Using Giveaways To Build Your List

Using giveaways to build your list is becoming an increasingly popular method, and providing you do it right it’s easy to generate a large amount of subscribers in very little time.

A giveaway event is basically a website where marketers upload products for other people to download for free. These products can be anything – eBooks, short reports, audio products, video products, etc.

In order to gain access to the products, people first have to sign up to the giveaway event (so the organiser of the giveaway gets to build their list) and then people also have to opt-in again to download any individual product (so the person who puts the product on the site gets to build their own list.)

Contributing a free product to a giveaway event can therefore be very lucrative. People sign-up to giveaway events because they’re looking for free products, and if you can provide a product that people want then you should generate plenty of new subscribers.

The most important thing is that you give away a QUALITY product. Many people upload products to giveaway events that are outdated, tired, and are generally rubbish.

You can’t offer crap. Sure you’ll get opt-ins, but if the product is rubbish then people will very quickly unsubscribe.

The other thing to consider is the quality of the giveaway event. Some giveaways seem to be put together in a great hurry, look very unprofessional, and have lots of rubbish products. Do you really want to be associated with a giveaway like that? Probably not.

It’s a good idea to promote the giveaway you’re participating in. By generating referrals to the giveway you will in most cases help your product appear more prominently in the giveaway. On some sites it is a requirement that you generate a certain amount of referrals before you are allowed to contribute a free product.

If you’d like more information on giveaways the following Push Buttton Giveaways might be quite helpful – http://www.craigdawber.com/recommends/PushButtonGiveaways

Essential Squeeze Page Tips

We all know you need to build a list. ‘The money’s in the list’, ‘the gold’s in the list’… and I completely agree. To build it, however, what you need is a great squeeze page. You need a free offer that converts like crazy – something which turns your visitors into subscribers and captures their attention to the point where it’s something they simply can’t refuse.

Here are 4 tips for creating a great squeeze page….

1. 1. Use professional graphics

It’s important that the offer on your squeeze page looks professional and valuable. A great way to do this is to have some eye catching graphics made. If you can’t do it yourself then pay a designer to do it for you. Even though you’ll be shelling out money to create something you’ll be giving away for free, trust me when I say it will be well worth it because it will massively increase the perceived value of your freebie.

1. 2. Offer something of value

Even with a free offer you can’t get away with giving away crap. People are becoming increasingly choosy about what they will opt-in to receive, so make sure your squeeze page offers something which is actually worth having. Make sure it is high quality and if it’s unique to you then even better.

1. 3. Use an exciting title

As well as using the graphics to ‘sell’ your product, you can also increase conversions by giving your product an exciting title. Make it a complete formula or a system.  Use ‘buzz’ words which the top products in your niche use.

1. 4. Use something else other than ‘submit’

Don’t leave ‘submit’ as the text on your opt-in button. Changing it to something else such as ‘free access’ can greatly increase the number of people who join your list. I can’t prove why, but my own theory is that ‘submit’ is quite negative in that it makes people think they are joining a database (which of course they ARE) but what you need to do is refocus their attention on the fact that as soon as they’ve clicked the button they will be able to access their freebie.

As always please leave your comments below

Website Traffic Strategies For You To Consider

I’m sure you’ll agree that it is pretty important to have a decent flow of regular, targeted traffic to your website. After all, there is little point in having a website if nobody ever sees it!

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but here are 5 strategies for generating website traffic which you might want to consider using:

1. Get Involved with Social Media

There is simply no getting away from social media tools such as Facebook or Twitter. The key to success with this method is to attract potential prospects to become your followers and then also tell them about your websites. You can use a tool such as http://bit.ly to track how many people click on your links (this is an excellent tool which provides real time statistics).

1. Submit Your Website to Directories

This probably isn’t going to drive much website traffic in itself but it does have excellent SEO benefits. By submitting your website url to site directories you will build up a number of backlinks to your website. This can help your ranking in the search engines (ie. How high up the search results your site appears when people search for specific keywords.)

1. Take Part in Giveaways

A giveaway is a special website, usually only live for a specific period of time (for example 30 days) where people come together to exchange freebies. Giveaways are a great strategy for generating website traffic. Simply create or source a good information product (for example a report) and then include links back to your websites within the content. You can also ask people to sign up to your mailing list to download the product, thus increasing your subscriber numbers at the same time.

