I was a guest speaker on a teleconference today hosted by a company that is offerring web sites to their direct mail clients. It’s a great idea and I helped to drive the formation of the product - so I wish them the best of luck. The teleconference was set up and run by the President of the company and while I provided him some technical details, he provided most of the other content. However, he made a great point on there, which I think can’t be stressed enough for people looking to get traffic to their web sites.

Use Offline Methods to Drive Traffic Online

So what does that mean? Most people will tell you to put your web site address in most any place that you can - whether it’s a business card, sales brochure, etc. That’s all very good and should be done. However, I think there’s an extra step that makes it more powerful. For the direct mail company, they could use the mailings to not only drive traffic to the web site, but to make the mailings more effective.

For example - if you get a direct mail advertisement, you do one of 2 things with it:

1) You throw it out

2) You contact the company.

There is a 3rd alternative that is really powerful. If you offer special information on the website (via special report or maybe even a coupon), you attract another class of customers who aren’t necessarily interested in buying right at that time but might be in the future. Some of those people who go to the website and request the information will eventually buy. And what would have been a non-response before, now becomes a customer - all by doing nothing more on your part besides listing special information on the website.

You have driven more traffic to your website and you have also made your other marketing materials more effective in the long run. It’s a big win.

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