Advertising your board offline?

[JoeBannon]

Has anyone advertised their board offline? If so, where? What results did you get?

[MrEyes]

Yes, I tried this a while ago.

My site is Motorbike related so I paid to put a 8 foot by 2 foot banner up at a local meeting place (1000's of bikers go there every weekened), to track successes I put a "how do you find us" section in registration, with a "banner at XYZ" as an option.

Results? Well the banner has been up for 6 months, and not one person has selected the "Banner at XYZ" section. So you could say that it was an abject failure :mad:

This being said, I have just printed up a few 100 business cards and intend to drop one on every parked bike I see, it might work it might not.

[Floris]

I've never been a fan of unsolicited ads, like finding spam on a car or bike. I automatically never support those companies. But I am sure it works for a lot of people, otherwise they wouldn't be doing that.

In case of a bike related forum, perhaps go to some bike stores and ask if you can leave some flyers in return for some link to their store on your site or something.

[Forum Switch]

Yes, I tried this a while ago.

My site is Motorbike related so I paid to put a 8 foot by 2 foot banner up at a local meeting place (1000's of bikers go there every weekened), to track successes I put a "how do you find us" section in registration, with a "banner at XYZ" as an option.

Results? Well the banner has been up for 6 months, and not one person has selected the "Banner at XYZ" section. So you could say that it was an abject failure :mad:



That's amazing, you'd think that would of attracted a fair few members, Did you see your traffic rise during that period though?

[Floris]

When I had my web design company I was always sitting in the bus going from my town to Amsterdam for a summer. I was staring at the stupid little paper saying 'for 7,50 a month your ad shows in this bus'

So I decided to put it up for a month in the buss from towns around amsterdam to amsterdam spread over period of 6 months. And only the bus where no ad was in yet. And I took a one time three month account.

A tiny investment, to reach hundreds if not more people in one go.

Three months later the customers started showing interest, and I got 3 big customers (companies) out of it, and about 15 to 20 normal small business customers and consumers. Which filled up that year with work.

[pk698]

I posted flyers on my college campus, it worked quite well for me. But then again, it was a site dedicated to the college.

We also chalked the sidewalk with our site name. This worked REALLY well, we even got an email from an HP rep here in town saying that was quite an amazing idea. We literally chalked the entire campus. Got lots of members afterward. Then I had a nice little chit-chat with campus security, but that's another story :D

The one thing that worked the best for us was we posted flyers in the dorm rooms. We got about 150 new members the next day.

Basically, I think offline advertising works if your site is local to your geographic area - and the locals find your service useful.

[yogesh]

For my travel forum (which also covers a lot of motorcycle touring) we mainly advertise offline through stickers which I and other members have put up on our motorcycles. Not to mention while meeting other travelers I sometime give them my business card.

We also got covered by newspaper and magazine a few times and that was good as well, especailly for traffic when one of our trip was featured on the front page of a national daily.

[NegativeSmoke]

this is a great idea! :D

[David Grove]

Yes, I tried this a while ago.

My site is Motorbike related so I paid to put a 8 foot by 2 foot banner up at a local meeting place (1000's of bikers go there every weekened), to track successes I put a "how do you find us" section in registration, with a "banner at XYZ" as an option.

Results? Well the banner has been up for 6 months, and not one person has selected the "Banner at XYZ" section. So you could say that it was an abject failure :mad:

This being said, I have just printed up a few 100 business cards and intend to drop one on every parked bike I see, it might work it might not.

Perhaps people are too lazy to specify how they found out about you. One way to track how your advertising is going it to add the tracking to the URL that you publish in your ad. For example, use www.example.com/xyz as your URL for the banner and then have a script that counts how many users enter via that URL, and redirects to your main URL.