- Hang your white towel in gym in such a way that your company name sewed with red on bottom is easily visible.

- Put your site name on your car. Remember how Mercedes is read on back of every, well, Mercedes simply self promoting it. Try to put site name on back, coz this is place most people following you are going to see. Now how you balance size and color is up to you. Make sure you don’t look desperate with that sticker. It should look as though you are running a satisfied business and it doesn’t matter (though really it does) that whether your pursuit visits site or not.

- Send out birthday greetings to your best customers and potential customers. No, don’t start searching for e-greetings. I said greetings, physical cards. They hold a lot deeper value compared to its virtual counterpart. And it shows that you are making sincere efforts to please customers. Again, going back to earlier formula, this will elate your customers and make them loyal customers.

- Take placard to any sporting event. Lets suppose soccer. Go to support your home team in a home match. Take along with you some placards that have a suggest score line with victory to home team written on it, and your site address nicely fixed on bottom line. Distribute this in crowd, who first of all display it all around for T.V. cameras to catch it and then they take it home, preserve it for some time, see your site name often and now become customers. Simple, huh.

Now, one very useful trick to promote your site is one which exists right in our campuses. Confused? Well, let’s clarify. University, college or school students are a great way to put your product across. Its like all bowling pins are stacked together and you just need to roll ball. Metaphorical. Let’s say, you've got a firm selling pets. Now, you could go meet principal/head/president (or whoever is authority) to hold a quiz competition in their campus about nature and wildlife or geography or anyother topic which would exhibit your product. Now, this is where you are getting loads and loads of publicity. Try making this a city effort, a state effort, whatever your pocket can handle, and hold these final inter-college events in your premises (hire a hall if you don’t have a decent enough premise). Contact press; they would love to put your event on page three. Moreover, students, their friends and all will also become aware about your services.

You could use other competitions also. It might be a karate competition, if your selling martial arts goods, a poster-making competition if your selling stationary, a elocution or debate instead of quiz and possibilities are endless.

You could also sponsor a lecture/seminar by people who have been in field and would not overwhelm you with their charges. This could also get a good press coverage, and if not that, at least a mention in events section of news-paper, whereby your companies name is disclosed.

So, having said all this, I don’t think you would disagree that there's a wired world out there. The sky is limit for such ideas, and if you get some, please inform me as well. Find contact details in About Author section

I insured my car other day over Internet. The first few sites I tried only supported Internet Explorer. That, at least to me, is a filter and I went somewhere a little more Firefox friendly!

Many corporate web sites insist you provide a lot of information before they will send you that ‘free’ White Paper you are interested in. No doubt that information is required by someone in business, but it filters out a lot of otherwise interested people who simply won’t take time to fill out form and inevitably receive all sales calls afterwards. After all, they can’t be sure they’re even a prospect before they read White Paper!

Apple has potentially filtered out a large portion of their target market for iTunes by only accepting credit cards. Most under 18s won’t have a credit card, and they are major buyers of chart music. The ‘Music Store Card’ is an attempt to turn this filter into an amplifier.

What Filters and Amplifiers Mean to Your Marketing

Importantly, this way of thinking allows you to look at all of your marketing, online and offline, in a critical way to improve your response rates and your sales. Every time you look at any aspect of your business, ask yourself if this filters out customers you want to serve, or if you can amplify target market by improving process.

Perhaps you could send postcards or use leaflets instead of putting brochures in envelopes. Don’t insist on a customer’s life history before you will allow them to buy from you. Make your web site informative and easy to use, rather than slick, ‘cutting edge’ and hard to understand. If you are providing services, make it clear on your site where you are and distance you will travel. Use local town and county names as keywords to filter out people who will never be able to buy from you, but to amplify chance of attracting locals.

If you do this consistently, over time you will get your filters and amplifiers to attract profitable customers to you, not send them away to your competitors, never to return.