The following is from Click Input and should hopefully save some of you guys some money and get some people thinking how to get free leads. Hope it's helpful! When it comes to affiliate marketing, you people living in the United States are luckier than the rest of us. Besides the obvious reasons, one of the bigs ones is your ability to market affiliate products offline, and this is something that I don’t think a lot of people take advantage of. Why they don’t I’m not entirely sure, but if you see people like Shoemoney running around giving out free shirts for their own websites (which, while they may not be affiliate based, are still web based), then offline marketing must still work. Maybe people get tunnel vision and because it’s an online product they are promoting, think they will only find customers online through PPC, SEO, whatever. To take an obvious, and totally overused example lets look at ringtones. While I can’t say for sure, I assume that all the big Universities and maybe even the High Schools have public noticeboards where students can put up notices for free, or a small fee. Well how about registering a domain like FreeCollegeTones.com and redirecting it straight to a ringtone affiliate link? I guarantee that is a way to some free leads. Likewise with advertising on local radio, you aren’t going to pay big bucks, and if you are getting back anywhere from $10 to $40 on something like insurance leads you should be able to stay in the black. You can say a heck of a lot in a 30 second advertisement spot and then use the website you send them to to back up everything you said in the commercial. So take a step back from the traditional, online only, affiliate marketing methods, you might find an avenue that costs literally nothing, but can make you a ton. And one last thing - don’t be too lazy to pick up the phone and call some radios or newspapers about advertising, or walk down to the local University and post some notices, don’t kid yourself it’s easier to whip up another Adwords campaign - get off your butt!
Telemarketing, newspaper ads, billboards, word of mouth, flyers, business cards, radio, and on and on. I have seen many traditional businesses coming online to build their business, but not as much the other direction. An internet business hitting on all cylinders would have to include some offline marketing as there is still a huge amount of the population who do spend that much time on the internet.