Your Web site is the key to effective online/ offline marketing mixes. If you haven't got a Web site, you're handicapping your marketing abilities. Your Web site is the basis of all your marketing, so if you haven’t got one, it's time to get serious about your business.

How do you mix traditional marketing and with 21st century online marketing? You can combine your Web site with: newspaper classified advertising, sending news releases, direct mail, online advertising, and much more.

Let's see how that works.

=> Your Web site plus classified ads

One of the cheapest, most effective forms of advertising is the humble classified, in the newspaper. You can use this form of advertising to the greatest effect, and make it much more powerful, if you combine a two or three line mini-ad in your local newspaper with your Web site URL. Used in this way, your ad is just a teaser, designed to get people to visit your site.

Don't forget that when you use this ultra-simple form of advertising, you need to TEST.

Let's say you're selling ebooks from your site. Write a series of four ads, each with a different headline, and different offer, but all including your URL. Create a different "landing page" for each ad, so that you can use your Web log to see how many people visited the page in response to your ad.

After the series of four ads, one or two ads may attract more visitors to your site. Select an ad, and then, without changing it in any way, run that ad for three months. (Most advertising takes around three months to have an effect.)

=> Your Web site plus news releases

The Internet is sheer heaven for Public Relations folk. You're your own PR person, and you can use the Internet to get free publicity for your creative business in exactly the same way they do.

If you have a minimal budget for PR, use PRWeb at ---

http://www.prweb.com/

You can post your news releases free. Or if you want more features --- your releases added to search engines and news feeds --- pay a minimal amount to get these added features.

=> Your Web site plus direct mail

I open my postal mail, and so does everyone else. Although I discard junk mail which is obviously junk --- that is, it's been sent out automatically with no human intervention by culling my name and address from a database --- I read mail which is directed to me by name, and which takes my needs and interests into account.

Please don’t send out thousands of direct mail letters to addresses you've purchased from some marketing company or other. This form of broadcast mail is useless for a small business person.

Your direct mail should consist of personalized, custom-written letters, directed to a single person at a company you want to do business with, and it should make some kind of business proposal.

==> Your Web site plus online advertising

You can advertise online even if you have a minimal budget. Google Adwords is very popular, and you can set your own budget for how much you want to spend per day:

https://adwords.google.com

=> Your Web site plus your creativity

The biggest benefit of your Web site is that it's the world's most inexpensive form of advertising and marketing. How you use your site is up to you.

Please try some of these methods I've outlined for old-fashioned marketing combined with the new. They WILL work for you, but please remember that you need to be consistent and persistent. I get very frustrated when someone tells me that they've been marketing without success, because 85 times out of 100 it’s because they haven't given it a fair shot. They've dabbled, rather than approached their marketing in a businesslike fashion. (The other 15 times their offer needs work.)

Persist, and you'll get results beyond your wildest dreams. Good luck.

Author of many books, including Making the Internet Work for Your Business, copywriter and journalist Angela Booth also writes copy for businesses large and small, and consults on search engine marketing. Angela has written copy for companies in many industries, ranging from technology and real estate to the jewellery trade. Her clients include major corporations like hp (Hewlett Packard), WestPac Bank, and Acer Computer. For copywriting services and marketing advice contact Angela at angelabooth.com

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