New Marketing and Promotional Ideas

Half of these new marketing and promotional ideas are related to internet-based businesses. Still, even those can usually be adopted in some way to other businesses.

Free gift teaser. Offering a free gift is certainly not a new marketing idea, but it hasn't been done much in internet article "resource boxes." My click-throughs from articles increased as soon as I started putting in the author's resource box, "For more information and a free gift, visit..." The gift is usually a short course, or an e-book. Even if you don't want to write an e-book, you can find one with free distribution rights.

One hour coupons. This idea is for offline businesses that want to increase the traffic to their web sites. Announce in any other advertising that you'll have an "internet coupon" good for a free drink (or whatever) up for an hour on Friday. It takes about two minutes to change a web page, so it is easy to have it up for just an hour. Meanwhile, visitors will be returning again and again to try to be there at the right time to get the freebie. If you collect pay-per-click advertising fees, this repeat traffic might be especially profitable.

Sell word links. You may have heard about the entrepreneur that sold a million pixels on one web page for a dollar each. You could buy a minimum of 100, and the image would link to your site. There have been many copycats so far, but I haven't yet seen anyone selling words. This would be even better for the advertiser, because they could buy the words that are relevant to their product. Of course, a page full of random words isn't pretty, but these things get publicity and traffic for their novelty.

Advertise on cereal boxes. People spend a lot of time staring at cereal boxes. You might get a good rate on advertising on them. There has been some advertising there, of course, but not a box covered in ads yet. Brokering ad space on cereal boxes might be a good business to get into.

Product use contests. For products that are used in many ways or many places, this is a great promotional gimmick. Have a contest to see who has used their cell phone, watch, or whatever in the wildest place or the most unusual way. ("I took my Walkman to the north pole!") They can post their stories and photos directly to the company web site, and they will return again and again to see the new stories, and the results of the competition.

Paid article placement. Many of us online distribute articles to generate traffic to our web sites. Many also pay to advertise. Articles are especially good marketing tools, so why not pay to have other web masters put them on their sites? They do this for free already, in order to get free content, but not often enough. Offer a small one-time fee, with a minimum time commitment and an explanation that leaving the article there forever can benefit them due to the search engine traffic it will generate.

Ads on peoples private cars, advertising on sidewalks, a contest to see who can get your product mentioned and seen on TV - there are endless possibilities for new marketing and promotional ideas.