Promoting Your Online Business Offline: Filler Exchanges

A Few Tips for Effective Exchanges~

What Kinds of Fillers to Exchange - Don't just limit yourself to business cards or flyers. That's not likely to elicit a response and you will have wasted your time, money and postage. Everyone gives out business cards. This serves purely to promote yourself - they give nothing back to the receiver of the business card. Make sure to offer something of value in the flyers you exchange. Try coupons (and make them good ones!), samples, little gifts like personalized pencils, pens, etc. This will give people the motivation to visit your web site. Oh yeah, and don't forget to include your URL on ALL your fillers!
 
Making Professional-Looking Fillers - Don't spend too much money, but make sure your fillers are professional. If you are making your own coupons or brochures, make sure they are folded neatly, they are cut evenly and that you have plenty of ink in your printer. Unless you have a color laser printer, it is best to stick with black ink and if you put it on color paper, you will have a sharp and professional look.

Testing Your Fillers - It is always good practice to have a place on your online order form to ask your customer where they heard about your business. Give them the option to choose "printed promotional material" or something that will indicate to you that it was from a filler exchange. However, don't give your customers the option of choosing "filler exchange" ~ they won't know what you're talking about. Include coupons in your fillers that you don't give out anywhere else or number them so you can keep track of how many are redeemed.

Taking Other People's Fillers - Be honest about the number of fillers you can accept. Don't tell your filler exchange partners you'll take 50 if you only do a couple of orders each month. These cost money and you don't want to have those fillers sitting in the corner of your office, collecting dust.
Be specific. If you want to accept any filler, from any business ~ then that's your prerogative. If you want to be selective and ask only for people who give you fillers with substance (coupons, gifts, samples), then that is acceptable. If you only want to accept fillers from businesses that sell children's products or if you don't fillers from competing businesses, then say so. The packs you give out reflect on you as well. You need to feel good about what your passing out.