I have DaniWeb business cards which I am not shy about passing out. Additionally, I attend a lot of Internet marketing conventions where I do a lot of face-to-face networking.

relevant linkage

I think both offline and online promotion can be effective for your site. For offline promotion you can implement ad campaign through letter drops, press release, trade show, business card etc.

When you say an online shop, are you referring to Cafepress, or something more elaborate?

If your community is global then your options are pretty much restricted as it would be costly and time consuming for you to ship merchandise across the world thus Cafe Press is the best option but if you have a local niche then I am all for local production of merchandise and sell it using any cart scripts (x-cart, oscommerece etc), with local production you have the advantage of having more control on quality and design of the product.

Marketing is one mile depth and 20 mile wide, you can not constraint with your local market only either with tangible or intangible product or service. You need to identify the marketing influencing factor and adopt some technique to motivate the targeted customers’ in particular marketing segment.

Can you please elaborate on what you mean by "one mile deep and 20 miles wide"? I'm not familiar with that expression.

My expression is that marketing is more to expand rather than going into depth only. You can learn new techniques contributing it to the knowledge based experience on experimental methods by exploring your marketing field. You can be able to predict a wide range of behaviors, wide range of tastes and interests if you are open your field widely.

It is like the distance from the centre of a lens to the image of an object at infinity, if you make changes in focal length it will affects both image size and depth of your field.