I found out a great way to sell items recently. It’s selling your friends on different opportunities. There are many opportunities out there to make money selling, but some of the products can be a bit inappropriate.

The way around inappropriate products is to sell products to your friends. You naturally want the best for your friends so when you sell to your friends, you choose a higher tier of products. They are a self checking mechanism to ensure that you are really doing the best that you can do. If you can do this, you’ll make more money and be even more fulfilled with your sales.

In the previous post, I touched upon using marketing lists to help get sales. It’s really an age old technique. The goal is to get find the people who will likely be most interested in your products and services and personally delivering your sales pitch to them. It’s a very successful technique and will never really go out of style, but it did get me to thinking about some interesting marketing ideas for the internet age.

Ok, SPAM is just stupid so don’t even think about that. No one opens the emails and those who do are not exactly savvy consumers. No I have four ideas that are used offline to promote online businesses. Now, I haven’t examined their legality, so you’ll need to check legal information just to make sure, but here they are.

1) Telemarketing prospects. A fun way is to make up a survey related to your site and professionally script it out. Call up a statistical sample, survey them and let them know who you are. Post the survey results on your site. You will get visitors who just want to check you out.

2) Take out a newspaper ad. This can be a highly effective way to get your website out there and known. Take out a small ad and talk up whatever your site offers. Of course provide a link.

3) Make flyers. If you have a site that appeals to a geographical area then getting some flyer made up and strategically placing them might be a good way to generate traffic and interests in what you have to offer. You may opt for a brochure instead. Think of leaving in places where people are waiting and looking for things to read, like hospitals, doctor offices, you get the idea.

4) Sponsor a local contest or event. There always seems to be an event taking place in communities all over and funding always seems short. Approach one of these events about being a sponsor. You may be able to sponsor for a very cheap price. You’ll gain goodwill and you’ll gain web traffic.

I am interested to hear any other ideas for Marketing offline.