If you have a website, you are constantly bombarded with information about how to promote it, from pay-per-click search engines to submitting articles to exchanging links with other sites. The sheer volume of information that one encounters when embarking on Internet marketing is just overwhelming.

As I was talking to a potential client the other day, the topic of promoting her company's website came up, and I knew that my telling her about all of the ways to conduct online marketing would just sound like gibberish to her. So, instead I started rattling off all of the offline ways she could promote the new website. These she understood and they made sense, as she could relate them to traditional marketing techniques. It occurred to me that in our quest to be the biggest and baddest online, we often forget to use more traditional means to get the word out about our online presence.

So, here's your checklist of the top 10 ways you can market your site offlline that won't break the bank:

1. Collateral Materials: Print your URL and email address on all of your collateral materials, including letterhead stationary and envelopes, business cards, postcards, greeting cards, business checks, mailing labels, invoices, brochures, fax cover sheets, print newsletters, press releases, and customer feedback forms. By doing this, everyone with whom you have any contact has your website address. Many of these items pass through tons of hands, and you never know who might see one piece of your collateral material and become a customer.

2. Front Door of Your Business Location: Do you have a retail location? If so, somewhere on your front door or in the window near your entrance, place a sign that says, "Open 24 hours a day online at www.YourWebsiteName.com". You could also add this to the permanent outdoor business sign. Let your website do your selling for you!

3. Voicemail Messages: On your voicemail message, include your website address in the content of the message, letting listeners know that they can find information about you and/or buy products and services via your website. If you have music or a message that plays while callers are on hold, incorporate your website URL into the information that they hear.

4. Promotional Items: Plaster your URL all over any promotional items that you might give away -- mousepads, pens, magnets, notepads, etc.

5. Automobile: Use your car to advertise your website for you as you go to client meeting or run errands around time. Place your website URL on removable vinyl magnetic signs on the doors of your vehicle, vinyl cling signs on your back windshield, or I.D. It Plates (www.iditplates.com) on the back of your car.

6. Clothing: Have clothing printed with your web address and logo and give them to friends and family members to wear around town -- baseball caps, T-shirts, button-down shirts. Or, you can give them away as prizes or promotional items. Have your friends and clients become a walking billboard for your website!

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