"As much as things change they stay same."

As an OFFline marketer it's interesting to observe a trend emerging on web.

What's this trend?

Well, what's now happening is that highly successful promotional techniques, - which have been part and parcel of everyday, (offline) small business marketing campaigns - now have their web-equivalents.

OFFLINE:

* Company A is in marketplace competing with a lot of other Company A's.

Businesses have to find ways to keep their products and/ or services within orbit of their potential customers ever- diminishing attention span.

* Advertising is expensive. Advertising Messages have to be continually repeated to maintain a presence in marketplace. The Advertiser with biggest budget can pay for biggest presence (Note: this doesn't always translate into sales though.)

* Give-aways, freebies, contests, valuable guarantees, trial use, buy one - get one free, referral systems and loss leaders are used to attract customer attention.

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ONLINE: Notice web similarities with these existing bricks and mortar promotional techniques here? Many of these offline promotional techniques are now becoming common fare on web.

ENTER The Fridge Magnet concept... "stickiness systems."

An excellent example of this trend in action is old fridge (refrigerator) magnet technique. Offline, it's a simple, cheap and EXTREMELY effective technique. ONLine it will achieve same results.

Why? Two phrases "Repetition & human laziness."

Here's how fridge magnet system works, OFFline.

1. Company A makes contact with a potential customer through a variety of different promotional techniques. Smart companies know that a person is unlikely to buy from them first time. Repetition is key.

By Christopher Wright, Guerrilla Marketer www.GuerrillaPromotions.com

Ok, here's game plan. Joe, you roll right and block defensive end...oh wait a minute...WRONG GAME PLAN!! Just as in Super Bowl you need a game plan, so it is so with Internet marketing. One question I often hear is, "What product or service should I promote?" Sometimes they may not want to necessarily start a new product/service, they may only want to enhance one they have or are involved with.

Your challenge is twofold. First, you must find out what's hot, then you'll have to find a way to make a product/service (or enhance your present one) from this acquired information. As is often case, we can't see forest for trees.

"Finding Gold Where Everyone Has Already Been"

Here are a list of places that we visit almost daily, but now I want you to look with different eyes.

Download Sites: DownLoad.com, TuCows.com, Zdnet.com. DownLoad.com is probably most visited download site there is around. On their front page is a list of most downloaded software/info (by day-week etc.). They also have categories you can go into to get a peek at what's hot for that particular subject. This also applies to other download sites like Zdnet.com and TuCows

Books: BarnesandNoble.com, BooksAMillion.com, and Amazon.com. Lets focus on Amazon, since they're largest and most known of three. Amazon provides a 'top seller' list on their site for most purchased books from their site. These may or may not be same as what's on New York Times best seller list. What is to be noted is that these are most popular books purchased ONLINE (hint-hint).

Music: Amazon.com and CDNow.com. Did I just mention Amazon in section about books? Well...they're also mentioned in section about music. They may have began their career as booksellers, but they've drastically diversed their inventory. Again they have a top sellers list of music sales.