Copyright 2006 Donna Payne

Many people are disillusioned with the build it and theyll come theory where you painstakingly build a website (either yourself or hire someone). Get it done, see your name in lights and dont bother to follow thru with a marketing plan. Tsk. Tsk.

Or worse yet; youre led to believe if you participate in search-engine, or pay-per-click hocus-pocus thats all youll ever need to do. Period. WRONG! If you don't know what you're doing, you could end up farting around with your time and hard earned money!

The #1 marketing secret to online success is to combine offline marketing techniques with your website.

In todays world of solo-professionals and entrepreneurs many are combining Hi-tech and Hi-touch techniques by finding new ways to reach out and touch someone with outrageous success.

Does that make sense?

Here are a few examples:

A Marketing coach has combined email and traditional snail mail to increase customer loyalty and boost sales. She emails a weekly ezine to her list of 9,000 subscribers, where she promotes 2 of her own teleclasses a month. To everyone who signs up for the teleclass she offers a free mp3 downloadable recording after the call, AND she sends via regular postal mail an audio CD to your home. Nice added touch, eh? Certainly adds value to her services.

An extraordinary Mortgage broker goes way above and beyond customer service; so much so that he has raving fans! His secret? Keeping the customer in the loop by sending small gifts with status updates throughout each step of their loan process. His customers are simply blown away because they feel appreciated and cared for.

Another small business owner offers such an outlandish guarantee you simply cant say no. His pest control company offers a transferable, life-time warranty against the recurrence of termites. A LIFE TIME WARRANTY against termites? In Florida, thats unheard of! He even has photographs of refund checks in his sales letter to prove it. To most that seems like an incredible gamble, BUT hes the best in the business and rarely has had to issue refunds. The increased revenue has far outweighed the risk.

Daniel opened a specialty retail shop on Main Street. His business is the classic brick and click meaning he markets just as aggressively online as he does offline. The other day I noticed one of his billboards along the highway. It gave his business location, a small blurb about lowest prices and Get a free yadda-yadda at our website xyz.com. Needless to say, Daniel is building his customer mailing list and getting tons of traffic, both online and in his store. Once he has you on his mailing list, he can reach out and touch you forever, promoting his products, services, special events, sales, etc

Each of these folks has demonstrated that with combined aggressive marketing, you can achieve remarkable success. So dont think for a second that your ho-hum brick and mortar or website can ever stop marketing. Experts say a very large percentage of your time should be spent marketing.

Now its YOUR turn! How can you think beyond the box in terms of marketing? Online? Offline? Simple adjustments can make all the difference in the world. Take time to review your marketing materials, youll be glad you did!