Low-cost offline website promotion

Promoting a regional (national) discussion forum through cyber-cafes

[seunosewa]

Hi there,

I'm trying to build a large, general-purpose regional forum using standard forum software. I live in a third world country where most people use the Internet through cyber-cafes .

I'm looking for the most effective ways to promote the forum through those cybercafes. I've considered:
- Paying young people to loiter around the various cyber-cafes, and distribute promotional leaflets to people going in or coming out of the cyber-cafe.
- Somehow convincing the cyber-cafes to use a page on my site as their start page, distribute my promotional materials at the counter to anyone who would accept them, or display posters advertising my site.

Are these ideas any good? Do you have any better ones?

Seun

[chunk_split]

design screensavers for the cyber-cafes, include a link/address to your forum on the screensaver.

[nonstop]

IE toolbar with a link to your site on it, Icon on IE itself, favourites, quick launch bar, desktop, start menu, run a competition, cyber cafe staff t-shirts sponsoured by your forum, mouse mats with your forum info on it, stickers on computers/monitors.

just some ideas

[nonstop]

I thought of another one, you could get one of them stand up advertising boards you sometimes see outside of shops with some info about your forum.

[webtress]

Seun, these are all good ideas and provide an important ingredient "win-win" that is what will help you sell it to the cafes. Every business wants to know "what's in it for us". The idea of passing out flyers in front of the cafe may just piss the owner off. Get the cafe owners to approve the idea in writting then spend a little printing some gadget or gizmo.

[seunosewa]

Hello,

Thanks for all your suggestions. I also thought about this one: creating educative leaflets on topics of general importance to web surfers (e.g. shopping safely online) which cafes would be happy to distribute to their customers, and including a brief ad with our forum url.