Online Marketing 101

A fairly recent list building strategy that has come on the Internet marketing scene is the Giveaway Event.

Before the giveaway part of the event formally opens, you can become a contributor, which means you can list your free bonus gift in the event.

Just like you would normally do to build your email opt-in list, you offer the free bonus in exchange for each recipient’s email address.  The difference is that when you contribute to the Giveaway Event you benefit from the promotion of the event as a whole.

The first thing you need is a free gift.  You can write your own special report or ebook.  You can also develop videos, software or graphics or just about anything downloadable you can think of.

If you don’t care to compose your own bonus, then you need to find something online that you can give out for free.

I highly recommend you take the time to create your own product.

First, you won’t have to worry about it being a duplicate gift.  These Giveaway Events do not allow duplicate gifts.

Second, you need to understand that the only reason the recipient will opt in to your email list is because they are after the free gift.  There is a good chance that the only email from you he or she will ever open is the one with the download link.  If it’s your product, it can contain your affiliate links.  Then when the recipient gets around to reading it, you might at least make some money off an affiliate sale or two.  The next best option to creating your own product is to offer one that you can rebrand with your own affiliate links.

Once you have your bonus product, you of course need to have an email list management service.  I use ListWire because it is free and has all the capabilities of the autoresponders you pay for.  Because it is free, the creator of ListWire makes his money off it by insisting you stay subscribed to his own email list (if you try to unsubscribe you lose your account), and each of your subscribers gets presented with the opportunity to buy one of his products as soon as they confirm their subscription to your list.  If you don’t want to deal with ListWire’s quirks, then use AWeber.  It is affordable and highly recommended by the top Internet marketers.  It will take you some time to learn how to use either ListWire or AWeber and to develop your autoresponder sequence and opt-in forms.

Once you are all set to collect and follow up wtih email addresses, registering as contributor to a Giveaway Event is fairly simple.  You click on the link to register from the home page, enter your email address and user ID you’d like to use.  You will be sent a password.

Once you have completed your registration, you will be hit with anywhere from one to four one time offers.  You should know that your only opportunity to upgrade in the giveaway is right after you register.  In this case, it really is a one time offer!  You also need to know that when you register as a contributor for the event, you are also opting in to the event administrator’s email list.  He’s definitely using the event to build his list!  You do not need to confirm anything after you fill out the initial registration form for the event itself, and you are taken automatically to your members area.  You do receive a request to confirm your subscription to the event administrator’s list.  Confirm if you do indeed wish to be added to his list, but it won’t impact your membership in the event in any way.  It took me a couple events to figure that one out.

Should you upgrade your membership or not?  So far I have stuck with the free options and turned down all those one time offers.  Upgrading buys your gift more exposure and allows you to upload more than one gift in the event.  If you upgrade, you will get more people subscribing to your list and downloading your gift than you would as a free contributor, so that is the main advantage of upgrading.  I gained about ten new subscribers from the first event I contributed to and I learned that there are lots more events coming up.  My strategy at this point is to register as a free contributor to as many as I can.  It takes five minutes to set up your gift and if each event gains me ten subscribers I figure I’m doing pretty well at building my list.  It’s your choice.  If you’re not sure, stick to the free membership and know that you will always be able to upgrade your  membership in the next event.

The first thing you should do once you get into the members area is click on the manage your gift tab.  There you will upload an image of your gift and fill in a short and slightly longer description of your gift, the url for the squeeze page and the direct download link.  Your squeeze page cannot contain any advertisements so create a completely separate squeeze page for the event.  Your gift has to be downloadable–it can’t be a free web-based course or free membership.   When you’ve submitted your gift its status will be pending until the administrator has a chance to review and accept it.

Update your profile after you’ve submitted your gift.  You’ll get to upload a picture of yourself and fill in some information such as your ClickBank ID and a few other things.  That information is optional and it mostly applies to upgraded members (or people who responded to the one time offers), but I would at least put in your picture so people participating in the event can see who you are.

At this point you just have to wait for your gift to be approved.

Your next job is to promote the event.  These events have rules that all contributors need to have some unique clicks coming through their event affiliate link or their gift will get removed.

Before the giveaway part opens, your promotion efforts will be geared towards referring other contributors.  You get points for every referral and those points affect the ranking of your gift.  The highest ranked gifts get shown on the first page, whereas the gifts of people who don’t get referrals get put on page 19 or so.  That’s where my gift sat for my first event (and I still gained ten subscribers).

After the giveaway part opens, it is closed to new contributors and you promote it as a place people can go to download all sorts of freebies.

I’ve chosen to promote these events as a whole rather than individually.  In my article marketing efforts I link to my category on Giveaway Events so that visitors will always see the most current events that automatically show up on top (rather than the expired ones).  In this way, as long as I participate in these events, my back links will always be current.

The next step is to watch your list of subscribers grow.  As I said before, you do need to understand that any subscribers you gain from a Giveaway Event are there because they want the freebies.  They undoubtedly have downloaded at least half a dozen other bonuses and opted into that many lists.  This means that you are competing very heavily for their attention.  It is important that your bonus have value and lots of it.  It is also important that you make it clear in your very first follow up message that your email updates have value, and lots of it.  Be clear about what they can expect from your updates, so that they know they should open your subsequent emails.  Be brief so they can learn it quickly while scanning for your download link.  Then deliver that value in every email you send out afterwards.