Marketing and promotional ideas! Free! Most are related to internet-based businesses, but even those can usually be adopted in some way to other businesses. Here are some awesome marketing ideas to get you thinking.
A one-hour coupon. Offline businesses that want to increase the traffic to their websites can announce an “internet coupon” good for a free drink (or whatever). The coupon would be up on the site for an hour, sometime on a Friday, say. Visitors will return again and again to try to be there at the right time to get the freebie. If you collect pay-per-click advertising fees, this repeat traffic might be especially profitable.
Free gift article teaser. A free gift is certainly not a new marketing idea, but it hasn’t been done much in internet article “resource boxes.” Your click-throughs from articles could increased when you starting putting in the author’s resource box, “For more information and a free gift, visit…” The gift is usually a short course, or an e-book. If you don’t want to write an e-book, you can find one with free distribution rights or a PLR book.
Word links for sale. Maybe you have heard about the entrepreneur that sold a million pixels on one web page for a dollar each. Advertisers could buy a minimum of 100, and the image would link to their site. I’ve seen many copycats, but I haven’t yet seen anyone selling words. This could be even better for advertisers, because they could buy the words that are relevant to their products. A page full of random words isn’t pretty, but these things get publicity and traffic for their novelty.
Product user contests. If you have a product that’s used in many ways or many places, this is a great promotional trick: a contest to see who has used their cell phone, watch, or whatever in the wildest place or the most unusual way. Customers could post their stories and photos directly to your company web site. They would return repeatedly to see new stories, and the results of the competition.
Advertising on cereal boxes. A lot of time is spent staring at cereal boxes. Perhaps you could get a good rate on advertising on them. There have had some advertising, but no boxes covered in ads yet. Brokering ad space on cereal boxes could be a good business to get into.
Pay for article placement. Many of us distribute articles to generate traffic to our web sites, and many also pay to advertise. Since articles are especially good marketing tools, why not pay to have other webmasters put them on their sites? This is done for free now, but not often enough. Maybe offer a small one-time fee, with a minimum time commitment. Explain that leaving the article there forever can generate search engine traffic.
Put ads on cars, advertising on sidewalks or stores,give away free offers. There are endless possibilities for new marketing and promotional ideas.