Have you ever run offline advertising campaigns for your blog or website? Well, I have and I will now share with you how did my offline ad campaigns go. Till date, I have had two offline advertising campaigns for my blog BeginEarning.com:
1) Flyers Campaign.
2) Classified Ads on a local newspaper.
The first one, distributing flyers is still kicking and does produce some good results from time to time.
The second one – my idea to put up classifieds Ads on one of the local newspapers was a complete failure. Recently, I put classified Ads on a local English Daily for 6 days and I got the same number of uniques on the day I advertised as I receive on other normal days. Considering the fact that the newspaper in which I advertised reaches to well over a million readers daily, my advertising campaign was a total failure. I ran the campaign for 6 days because they provide discounts on bulk order. If I had known the campaign would fail so badly, I would have never run the campaign for more than a day. I thought I will easily get some hundred uniques to my blog each day because of the campaign, but I now know I expected way too much considering the cost I incurred for the campaign. The whole 6 days of ad campaign cost me only about 2.5 dollars. I now see it as I only got what I paid for. This happened because my country Nepal is still technologically backward and only a few have access to the Internet from home, so even though a heck lot of people saw my ad, no one really bothered to check my blog online.
Talking about flyers, I used to distribute flyers of my blog at a hell lot of places earlier, but after I failed with my classifieds campaign, I started running targeted flyers campaign. I now distribute my flyers only at Internet cafes (they call them cyber cafes here in my country). As soon as I give the flyer to someone, I instantly gain one hit to my blog (because the person is sitting in front of the computer) and I now know distributing flyers anywhere else than cyber cafes will yield me nothing. I printed the flyers at home. See the picture on the right.
I got 1000 XX papers for just 20 cents, and then printed the flyers at home. I spent around $1 for the ink to print 1000 copies. So my Flyers campaign was cheap and I didn’t dedicate much time to distribute the flyers either. As I was walking and I saw a cyber cafe, I used to drop in and distribute my flyers, that’s it and I earned some free traffic to my blog. Hence, for just 1.2 dollars, I gained 1000 visits to my blog. Judging by the figures, one can say, my flyers campaign was quite successful.
Conclusion:
Advertising offline for a product that is online (like a website or a blog) is not going to give you value for your money and time unless you are able to target it well. Although, I didn’t have to spend a great deal of money on the classifieds campaign, it’s still a loss of money and obviously a loss of time considering the results. However, Flyers have turned out to be a good option for me.
