Offline Marketing

By Mark Sceats

Online and offline marketing should be integrated for maximum effect. Traditional marketing can play a big part in informing your target audience about your web site. Advertising, direct marketing and PR should all be included in your web site promotional plan.

Ensure your web site address (the URL – www.yoursitename.com) appears on all forms of written communication such as stationary, business cards, print ads, signage and packaging.

If feasible, include the URL on any radio and TV advertising you do. Easy to remember simple URLs are needed, so it may be necessary to obtain additional URLs if your main web site address is too complicated or long.

A word of warning!

If you are in the situation of having multiple domain names for the same website then steps must be taken to ensure you are not hit with duplicate content penalties by Google and other search engines.

There are legitimate marketing reasons for registering additional domain names, such as to protect a brand and prevent competitors using these domain names. Typically each of the domains is set up to point to the existing site and all have the same IP address

The problem is that having multiple domains pointing to the same web site runs the risk of search engines penalising you for duplicate content through 'mirrored' sites. Basically it looks to them as if you're trying to manipulate their results by duplicating the same site with different names.

Google is justifiably very aggressive about this and will typically keep in its index the domain with the highest number if inbound links and dump the others. The risk is they may dump the primary domain in favour of a secondary one. Worse - they may drop them all.

Depending on your situation there are various measures that can be taken to legitimately have multiple domain names all pointing to the same website without spamming search engines. Viz Marketing can assist you with this.

Note - If you deliberately try to spam search engines then you deserve any penalty you receive.

There are doubtless many other options available for you to promote your web site using traditional offline media. The point here is to think about the whatever offline marketing you’re doing and consider ways your online marketing can be integrated with this.

| search engine marketing | banner advertising | email marketing | ezine advertising | affiliate marketing | viral marketing |