I'll tell you a secret that you can use within ten minutes that could substantially benefit your business. And it's strange because, unless you happen to live within ten minutes of me, there's no way you can compete with me or steal this almost zero cost, local traffic (and if you do live nearby, stay off my turf or I'll break your legs). You can however do exactly the same in your local area without fear of me coming round your place with hired goons and a baseball bat.

Recently, I've been getting my house renovated (if ever you wish to go grey with alarming speed, this is the way to do it). It means I've had to go to a very popular hardware store near my house countless times. This hardware store gets tens of thousands of customers every week. That's what I like to call offline traffic (there's loads of it about and pretty soon, you're going to learn how to harvest it). A while ago I noticed that this hardware store had an advertising podium on a very prolific spot near the tills. I had seen loads of people buzzing around it before, checking out the various advertisers displayed. It costs ?20 to place an ad there for a whole week.

Did I place an advert? Most certainly - but I put it with a very specific SPIN. You see, you have a lot of builders, plumbers, decorators (etc) visiting this store frequently. This is a group that is always looking for new business. A group that is not particularly tech-savvy. A group that are increasingly looking to set-up a web presence. In short, a group that would benefit greatly from my site design & promotion services. As you might imagine, I placed the ad for website design services targeted to this group. The response? Far more than my design team (currently one person) could handle. And a bunch of leads pestering me to let them know the minute I had availability to service their order. Now I don't know about you, but that's the kind of result I like from twenty bucks of advertising.

Now this method is one very small strategy you can employ to get big gains for your online business using offline advertising. I could literally think up HUNDREDS of variances to this theme. You see, many physical stores that get tonnes of customers offer these advert spaces and you can benefit from them in a pretty big way:

- Place an advert in the popular health store and drive traffic to your highly related health food website. Immediately you have targeted traffic that will click away at your Adsense displays, affiliate links & purchase your health eBooks.

- Put an advert around local gyms and get traffic to your fitness website with the same results.

- Place your "make m.oney" type adverts around smaller newsagents (one ad I place costs me ?2 [about $4] a month) and watch the steady flow of traffic come in.

You get the idea. And this is just ONE offline strategy. There are countless other ways to drive traffic & sales to your online business. Here are a few additional ones for you to consider:

- Classified adverts placed in local papers & magazines.

- Radio & TV ads - contrary to popular belief, there are affordable radio & tv adverts available to suit your product.

- Flyers - very inexpensive to get out, yet can be incredibly responsive depending on the type of niche you're in.

- Coupons - issue coupons that can be redeemed at your site

And believe it or not there are even more. Hopefully, this article has taught you that just because you have an online business doesn't mean you should turn your back to offline advertising. In fact, these rather ignored strategies can account for the bulk of your traffic, subscribers and customers once you put them into place.