Below are 7 offline marketing methods you can use to promote and generate traffic to your site or online business:

1. Advertise in the Yellow Pages
Many people still use the phone book to find what they need, so consider advertising your site or online business in the local Yellow Pages. It’s an inexpensive way you can promote your site offline.

2. Transform Your Car into a Moving Billboard
Turning your car into a moving billboard can be an inexpensive way to promote your site or online business. You can put a bumper sticker or a magnet with your website printed on it. Every time you’re on the road, people will see your site. Make sure your site is short or memorable.

3. Wear Your Site
Have your site and logo printed on shirts and baseball caps. Wear them whenever you go out. Give away shirts or baseball caps to family and friends and encourage them to wear them when they go out.

4. Sponsor Your Local Sports Team
National sports team have big budgets, but local sports teams like the Little Leagues are always on the lookout for sponsors. Why not sponsor a team by paying for their uniforms or equipment? You can have your site or business name printed on the uniforms or equipment. You’ll have exposure whenever your local sports team plays.

5. Advertise on TV and in Radio
Unless you have a huge budget, national advertising is beyond your reach. However, you can still reach a wide audience through your local TV and radio stations.

6. Use Direct Mail Advertising
Direct mail advertising existed even before the Internet. However, of all the traditional advertising methods, direct mail can be rather expensive. If you do decide to market your site or online business using direct mail, make sure that you can track your direct mail so that you can evaluate its success instead of lose money.

7. Give Away Gifts and Free Stuff
You can put your name and logo on practically anything — pens, coffee mugs, notepads, calendars, cups, pencils, letter openers, bookmarks, et. These promotional items can be inexpensive and you can give them away to prospects, customers and associates.

About the author:

The author is a Toronto Internet Marketing consultant.

If you want to build traffic to your website, joint ventures can be very powerful in helping you achieve this goal. In a JV, you are leveraging the assets of others in a way that is beneficial to your website, and in turn the others are leveraging your assets in a way that is beneficial to them. In addition to building traffic to your website design, joint ventures can help you establish professional relationships with fellow Toronto website or online business owners.

You can use joint ventures to generate more traffic to your web design or online business. Below are some suggestions:

1. Do you have a mailing list or do you publish an e-zine? You can find someone in Toronto who has a mailing list or publishes an e-zine and strike out an agreement to promote each other’s website, product or service in your mailing lists or e-zines. Both you and the other person can benefit from this arrangement since each of your message r offer will be seen by a whole new set of people.

2. Trade content with other Toronto website owners. This works the same way as promoting each other in e-zines or mailing list only this time, the two of you exchange articles instead of ads. When you use your JV partner’s articles on your website, you include a link back to his website, and he does the same thing for you.

3. Create a joint venture website or blog. If your strength is in content writing and not so much as in graphics, consider looking for someone who is good at creating graphics. Together, put up a site or blog where both of you can link to and promote your websites.

4. Create a community blog where several Toronto JV partners can post and promote themselves. You can create a team whose members each have their own areas of expertise. The community blog is where all of you can post about your expertise. This strategy is actually similar to the previous strategy only this time, you are joint venturing with several people instead of just one.

5. Make yourself available to be interviewed. Contact website owners in Toronto and see if they are interested in interviewing and featuring you in their websites. You’ll be new content that they can add to their website and you can gain wide exposure by becoming an expert.

The above are only a few ways you can use joint ventures to generate traffic to your website and establish yourself as an expert in your field. There are certainly many ways you can joint venture with others. The only limit is your imagination, so don’t be afraid to be creative in coming up with joint venture ideas.

To find people, it is best that you start small — approach a few whom you know and trust. Many have found that there is little financial risk in promoting to each other’s mailing lists or e-zines.

Once you’re used to working together on different web design projects, you can start pursuing bigger projects with the same people as well as new ones. One thing you need to make sure of is that both you and your partner clearly understand what you expect from each other and what each of you must do in order to make this web design venture a success.