My offline marketing adventure and why I am no longer doing it!

- My adventure into CPA marketing starts around June of 2014 -

Throughout the month of June I applied to the following CPA networks:
- Rocket Profit ........... (Denied)
- Max Bounty ............. (Denied)
- Link Share ............... (No response)
- Share a Sale ............. (No response)
- Search Cactus ........... (No response)
- Market Leverage ..... (Denied)
- Ad Fish .................... (Denied)
- PeerFly .................... (Denied)
- AdscendMedia ......... (Accepted)
I applied to about 3-5 other CPA networks (not listed).

On June 30th I was accepted into the AdscendMedia CPA network. (Hurray I broke through!)

The day I was accepted into the AdscendMedia CPA network I found an offer to promote and I ordered 5,000 flyers 'Business cards', (5,000 flyers may sound like a lot, but it's really not...). It cost me under $100 shipped, from Vista Print.

I conducted geographical/demographical research through the US Census Bureau's website, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and my common sense to determine that the area was largely middle class college students. There is a university less than 2 miles away from where I distributed the flyers.

I wrote custom copy and created a URL relevant to the offer and utilized URL forwarding to forward traffic to the offers landing page.

On July 10th 2014 the 5,000 flyers arrived in the mail. Later the next morning at 12:30am I drove out to the location where I was going to distribute my flyers. I had a backpack with 1,250 flyers and a couple bottles of water.

- Fast forward 3 hours -
Around the time I had distributed 750 flyers I was stopped by an off duty police officer. The police officer told me that he had been watching me walk in and out between cars and he viewed my activates as suspicious/criminal. He presumed that I was looking for a car to steal, (the officer thought I was looking for an unlocked door handle). We spoke for about five minutes. The conversation started out hostile and by the end of it we were 'best of friends'. The officer allowed me to carry on with distributing the flyers.

Some of the data I gathered while I was out...
- It took me three hours to distribute 860 flyers. (Approximately three minutes per car). Three minutes per car... WTF!
- Of the 860 flyers distributed I got six leads.
- When you distribute flyers of cars, you have two main options... Either place the flyer under the windshield wiper or on the driver side door.
- Sure it only takes 10-15 seconds to 'Tag' a car with a flyer and walk to the next one, but there is a lot more unplanned walking that goes into it that eats up the time.
- If you are stopped by the police they might (in my case) take your driver's license information and consider you a suspect if any criminal activity is reported in the following days.

This leads me to the present day...
For the past week I have been exploring/learning PPC. I am currently running two campaigns with 7Search. One of my campaigns is promoting a ClickBank Product and the other is promoting a CPA offer for a social networking site.

On 8/2/2014 I saw my first profit of $8 from the CPA offer I promote. (Very cool stuff!)

I spent $18.25 to recognize the $8.

So far I can say that my experience with 7Search has been great! But, I am currently branching out to Bing for PPC. (I have created an ad campaign with Bing, but have not activated it yet. My accounts funded and ready to go, I'm still doing research on their demographic/my offers keywords...).

To bring this post to a close...
I highly recommend offline marketing if you can engage with the people who receive your flyers. Don't place them on cars. Let's do the math; I distributed 860 flyers (ie. 860 impressions, with a 'click through rate, CTR' of 6). Since I started running two campaigns on 7Search (one week ago) I have received 66,185 impressions and 389 clicks. I recommend If you don't want to engage with people by handing out flyers, learn PPC. I am still learning, but I can attest to you that PPC is WAY better than putting flyers on cars at 2am.


Thanks for taking the time to read. Please share your online 'PPC' or offline 'Flyer' success / failure experiences.