The main focus of your online marketing campaign can and should be centered around the process of search engine optimization. The simple reason for this is that the traffic you produce is free, and renewable. But traffic on the Internet can be gained from many different directions, and one most notably forgotten, is the regular offline world.
It will take time to produce traffic from the search engines. Conservatively, from the first time it goes online, it could take as long as three months to be producing it's maximum traffic potential from the engines.
So, why is that affiliates never bother to print a thousand flyers and distribute them around their hometown? Would this produce traffic? If your message was clear enough, your URL was memorable enough and your call to action was appropriate, this could certainly produce traffic, and in huge numbers. Now, this traffic isn't renewable like the search engines, but it's no less valuable, and it's not terribly difficult to produce.
Start looking at the outside advertising world, what's cheap and could be effective. Does you cable provider have a preview channel? One of those ones that has ad's running constantly on one half while the other shows what's on every station? Those ads are sold locally through the cable network, and are very affordable. That's why you often see low budget ads there for the local car dealership or other things. If you put together a simple flash animation advertising your website with it's free games, all of the people who are bored out of their minds trying to find something to watch on television, might just log on to the internet and check your site out. Another plus of this specific advertising medium is that you get to repeat your ad often, and the more times someone sees it the greater the chance of them deciding to check it out. Of course, being the smart affiliate marketer that you are, the first thing your going to do when they do arrive at your website is collect their email, opt-in, so that you can contact them again in the future, on your schedule.
Our point here is to not let yourself get stuck in an Internet state of mind, one where you don't feel like there is any point to advertising locally, because your audience is potentially international. Start small, and grow. Start locally, and expand.
