Magazines and newspapers are dying, and Adblock has made it possible to avoid pesky click through ads. If you want to reach an audience, traditional advertising methods no longer work.
Your best way to advertise is to create a website and utilize search engine marketing. But it’s not the only way to advertise. Another method that very few companies take advantage of is guest posting.
Intro to Guest Posting
Guest posting is a difficult but valuable SEO technique that involves writing up a quality and unique informational post and getting it placed on someone else’s website. For example, let’s say you’re a pest control company and you find a blog about home care needs. You ask them if you can write a guest post on pest control, they accept, you write a post, and it gets posted.
Ideally this is used for internet marketing. This method creates more incoming links, which in turn increases your search engine rank. Articles should be informational – NOT sales letters. Your only goal is to increase the value of your website with the incoming link, not necessarily to sell to the readers of the blog.
Guest Posting on Hard Copy
You should also consider this marketing technique for hard copy papers as well. Contact your local magazines. Ask them if they’re willing to place an article in lieu of an advertisement for the same amount of money (or maybe a bit less). Most likely these magazines will accept, because the more articles they have and less advertising they have to publish to survive, the better their magazine will be received.
In that article you can provide helpful tips about your industry, written in a style that grabs the attention of the reader, and use that article as a form of makeshift advertising – drastically increasing the number of people that see your “ad” while using a less invasive marketing technique.
It may work, it may not, but it provides you with an additional style of marketing that could open up new avenues of reaching your customers in a world that has generally tuned out most types of paid advertising.