Marketing Outside The Box

By Melanie Ullman

For most Internet business, marketing generally tends to consist of the basic IM strategies such as Article Marketing, Social Bookmarking, etc. Increasingly, however, the most successful businesses get there by thinking "outside the box".

For some types of businesses, this can present a challenge. As an example, this site about potty training girls might not be the sort of topic that lends itself well to casual conversation.

However, most businesses online tend to fall into the more traditional arena of product & service purveyors, such as ecommerce sites like this one talking about Homedics back massager products.

What is "outside the box" marketing consist of? To answer that, let's first look at what marketing itself is. In this context, marketing is the means of finding prospects, people who would have an interest in the product or service we are selling. We could also think of marketing as traffic generation. As an online business, our "business address" is our website. By getting more people to show up at our website, we increase our business, whether that means more sales, more sign-ups, etc.

So how can we increase traffic by thinking outside the box? Here are a few ideas; hopefully these will serve to spark some creative thinking to come up with additional ways.

Traditional advertising avenues

Using the more traditional means of advertising, we can increase the number of people coming to our website. These might include classified ads in newspapers, newsletters, and bulletin boards. Placing free or low-cost advertisements with our website address can generate traffic that we might not otherwise get through those common online marketing methods.

Organizations and affinity groups

Word-of-mouth is very powerful. By finding and joining groups such as our local Chamber of Commerce, we have the opportunity to get our message across and attract new prospects to our website. Affinity, or special interest groups can server the same purpose.

Reciprocal advertising

In the IM world, this often consists of emailing to each others lists. Thinking outside the box, we can talk to "bricks & mortar" businesses and offer to mention them in return for having a flyer with our website address posted at their location.

These are just a few of the ways we can market our business and increase our traffic beyond the current online methods we now use. By simply thinking along different lines, you will find yourself starting to look at marketing in whole new ways. Spend a little time each day thinking about how to get your website address in front of people. You'll find there are an almost unlimited number of opportunities for marketing, most of which can reach an entirely new and different set of prospects than current online methods!