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Too often I find that people are looking for ways to promote their products and services online. The trouble is that this really does not work as well as intended. To illustrate this even further, one need look no farther than Yahoo, the largest site on the Internet with over 38 million visitors per month.

How often do you find Yahoo banner ads? The correct answer is never. They promote their site offline. Newspaper, television and radio are filled with �Do you ah�. Yahoo?�

They got smart and figured out that they could get a better response offline, so they took out some ads on television. They got terrific response.

While you probably to not have the advertising budget the Yahoo does, you should still consider some of their techniques and adapt them as your own.

1. Be Creative
   Work with local groups to offer them free use of your product or service while promoting you.
2. Think Outside the Box
   Forge alliances with other companies to provide them with your services in their businesses. Look at your local copy shop. The odds are that they advertise their copiers in the window. Without even walking into the store, the copier companies get free advertising from several copy shops.
3. Press Release
   Write a well constructed press release and the media will send you free traffic! Make sure that your press release is news, however, of you will never get published.
4. Neighborhood promotion
   If you are like me, you get coupons every week on your front door. Look into getting an advertisement in those publications. It is often not as expensive as you may think!
5. Classified Advertising
   Classified ads are the cheapest advertising available. Studies have shown that they provide the best long-term solution to a small business. If you have an advertising budget of $2000 for a year, it is far better to run 52 ads at $40 each, than take out a full-page newspaper ad. This continual promotion of your business will provide you with ongoing traffic to your website, rather than s huge onslaught of business all at once and will allow you to reap the benefits year round.

Continually working to promote your site both on and offline will create a windfall for your business.

Note from Fluffy the Moose

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