Over at SEOmoz Blog there’s an interesting article (Link Building with Discounts) regarding Lucky Magazine and how it promotes online shopping sites.

Sure enough, inside were “links” to hundreds of stores both online and off from which to purchase the trendy gear (clothing, accessories, hygiene products, furnishings, etc.) that was featured in the spreads.

As I flipped around near the back of the magazine, a page caught my eye - luckymag discounts. These discounts were purchase codes that could be entered online during checkout to receive a discount on the merchandise featured at the site or in the magazine. I thought to myself - now this is a brilliant method of combining traditional and online marketing, and it works well for link building campaigns too.

What I’m more interested in (rather than the link building aspect), is using offline media to promote online media. Now there aint no way I can justify spending what it would cost to get placed in a magazine (especially for an aff site), but what other things can I look at?

Where I live (a city of approx. 200,000), we have a community newsletter, a weekly city newspaper plus a daily newspaper. The daily is far too expensive to advertise (unbelievable), but the community newsletter and the weekly newspaper have some good rates.

The community newsletter is focused on a specific neighborhood/community within the city. So my city probably has I dunno - 30 or 40 different community newsletters that get sent out (maybe even more - really I have no idea :lol:). What about contacting each of these communities (or a selection of them) and talk about placing an ad for one of my websites? The advertising is CHEAP.

Advertising this way never really struck my fancy because the readership counts are low plus the advertising is untargeted. But what about approaching these newsletters and newspapers and asking for a section to be created such as: What’s Cool On The Web Today, or Online Shopping Finds. You can make it a regular feature and rotate your sites through them (meaning you don’t advertise the same site over and over and people start seeing ADVERTISEMENT and go blind to it). If it’s presented in a fashion that people think they’re being let in on some big secret, or have stumbled upon a well hidden internet gem, maybe the word of mouth campaigns will spring into action.

Just some thoughts, maybe it twigged something for you. Worth pricing out if you’re wanting to reach out to the offline world and bypass the Google monster.

Btw if you’re wanting to pursue the community newsletters, you should be able to obtain a list of all the communities and their contact people through City Hall. In my city it would be the Parks & Rec department that would zap me that info. And heck if it works out well enough, you can contact other cities to see what they have to offer in terms of newsletters and newspaper advertising.

Now just to get my hands on a copy of that Lucky Magazine, I’d like to check out how they put everything together.