Art Of Money

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Here’s an interesting report with a message that makes sense when you think about it, but is often taken for granted or overlooked.

Anyone involved in online business knows and spends a lot of time trying to grab searchers from search engines: analyzing keywords, traffic conversions, search volumes etc. But what makes people search for certain terms in the first place?

If you listen to certain sources they’ll tell you that offline ads are in steep decline and that all the money is moving online, but the following story may illustrate that online searches are much more dependant upon offline influences than expected:

While many search marketers understand that there is a connection between online and offline marketing, some may not understand its full extent. According to a new study by Jupiter Research and search marketing agency iProspect, a surprising two-thirds of searchers are led to search on a given keyword as a result of offline marketing.

Specifically, 37 percent of respondents said that in the last six months, a television ad prompted them to conduct a search on a particular company, service or slogan, while 20 percent said a magazine or newspaper ad led them online. Twenty percent said a company’s store drove them online, and 17 percent were influenced to search by a radio ad. A smaller number were influenced by outdoor ads.

…

Besides driving traffic, offline media tends to drive quality traffic, according to Murray. The study asked those users influenced by offline media if they had ultimately made a purchase at that site as a result, and found that 39 percent had done so.

That 39 percent conversion rate is generally higher than the rate achieved by either search or offline channels alone, Murray said. While the offline ad gets attention and creates demand, it’s search that can harness that demand and drive the potential customer to the company’s site and turn it into a sale, he said…

source : http://www.clickz.com/3626795

found via: http://www.axandra.com/nl.php

In the myopic world of Internet business it’s easy to forget that, even now in 2007, the vast majority of people still gather their information primarily from offline sources.

How to Profit From Offline Influence

Even if you are running an affiliate site, look for off line ways to pull in new customers.

In my local paper, which has a daily circulation of at least 100,000 people, the business section has a feature that runs every two weeks which publicizes new local businesses, so I sent in a little blurb about my Ninja Blog Setup service and it was accepted.

I created the write-up in a way that would get readers interested in my service but also emphasized the nature of my online business, hoping that a reporter for the paper would pick it up as an interesting angle, since I have seen very few articles about online business in their paper - do they even know there is such a thing?

I’ll let you know if anything comes from it, but my hunch is that for someone with a bit of creativity there are a lot of sources of traffic offline that would be more powerful and much cheaper than online sources like AdWords and other types of paid promotion.