Pete Ericson provides practical, free ways for publishers to promote their magazine website offline. Key tips: make web addresses easy to read (capitalize word starts in domain names), include the site in voicemail greetings and on all printed materials (business cards, ads, vehicle signage), and use email signatures—specifically Gmail plus the Wisestamp plugin—to add links and social icons. He also emphasizes always inviting users with a clear call-to-action (free issue, video, interview) and ends with a call to visit issuem.com to learn more.
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Lets talk about how to promote your website address offline, which is within your company and for free. And the first thing I want you to consider is the way your website address looks. You want to use capital letters at the beginning of the words in your web address. And as an example, dollcrafter.com the D is capitalized, the C is capitalized. It's very easy for people to see what this is. Here's another one. Newyorkdogs.com looks good, right? And a third one. Pokerhq.com using capital letters can make your website address easy to read and scannable. And that is the secret to creating copy online, to writing text online is we as humans, we don't read website pages or really anything. We scan, we're always scanning. And in this case, for your web address, we're scanning the text and then we're deciding. Okay, I like that. Then I'll read. Using capital letters makes it look scannable. Okay, here's another idea. Put your web address on your voicemail. I can't tell you how many companies don't do this. If you're publishing a magazine and you have a phone number and people call you and they get voicemail, make sure your web address is there. Printed matter. Now this seems a little old school, but if you have printed matter, make sure your web address is visible on all your ads. Make sure it's on your business cards. And what I would recommend the back of your card, put it to use for social media addresses. How about a vehicle tailgate? If you drive around any signs you have, and if you already have stock and you're not going to reprint soon, then print labels that you can stick on all your printed matter. Okay? Email signature. I cannot tell you how many publishers email me and don't have their web address in their email signature. Every time you email somebody, it's a little piece of advertising potential for your publication. So put the link to your magazine in your email signature. Every email program has this in their preferences. And all you have to do is put the HTTP front of your web address and that will create the link. You also might want to link to your Facebook and Twitter and any other social media properties that you have as well. And if you want to make your email signature the way it's shown here, the way I do it, which I do get a lot of requests for. So I thought I'd share this with you. First of all, you have to use Gmail. If you're not using Gmail for your email switch, it will handle your business web address, email. And it's fabulous. And the plugin is called wisestamp. Go to wisestamp.com and you can download it for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. And it will let you add those neat little social media icons and pull your Twitter feeds, whatever you want. Write in your email signature works great. And it's free. And let's wrap up with the secret sauce. Always be inviting. And when I say that, I mean you have a web address. Why should somebody go to your web address? Yeah, okay. You publish a magazine, they want to read your stories, but make it obvious. Invite them to do something specific to motivate them to actually go to your website. So give away a free issue. There's an idea. Watch a great video. Maybe they should go to your website to watch the super video you have. Maybe they should go to your website to listen to an interview with an industry expert or sign up for a webinar. That is the secret to getting people to move to your website. And here I've invited you to go to issuem.com to learn how to drive more readers to your magazine for free.
