Website promotions are often described as on-line and off-line.

An on-line promotion happens on the internet, whether it's on your site, a search engine, someone else's site, or a blog of social media site. It's message is, While you're on-line, come visit my site.

If you can get this message to someone with a proven interest in your product, that's targeted marketing. So if you're selling car parts, you might want to advertise on a "how to fix your car" site.

Some sites offer classified ads, some offer display ads. If there is no existing advertising structure on a site that interests you, contact the site owner and make them a proposal. It might be a small site, it might not take much to persuade them, but if its traffic is relevant to you and you are the only advertiser, it could be very profitable to you.

Or you might like to advertise to people who go to Google and search for "car parts", whether you do this by SEO or pay-per-click.

Off line advertising happens anywhere except the internet: on television, on your letterheads and brochures, at the bottom of coffee cups. It's message is, Go on line and visit me.

This two step (go on line, visit me) is clearly harder than the one-step (while you're on line, visit me) but it still has some valuable functions. Not everyone spends all their time on line and some people when they go on-line are very focused on their task. They may even use software to clock your ads. And probably they are mostly different people from the always-on set.

It's also true that a person who sees your off-line promotion then logs on to visit your site is more committed to you than a casual browser who takes a chance on just one click. Probably these visitors are more valuable to you.

On-line and off-line both have their role; the mix that's best for you will depend on your circumstances and any opportunities for very targeted contacts or smart attention grabbers (sometimes called guerrilla marketing).

Glide can help you devise, implement, measure and refine a promotional strategy that will maximise your results for your budget.