1. Viral Marketing

This is one of those strategies for generating website traffic which is often overlooked, and yet it remains one of my favourites. The beauty of viral marketing is that it works on autopilot for years to come. The easiest way to launch a viral marketing campaign is by creating a free report (which includes links to your website within the content) and then distributing it to people online. Offer people giveaway/resell rights and encourage other marketers to sell or give away your report. The key to success with this method is making sure that the content you provide is valuable and making it as easy as possible for other marketers to pass your report onto their customers (e.g. give them a ready made sales page).

1. Paid Solo Ads and Adswaps

Fancy an instant surge of traffic to your website? Strike a deal with another marketer to email their mailing list about your product or site. If you have a list yourself you could do this as an adswap, or if you don’t have a list (or just don’t want to email it for whatever reason) you could pay for a solo ad. This is simply where you pay someone to email their list promoting your product. The most important thing to remember if you decide to use this strategy is that you need to be very careful about who you buy the solo ad from. Is their list responsive? Will their subscribers be interested in your offer? Find out the average click rate of the mailing list and ask about the type of subscribers they are. How was the list generated? Etc. Choose wisely and you can achieve excellent results. Get it wrong and you might be extremely disappointed!

Another Way To  Get More Traffic To My Website

Every website owner wants to increase the level of traffic their website receives. It doesn’t matter if you’re already achieving what you consider to be decent levels of traffic – there is always the desire (and usually the scope) for achieving much more.

If you want to increase your traffic levels, one of the first things you need to find out is where your current visitors are coming from and then concentrate some of your efforts on those sources. Let’s say, for example, that you are getting 40 visitors a day from a particular online forum by posting messages and including a link to your website in your signature. A good way of increasing your traffic would be to increase your activity on that forum and then find other similar forums which you could also post to. If you can find the sources which are working for you now, you know which things to spend time on. Over time you will start to see which methods give you the biggest return on the time you spend on them.

Remember however that not all traffic is equal. You always need targeted traffic because there is no use having 1,000 people a day visiting your site if none of them are remotely interested in what you are offering!

Think about the places where your target audience hangs out. If you are reasonably knowledgeable about your niche you’ll probably already know some of the most popular websites in your niche which you could potentially use to generate traffic.

Make sure you don’t overlook paid methods either. Would Google Adwords, for example, be a good way to get more traffic to your website? If you know what you are doing it can be an excellent source of traffic, although it is easy to loose money from it if you don’t. If you would like to trial it without taking much of a risk it’s worth looking out for the free credit vouchers which Google seems to give away on a regular basis to encourage new people to sign up for Adwords.

Traffic generation is all about finding your target audience. If you can do that and then give them a reason to check out your website you should draw visitors in.

Increasing Website Traffic For Free

Increasing the number of visitors your website receives doesn’t have to be expensive. Below are 5 ideas for increasing website traffic for free:

1.    Start a Blog

Blogs are a great way to boost traffic to your sites. Search engines love blogs because they contain regularly updated, current content (or at least they should do!) and thus they tend to rank well in search results. Blogs are also a great way of demonstrating your knowledge and if you can build up a loyal following they can be an excellent source of free traffic. You can place links within your blog posts or include banners or adverts down the side, on your resources page or ‘about’ page, etc.

2.    Recruit Affiliates

Imagine having an army of people all working to drive traffic to your website. Well, that’s exactly what affiliates can do for you!  Let other people do all the hard work for you and in return you pay them a commission when someone buys something from your website through their affiliate link.

3.    Start a Mailing List

Your own mailing list gives you the ability to drive traffic on tap and is one of the best ways of increasing website traffic for free. If you have a decent sized list you can simply send out a broadcast email and get an instant surge of clicks, or you can set up an autoresponder series and have it drive traffic for you on autopilot.

4.    Arrange Adswaps

Having a mailing list gives you access to this wonderful method. Adswaps have become increasingly popular in recent years and they can be a highly effective traffic generation strategy. Basically you find another marketer with a mailing list and arrange for them to tell their subscribers about your website in exchange for you emailing your subscribers about their website. If you can find someone suitable to swap with (they must be in a similar market) adswaps can provide an instant surge of traffic to your site. The drawback, of course, is that you need to regularly arrange adswaps in order to keep the traffic coming.

5.    Write and Submit Articles

Writing and submitting articles is one of the oldest traffic generation strategies. Basically you write unique articles and at the end you include a resources box with a link back to your website. Doing this generates you backlinks which will improve the ranking of your site, together with generating direct traffic from people who view your articles. Simply submit them to article sites such as EzineArticles.com or use them to create a content site.

As always please leave your comments and thoughts below.