In one post on this blog (Advertising Offline to Drive Traffic to a Website) I moaned that an advert in the Exchange and Mart didn’t perform for me.

However, this past week I received some advice from an expert in driving sales from classified advertising, Tim Lowe.

He said that I could publish the advice so here it is:

“Hi Ben

I saw you were doing this and wondered how it would turn out.

For what it is worth I have, occasionally, made out OK with Exchange & Mart but not for a couple of years.

The major nationals are my favourites.

Just picking up on your comments about visitor numbers, I wouldn’t dismiss 50 or so visitors as not enough to do well. My experience, with a good offer, has been sometimes over 20% conversion ‘visitors to sales’ so it is possible to make a decent profit from small numbers of visits. In fact if I get 300 – 400 visitors each week in total I can make a nice living.

Of course, the key is a good ad and sales letter – what may pass muster with SEO traffic, just through weight of numbers, may not do well with offline ads.

A key point that you may not have noticed is the need for hard copy follow ups. I have always offered people a few links to order an “information pack” in the post, which is essentially just the website in printed format. This is surprisingly popular as people dislike reading screens for very long and it also gives people a hard copy which they seem to like, maybe to read in bed or on the train. Whatever the reaons, I know that this brings in a huge amount of extra sales. Just recently I have been having trouble with the data capture service that I use and have not been able to send out these follow up packs, sales are literally half the normal volume as a result.

I do feel for the people that you describe who all tried selling the same products with the same sales letter. There is no question that having what looks like a unique offer will always outsell a “me too” product. Common sense tells us that 3 people selling the same thing with the same advertising will only get one third of the potential sales each. One of the things that I have been teaching people at workhops is how to make yourself stand out from the crowd with unique offers and approaches to selling similar products. It is essential to give potential customers reasons to choose your offer over other people’s, otherwise you cannot expect to sell much at all, but this is such a simple point that it is often overlooked.

I hope this is helpful, if so then please feel free to publish it.

Kind regards

Tim Lowe”

Some interesting and helpful advice there – thanks for taking the time to email me!