As promised yesterday I wanted to discuss some ways to
integrate some offline marketing ideas for affiliate marketing. Below are just some of the ways that this
could be done.
1. Colleges / Universities – Although the majority of college
students are strapped for cash they do spend big on certain items. Two such items are school supplies/textbooks
and licensed gear for their school. Marketers
could post pamphlets or flyers around campus. These flyers would either list a coupon code to be used on the merchant
site or a link to a landing page built by an Affiliate.
With the NCAA tournament coming up soon it
is a great time to use this technique. I do not think it would be too hard to find a college student willing to
take a couple hours to plaster his/her campus with flyers for $50.
2. Classified Ads – This following technique has been used
forever. Place an ad in the classifieds
promoting information or a product. If
1 ad makes you $100 place it in 30 similar newspapers or magazines and make
$3,000. An example that could be used
would be a small business package that provides everything a small business
would need to get started at a discount price. Marketers could provide information
about loans, business credit cards, telephone systems, office supplies, fax
services, business card service. It is
important to be choose publications that are targeted to your products audience
3. Summer Camps – There are over 10,000 “sleep-over” or “sleep
away” summer camps catering to over 5 million campers. This is a huge market. Many parents send their kids candy, popcorn,
snacks, sporting supplies and nick knacks through out the summer. Affiliates could work with their local
summer camps, camp related websites or businesses to provide coupons or ideas
for gifts to send their children.
4. Fundraising coupon sheets / Stores – There are endless amounts
of organizations who are active in fundraising. As
an affiliate why not reach out to your top 10 merchants for exclusive
coupons. Coupon sheets could be created
and sold or provided with other items that are being sold for the
fundraiser. These sheets would cost
next to nothing to create significant income. I realize that there are quite a
few websites that provide a percent of sale to your charity of choice. However, there is no reason why this could
not also be done on a smaller scale for a charity or organization that you are active
with. This same type of coupon sheet
could be provided to local businesses to offer to their customers at the time
of purchase.
These are just some of the endless amounts of ways to
integrate offline strategies into affiliate marketing. Since Affiliate Marketing is all about
relationships many of these techniques rely on how closely an affiliate manager
is willing to work with their partners. Providing custom codes and tracking based on codes is extra work that an
Affiliate Manager would need to be willing to do to make this work. I encourage affiliates and AM’s to be
creative in their marketing to think outside of what 99% of what affiliate
partners are doing.
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