Which one is tougher - Online or Offline marketing?

Making money both online or offline is simple but not always easy. Of the two… I find that it’s far easier to make quick profits offline.

I then use a potion of my offline profits to market online.

I’m in the photography and IM/MMO niches.

I make a few thousand per month online from just a couple of the 37 domains I own. But if you put a gun to my head and told me I had 30 days to make a $20,000 profit or else… I’d grab my camera and laptop and would immediately start running as quickly as possible from house to house knocking on doors of any homes where I spotted children or toys indicating the household had kids living there.

I’d talk to the parents and hand them a sample portrait explaining I create fantasy portraits and that I had an irresistible offer for them… I’ll photograph the children and give them a 8x10 print of the image they liked best absolutely free. The catch is they would most likely fall in love with all of the images and end up ordering from $500 to $1000 in extra prints.

Of course I don’t tell them that most people spend over $500 on extra images. When they ask how much will it cost if I decided to order any extras I just tell them… The worst that could happen is you get your favourite image for free… extra prints are optional and you can purchase additional 8x10’s for as little as $50.00 Depending on how many they order.

This neutralizes the I can’t afford them price objection and doing this for 30 days straight I’d end up making way over $20,000 in profits. Then I’d take a month or two off so I could go back to creating long term passive income online.

I wouldn't try to sell IM services to brick and mortar businesses because that takes to much work and sales ability. I’d rather offer to create fantasy portraits of them and their children because I know my numbers. Selling fantasy portraits to parents is like shooting fish in a barrel.

I’m really lucky that I have something I can sell both online and offline. If they see it, they want it, but only if it's their loved ones in the picture so that's why for me, it's so much easier offline.

Unfortunately, most people don’t have an advantage like that and they think that Internet Marketing is a business. It’s not a business… it’s just another means to market a real product or service and most people don’t have a hungry crowd to sell to or a product people actually want to buy so they end up trying to market and sell to non-buyers instead of quickly running through the numbers to find the ones who already want what they are selling.

Cheers,
Steve Ski

If this were 2005 I would say offline were more difficult.

Back then SEO was much easier. And what I paid for clicks in 2005? It makes me cry.

You also had a lot fewer people trying to carve out their own "empire" on the Internet using things like article marketing.

In addition you didn't have as many of the offline "big-boys" on the net and the ones that were on the net... well many of those didn't know what they were doing.

Offline back then was still filled with many stalwarts of offline marketing. Catalogers. Mail order folks. Infomercial experts. It was tougher to compete with them.

But nearly a decade later things have reversed.

Not that you can't make money... good money on the net, because obviously you still can. But the margin for error is much smaller IMO. Many of the advantages smart Internet marketers had in 2005 have gone sour- to one extent or another. Just look at email response rates now as compared to what we got back then.

And offline?

My gosh, just start with your mailbox. We all receive much less mail than we did back then. And that itself is a magnificent opportunity, because those that use direct mail are finding much less competition for attention.

Radio... print... Television. All are still very effective and the rates especially for radio and print are stagnant or even falling. When was the last time your PPC costs fell?

Offline isn't just about getting clients and using offline that way. There are still lots of folks out there selling products, be it physical products or even digital products through offline channels.

The one advantage offline still has (as it did in 2005) is the ability to scale it upwards once you have developed a winning sales message. Take it from newspapers to magazines to free-standing inserts to direct response radio to direct mail to direct response TV to direct selling period. I think it's much easier to scale up big offline.