do have publications like this in your city, they're usually pretty desperate for content.
If you've running marketing for anything that's consumer-whore in nature, why not submit a photoshoot or article to them?

Anyway, just a thought.
I'm going to try it out with some subcultural fashion stuff and see how it does over the Xmas period, and tell you lot how it goes in the new year.
 
Okay smallest buy was $12, biggest was $200. Trying lead gen and even zip/email.

First one goes live on Wednesday.
 
Previously stated was a book called Scientific Advertising By Claude Hopkins, well I just purchased the audiobook for it and thought I would share it with the community.

It has a billion very interesting points to consider and gets your mind flowing with thousands of more ideas haha.

RapidShare: Easy Filehosting

Enjoy cause that set me back an entire $10 bucks.
 
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Aequitas said:
Previously stated was a book called Scientific Advertising By Claude Hopkins, well I just purchased the audiobook for it and thought I would share it with the community.

It has a billion very interesting points to consider and gets your mind flowing with thousands of more ideas haha.

RapidShare: Easy Filehosting

Enjoy cause that set me back an entire $10 bucks.
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+ReP
 
Aequitas said:
Previously stated was a book called Scientific Advertising By Claude Hopkins, well I just purchased the audiobook for it and thought I would share it with the community.

It has a billion very interesting points to consider and gets your mind flowing with thousands of more ideas haha.

RapidShare: Easy Filehosting

Enjoy cause that set me back an entire $10 bucks.
Click to expand...

thanks for that
 
rgordon83 said:
I'm thinking about testing dating offers at local, ethnic diners that are popular.
e.g. SPanish dating offers at local mexican food places, Jewish dating at Kosher places etc...

But not in papers, but on posti-it boards near the entrance. Or mabe even working out a custom deal with the restaurants for interesting placements (menu flyers, placemets, table stands).

Something like "Does this date suck? Find Spanish singles you'll actually like at Site.Com"

ok, maybe that's not the right copy, but you get the idea..

I just need to get my shit together, got too much going on now. :Yahoo_29:
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New placement and copy for ya .... "Share this Taco with someone special" on the taco wrapper...
 
Some really quick stats - 7 people have visited so far, 2 converted [zip/email], $2.50 total earnings. $200 was spent on this ad-buy (most expensive one so far).

I just wanted to note that of the 7 people, one of them actually typed the domain into a yahoo search before ending up at my website. Typing the domain name into Google brings up one result - for a classified page on backpage.com that got bundled in with my buy. So something to consider about the domain you use.
 
Barbarian said:
Some really quick stats - 7 people have visited so far, 2 converted [zip/email], $2.50 total earnings. $200 was spent on this ad-buy (most expensive one so far).

I just wanted to note that of the 7 people, one of them actually typed the domain into a yahoo search before ending up at my website. Typing the domain name into Google brings up one result - for a classified page on backpage.com that got bundled in with my buy. So something to consider about the domain you use.
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Good call. Lots of people just type domains into search engines instead of browsers. Especially in smaller towns. You should wait to get indexed before you launch a campaign. Not sure what to do if it's just a redirect from your domain...

I would advertise exact match for your domain so you'll likely be the #1 result for pretty cheap...

EDIT: nevermind, i just remembered that your domain needs to match destination page when you do ppc....
 
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