If you are working to make a going concern of your website, online advertising should be part of your routine, but do not discount offline advertising as a means to drive traffic to your site.
Whether it be television, radio, newspapers, magazines, flyers, billboards, mailers, business cards, etc. these are all still a way to get your website presence out there and known. Give them special offers and a reason why they would want to come and see your site. Some of these mediums are also not as expensive as one might think.
You want to ensure that you target your offline advertising campaign around your targeted market. If you are trying to attract customers online, you do not want to hit a targeted market of people who generally speaking do not use the internet. And if you are promoting offline, make sure that you include the URL to you site in the advertisement.
Ads in computer magazines or technical magazines may be of benefit in increasing your traffic. Google is getting involved in the offline advertising arena and has contacted and proposed to various newspapers how to get them selling slots in their advertising sections through the internet. This is a way to help the newspapers fill up the empty advertising space that they have. Google is looking to do the same sort of testing and is getting involved with radio and television advertising. The idea is to help integrate computer advertising and offline advertisement vehicles, not to replace the older forms but to work in conjunction with them.
One of the benefits of online advertising has been the ability to see the return on investment from campaigns and ads. This has not been the case with offline advertisement. It has been very difficult to specifically and directly monitor the effectiveness of an ad. Google is also helping to add this benefit to offline advertising by getting unique URLs put onto the offline ads so that when one goes to this unique URL it can be recorded that this person is responding to that offline ad. It has yet to be seen what overall effect Googles efforts and trials will have on offline advertising. There are skeptics and it is not proven that this will really be of benefit to the newspapers, radio stations and television.
The bottom line is what are the returns from the advertising one is putting out. If the offline advertisement is not giving you a profit, then it is senseless to keep pouring money into it without analyzing your campaign and adjusting it until you are hitting the right targeted market with the right message.
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