Many people will tell you that to get your web site noticed you need
to ‘optimize’ your site for the search engines. You are then led down
a deep dark path where you have to keep changing your web site as the
search engines change their ways of listing things. As fast as you ‘optimize’
your site, Google and the others have moved the goalposts, meaning you
have to keep optimizing over and over again.

Now consider this: Most people in the world are not users of the Internet.
Let’s repeat that. The vast majority of people who you want to reach don’t
use the Internet. It doesn’t matter how well you optimize your web site,
they simply will never find it.

Here’s another fact. Some of the best Internet marketers make most of
their sales ‘offline’. They sell their books, CD-ROMs and so on at seminars,
workshops and conferences. Indeed, for many Internet marketers, these
‘offline’ sales represent the bulk of their income.

So what do these facts tell us? They show us that ‘offline’ promotion
is more important than online promotion. You may be able to optimize your
web site to get high rankings in a search engine. But that doesn’t mean
you’ll reach the vast majority of people who could buy your product or
use your information.

This was confirmed recently by one study that showed most people go to
an Internet address (URL) after having read it in a newspaper or magazine,
been given it by a friend or colleague, or having heard it being mentioned
by someone speaking at a meeting or on TV. In other words, it seems that
significant numbers of people who get to your web site will do so having
heard the URL somewhere outside the Internet.

You can get many people visiting your web site, even if you are not ranked
highly by the search engines. You can do this in three main ways:

1. Do not neglect your offline advertising. The more you advertise offline,
the more people will go online to find out more about you and your business.

2. Write articles for use in regular publications – newspapers, magazines
and so on. Always include your URL in the article and you’ll get millions
of people to notice your web site address.

3. Speak at every opportunity. Make presentations to business clubs, chambers
of commerce, local societies – you name it, you should speak at it. Every
time you speak, announce your web site address.

Although these are the principal ways of gaining offline publicity for
your web site, don’t neglect your business stationery, posters, car stickers
and so on. The more your web site address is visible outside the web,
the more visitors you will get regardless of how kind the search engines
are to you.

About the Author
Annette Lucas
AmeriplanUSA