Offline Advertising Ideas for Your Web SiteWritten by Alan Grissett
The "traditional" forms of advertising, such as television, radio, and print, can all be used effectively to promote a business' online presence, but for smaller businesses, they may not be cost-effective. What smaller businesses lack in budget, though, can be made up for with a little creativity. The old standby, business card, can be a great tool for promoting your Web site. Not only can you include your site's address on it, but you can also add additional information or incentives that can be used to entice people to visit your site. For example, you could print a coupon or special offer that would encourage prospect to take follow-up action. You could also simply include information about your Web site and benefits of visiting it. Where would all this copy fit though? If you don't have room on front of card, you could print message on back, or you could use a double-sized card folded over. Another offline advertising technique that is used quite frequently,
| | How to Choose a Domain Name for Offline PromotionWritten by Alan Grissett
In this article, you'll discover a key element of your Web site and how you can use it to drive traffic to your site from offline sources. What is this "basic element" of your site, you ask? It's your domain name - your business' virtual address.To figure out why a business' domain name is important to its Web site's offline promotions, a little background into domain names is in order. To begin with, there are two main classes of domain names, gTLDs (general Top Level Domains) and ccTLDs (country code Top Level Domains). The seven original gTLDs are .com, .net, .org, .mil, .edu, .gov, and .int. As of writing of this article, seven new gTLDs are in process of being launched by ICANN, governing body of TLDs. They are .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name, and .pro. The gTLDs were developed to represent specific types of entities, such as commercial organizations (.com), educational institutions (.edu), or cooperatives (.coop). The ccTLDs were developed to represent entities from specific regions, such as United States (.us), France (.fr), or Japan (.jp). In most cases, if you find right registrar, you can register a domain name with any extension, no matter why you need name or where you are based. Does this mean you should though? Unless you need to protect your intellectual property rights in a name, probably not. The best choice by far is a good solid "dot com". Why? Because people are familiar with it, and it's what people associate most with Internet addresses. This is very important in offline advertising, because if a potential customer sees your Web address, he or she will likely have to remember that address when it's time to pull up old Web browser to visit site. So generally speaking, a domain name ending in .com is most desirable for offline advertising.
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