Tag: Offline Marketing

For those of you who are unaware, Toronto is a massive metropolis – to the likes of New York or Chicago. When I was still working a shitty cubicle-bound day job, I would ride the subway to and from work on a daily basis, and during this ride it’s common, almost ritualistic, for the commuting gerbils to pick up a free copy of the local paper we have here called the Metro. Now more than often I go straight to the business/financial section, peruse through some classifieds and continue on to my daily horoscope on the second last page – and this is where I was struck with an “outside the box” moment…

Newspapers are slowly dying…

Let me get right to the point – every town, city and county has several free local newspapers which all survive off of the advertising revenue they receive. In a city like Toronto, the Metro paper gets into the hands of probably half the population (3 million +) which presents a great opportunity for some prime time, low cost, creative marketing.

I went onto the Metro website and took a peak at the advertising program they have, and some of the pricing options available, and found out that I could get a reasonably size block on the front page for less than $50/week – are you kidding me?? I found this to be absolutely scalable, and well worth a trial run.

Here’s the plan…

Grab 1 or 2 of the more popular free local newspapers in your city or town, go to the classifieds section (usually near the back) and you should find info for advertising – usually a phone number or email address. Find out the pricing info, as well as reach for the first 3 pages of the paper.

Find a strong performing CPA offer from Neverblueads or Copeac, keeping in mind seasonal and social factors that may cause certain offers to perform better. Here’s an example of what I mean: It’s Christmas time, so you could find a dating offer and put up an ad like “Don’t Spend The Holidays Alone – Hot New Local Dating Site, Sign Up For Free! www.blahblah.com”. Another offer that might work now is targeting last minute Christmas shoppers with a free gift card, or another incentive based CPA offer and post an ad up like “Guilty Of Last Minute Shopping? Claim Your FREE $250 (enter store name) Gift Card Now! Limited Quantities Available! www.blahblah.com”

Are you getting my drift?

Many top performing CPA offers have custom landing pages available, so all you need is to grab a domain name to host it, or if permitted by your affiliate network, redirect straight to the advertisers landing page of your choice.

If you’re even half decent with Photoshop, you could make a really attractive ad in under an hour, $7 for a domain name, and if you want to take it an extra step – make some flyers that are similarly branded and post them up around busy sections of the city.

Most dating, scholarship, loan and gift card offers range from $3-$20+ payout for a simple form completion. When you look at the investment compared to potential return – one would be stupid not to take advantage of the struggling local newspapers that provide cost effective advertising options. What if that $60 translated into $400 dollars per week, would you consider that to be a sound investment? I think we all know the answer here.

Think outside the box, because each day that passes more people are getting into “online” methods of marketing, which means saturation and intense competition – especially with a platform like Adwords. By utilizing offline advertising mediums, one can cash out with minimal time and monetary effort – and after some initial testing you could have a hands off proven stream of revenue to add to your online wallet.

Cheers,

Elijah