An Offline Tactic for Online Business

It's funny how many good ideas are all around us, if you keep your eyes open. I was recently doing some work on the house, taking care of some summertime projects and such. While looking around on the Lowe's website (that's a hardware store for those of you not in the US), I noticed they had a really cool content idea that could be used in plenty of other businesses too. Here's what I found.

The Idea

Lowe's offers a number of "Creative Ideas" magazines. One is for indoor projects, one for outdoor projects and I think they had a few others. All of them are topical to appeal to different segments of their market. The magazines are free, delivered via PDF or through the mail if you want.

Three Important Lessons Learned

So what's so great about this and what can we learn from it? Well first, they're offering top-notch content to their customers. This helps put them in the position of the "trusted source" for this type of info, or at least one of the sources. And they're offering something that people actually want (and for free).

They've also built a platform to market their products/services. Certainly if they're talking about how to spruce up your deck or some other project, they'll include some recommended products that they offer that'll help you get that sort of job done.

They're also building a database of name/emails or names/addresses that they can use to highlight other offers. And by creating topical content, they've segmented their lists into specific groups…each with different interests. That also helps them gauge which type of content is most popular.

How Can We Use It?

So how can the rest of us use something like this? Well if you're creating/selling products, that should be pretty obvious. Just create some type of content (even a short 1 or 2 page PDF) with great info that compliments the products you offer. Imagine a dog blog or ecommerce pet store with a short monthly digest covering pet tips or something like that. The tips could be related to the products offered on the site or you could simply include ads for special offers, etc. within the content.

Of if you're a computer consultant, you could offer short technology tips for people looking for computer help…then include offers for your consulting services or information products. Feel free to replace "computer" with whatever type of consulting you actually do.

Even affiliates could get in on this by doing the same thing, but tailoring the content to the various affiliate products that they offer…nice way to build a list.

Some Other Thoughts

Probably best to keep it in PDF format at first to minimize cost. Depending on the conversion rate and success of something like this, it might make sense to go physical with it or even turn it into a paid resource.

Anyway, just an idea I thought I'd share here. I'm sure there are lots of other lessons to learn from this too. I subscribed to the Lowe's magazines just to get some ideas for how I might be able to use something like this on some of my other sites - might be something you want to add to your swipe file too.

Here's the link: Lowe's Creative Ideas Magazines

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