Adsense and the real world

Posted by stuart as , , , , ,

I read an interesting post today over at Wilcoblog, about offline marketing for Adsense sites.

I run a very small Adwords campaign, with a budget of a couple of bucks a day over a few different sites - nothing serious, just more as an experiment. I had never really considered offline marketing for any of my sites until I read this post.

I do some offline marketing on a fairly spasmodic basis for my web development business, more just when I’m looking for new clients, this has met with moderate success, but has not been what I would consider to be outrageously successful. I’ve always been a bit scared that if I advertise seriously, and bring in lots of work, I won’t be able to keep up with the workload.

This wouldn’t be an issue with advertising AIS sites, as all you’re really trying to do is bring visitors to a site, and you have processes (adsense, affiliate links etc) in place to take care of the visitors when they get there.

So I got to thinking about what sort of AIS sites would be most conducive to offline advertising. I’m thinking probably locality based sites, and probably sites with something to sell, such as in the above example - an employment or dating site.

I wonder what would happen if you went to the local shopping mall and placed flyers under car windscreens telling people about a site which was about online shopping, with the URL of a page which told people the benefits and pitfalls of online grocery shopping, and had adsense ads for online grocery shopping? Or even better, a nice simple URL such as buyyourgroceriescheaponline.com with a URL redirect to your online grocery affiliate partner?

I would imagine affiliate programs would probably work better in this scenario, as the payoff is better. I think that doing the above around mothers day or fathers day, using a giftware affiliate could be quite succesful.

Thinking along these lines gets the creative juices flowing as far as geurilla marketing goes. How can we get our message to the most people for the lowest cost? I like the idea floated at Wilcoblog, but I think that the transit cops here in Australia would be on top of you pretty quickly for trying this sort of thing. Maybe going to sporting events, or anywhere where there’s a lot of people wearing a bright coloured shirt with a catchy URL on it such as “yourjobsucks.com” or something similar would work?

….wanders off to do some brainstorming…..