giveaway Archives - Barbara Genest

Using communities to promote your products is by far one of the most effective ways to increase your revenue and loyalty to your brand. Sharing products within your community, or similar ones as an affiliate, is successful because the people within these groups are already interested and likely looking to purchase.

However, just because you share the products doesn’t mean it will automatically be successful. Sometimes you need to think creatively to promote your products without being so direct. Over promotion or creating content that looks too much like normal advertisements won’t get you anywhere. In fact, that will likely turn your audience away.

The following are six ways to use your brand community to promote your products and services more successfully:

Run a Giveaway

This is an effective way to just get the word out about your products without having to spend money on an advertisement or even a sales page. What you do is host a giveaway that you ask for entries too.

The entry can just consist of them providing their email address and name or other information that you decide. You can make this work using your email marketing software like Aweber, a Google Form, and your website to host the form.

Please keep it simple, but every single chance you can promote the contest, which is also promoting your business since entries are completed on your website where they can clearly see your offers. Plus, once they enter, they are now on your email list too.

Then when someone wins, promote the winner too, and again, this gives you a chance to go over what the product is and why it’s so great in public. You can then take this chance to give everyone who submitted a coupon and then everyone who is currently reading, a different coupon to buy.

Host a Contest

You can run the contest a lot like the giveaway in terms of the technology you use. You just need to make a form using a form maker like Google Forms, Gravity Forms, or even Acuity Scheduling. The concept is much the same, but you’re asking for something more than email addresses to participate this time.

The prize you offer should always be one of your products, services, or an affiliate’s products and or services so that each time you promote the contest, you are also promoting the product or service.

The other way to host a contest, with a required entry fee. For example, let’s say you’re an art teacher and your main product is courses for doing art in some way. You may want to offer your students a chance to win prizes that you can either buy with the fees collected or that you can ask vendors to sponsor, or you can pay for yourself. The press you get from promoting the contest, and the participants and winners will be worth it.

Hire Someone

One way to keep your community hopping is to hire people to work in the community. For example, you can hire a VA who will run your contests, promote your products, and drive engagement on your behalf. Outsourcing and reducing your workload will help you earn more money by freeing you to create more products and services and participate in engagement more.

Develop an Affiliate Program

If you have even one product, especially if it’s digital, consider having an affiliate program. When you set this up, you can promote all your products and services individually, or just some of them, or just the membership community itself. Again, it’s up to you, but having this type of system will increase revenue exponentially, even if it’s only used as a referral system for your members.

Ask for Feedback and Reviews

Use your group and the discussion boards you create to ask for feedback and reviews on your products and services that you can use on your sales pages, in promotions, and more. If you sell your products anywhere outside your group, you can even use the group to point out all the places you sell them, so they will feel free to give you reviews on those other platforms, too, where permitted.

Run a Live Demo or How-To-Presentation

A really fun way to use your brand community is to “go live,” as they like to say on Facebook to demonstrate your product, talk about an issue, or give a how-to presentation on using something you sell or are promoting as an affiliate. People love participating in live events, even if they’re unplanned and last minute. The good news is that they are recorded and can be enjoyed and repurposed at any time.

If you plan to build a community or use other communities to share your products, you need to create content that doesn’t feel too pushy or promotional. The more you understand your target audience, get them involved, and provide real value, the more you gain more revenue. With these six selling techniques, you can be sure that your promotions work every time.

You may wonder what your autoresponder sequence has to do with getting more subscribers. After all, you’re building the list before anyone sees what type of emails they’ll receive. What happens once your ideal customer joins your email list is just as important as what happens before. You want to keep engaged members on your list in order to build a robust list of hungry customers, and the type of messages you send can help.

First, you need to know the goal of the list. You may have goals such as keeping contact with your subscribers, promoting other products and services (yours or an affiliate’s), and providing more content to your subscribers. Not only that, you can use your list to bring people back to your content on your website so that they can see your offers.

The best way to choose a goal is to go with the goal of the opt-in you create. So, if you have an opt-in designed to build your list and promote your signature product, it’s a lot easier to figure out what needs to be said once you attract a subscriber. Who is the person who wanted that opt-in, and why did they want it, and what do they hope will be accomplished by acquiring it?

The order of operations looks like this.

Marketing Content

This content markets the lead magnet or opt-in. This can be a landing page, a blog post, social media posts, and more. In fact, the more points of entry you can create to lead to the opt-in, the better. Always create a landing page for each lead magnet just like you do for each product or service you sell.

Opt-In or Lead Magnet

The freebie you’re offering will need to be created before you start anything. The freebie itself is going to help you choose the messages to follow the opt-in. For example, a Yoga instructor might offer a freebie PDF download with drawings of 5 daily poses that help lower back pain, or perhaps you might want to offer a download that is a guided meditation to help reduce anxiety.

Whatever it is, the problem you want to solve with this freebie is essential to understand in order to create the follow-up autoresponder series. From there, you can better understand how each email will help guide your subscribers to take future actions such as reading more of your content, buying your signature product, or using products you recommend.

Welcome Email – The welcome email should be particular based on how the new subscriber has signed up. If it’s due to the freebie, you need to mention that freebie. If it’s due to a product, they purchased that should be mentioned too. Whatever it is, mention it by name and explain to your subscribers what to expect from you going forward from the first email.

Download Page – You can include a link to the download page in your welcome email, or you can tell them in the welcome email to be on the lookout for the download link for their freebie or product. However, it’s always best to send them to a download page instead of attaching the freebie. You can use automation to deliver it immediately, too, if you use software like Leadpages.net, for example.

Content – Send them some information about their problem, or the product that they downloaded and the ways in which it can help them. Ensure that the information you send is relevant based on how they got on your list.

Content – Send more content related to the reasons they downloaded or received the freebie. For example, a blog post with tips regarding relaxing to reduce anxiety that goes along with the freebie and helps them get the most from the freebie.

Related Promotion – After you’ve warmed them up, you can send related promotions of products and services you have created or that others have created as an affiliate marketer. For example, you might want to send them a link to that awesome app you are using that helps you stay mindful all day.

Content – Do the same thing. Keep sending them related content, articles, news reports, blog posts, and tips related to the initial issue you wanted to help them solve while tipping them off on the next problem you can solve.

Content – Keep teaching, informing, and engaging with your subscribers by sending only relevant information via email. Keep the emails clear. You want to avoid being long-winded in email. Use subject lines that make them curious but are straightforward. Cross-promote your social media platforms to help your audience engage with you more.

Related Promotion – Every couple of regular emails that you send, you’ll want to send a promotion for a product or service that you recommend whether you’ve created it or not. Remember to set up your autoresponder service to automatically tag or segment the list members based on their behavior.

Create a new sequence like this for each product, service, or behavior you want your subscribers to perform.

For example, if you ask them to read a blog post and they click through, your email marketing software can allow you to tag that person differently from someone who did not click through, which can enable your system to automatically send even more messages to them designed to move them through their buying journey and your product funnel.

The reason this works is that the more engaged your subscribers are, the longer they stick around, the bigger and stronger you can build your email list, earning that first 1000 subscribers or next 1000 subscribers in no time.