Are Giveaway Events for Your Business?

One of the simplest list-building methods is to join a giveaway event. You provide a gift with an image and the link to your squeeze page and promise to promote along with the rest of the partners. Except for very rare occasions, joining a giveaway event can give your business a nice dose of new subscribers in a very short period-of-time.

But that's not all that a giveaway event can do for your business. Far from it. The heart of a giveaway event is the relationships that it builds... between you and the subscribers... and... between you and the other partners. Their value can not be calculated in dollars and cents. Add a nice little bump to your reputation and hey, what's not to love?

One thing. The people you are attracting are what is known as "freebie-seekers". These are the folks who will un-subscribe while the download of your gift is still going.

Don't throw-in the towel, yet. OK?

Yeah, this is a tough audience, but nothing is impossible if you put your mind to it. So what is your goal? To target the grain and winnow out the chaff.

What do I mean by that? It is a harvesting term for separating the grain from the pieces of useless chaff before storing it. No one wants a useless bag of chaff, afterall. Your squeeze page has to target the serious visitors hidden among the freebie seekers.

Your choice of gift - Headlines - Bullet Points - They all speak to your chosen visitor. Now take a step back and look at the big picture. What kind-of an event have you joined?

Is it about Free or will it actually help the audience?

Is it a tossed-up page or a quality event site?

And most importantly, will the visitors be impressed with it?

To my mind, any business, off-line or online can benefit from joining a giveaway event. Beyond the building of your list, which is a not inconsiderable benefit, you will also be building your reputation and brand.

The cost is so little, a quality gift and a squeeze page with a delivery system in place, send traffic on a specific date. Yeah, in most cases, the benefits will far outweigh the costs, and that makes it worthwhile to do. If your business is online, your gift going viral could have a huge impact.

As the business owner, it is ultimately up to you to make this decision. With a little effort choosing your events and a high-quality gift, you could grow a list that will support your business for years to come.

Your First Giveaway Event   

How to Get the Most From Your Giveaway Event

Like many things in life, what you get out of a giveaway event will closely correlate with the effort that you put into the event. If you offer a trashy gift or don't bother to promote... well, what do you really expect?

You don't need to be a big name marketer to grow your list by participating in a giveaway event. Some small and medium marketers join to boost their branding or reputation. They create or find a quality gift that matches the theme of the event.

If you join a healthy living event, your gift needs to solve a problem that your prospective audience has. This gives them a reason to download your product and join your list. But you can't stop there.

Once you have a gift, you need a squeeze page for your visitors to provide their contact information. It is a simple matter to set your auto-responder to send them to the download page once they click your confirmation link. Using the double opt-in method also protects you from spam complaints.

Your squeeze page can be unique and individual to you and your business. Use your logo, your branding and even your image if you want to garner face-recognition. That's a lot of work for one web page. Take your time, and use your space wisely.

And finally, you need to be prepared for the new subscribers to your list... before you add them. What do I mean by that? It is simple. Don't waste time filling your auto-responder with names if you don't have any content ready for them. This is the biggest newbie mistake of all time, I believe.

Think of it this way, ok? If you have 200 people sign-up and they see 0 emails, you have gained nothing. Take the same 200 people and show them 7-10 emails and you will be much more likely to make sales.

I would rather see you write an article, or newsletter or even sales letter everyday while you build your list, until you have 30-60 pre-written follow-up letters. This is where you will offer links, downloads or promotional products to your audience. Make sure that the information you are providing is useful to your audience and takes them one step closer to reaching their ultimate goal.

This is why they joined your list in the first place, besides the offer of the free gift, they want you to help them reach their goals. Put the pieces in place and you will find that your gift gets more downloads than some of the bigger guys... the ones who have forgotten why subscribers join our lists in the first place.

Your First Giveaway Event   

List Building Tips - Archives

In this installment of List Building Tips, I'm going to talk about archives. This may be one of the sneakiest and cleverest ways to build a list that you will ever run into. And the best part is, it's totally ethical.

Let me start out by saying that this isn't a tactic you can use when you first create your newsletter and it doesn't work with a canned series. I'll explain what I mean by a canned series shortly. But let's first explain why this doesn't work with a new newsletter. To understand why, you have to first understand exactly what I mean by an archive.

An archive is a collection of old content, whether it be articles, photos or whatever. Most people create archives because they don't want to clutter up the main page of their site. For example, a Magic the Gathering site I go to has a series of articles for different topics. The main article for each topic is on the main page. The back issues are all archived and can be viewed by clicking on a link to get to the archive section. This way, your main page doesn't look like a train wreck and take forever to load.

Great, so how can we apply this to a newsletter? Again, this doesn't work with a brand new newsletter and it won't work with fixed length newsletters, meaning those that have X number of emails that go out and then stop.

What you do is simple. After an installment of your newsletter goes out, you copy and paste the content onto a web page and upload it. I recommend uploading each installment separately and then uploading a page that has an index to each installment. As you then send out each subsequent installment of your newsletter, you will include that installment as part of your archive.

After you've done all that, what you then do is simply drop links to your archive wherever you can. Make sure the index page has an opt in form so that if people want to read future installments they can sign up and get them immediately instead of waiting for the archive to be updated.

Will some people just keep checking back for the archive, not wanting to be on any mailing list? Sure, some. But there are going to be those who won't want to wait. They're going to want to get these installments right away, especially if they're timely. This tactic works very well if your newsletter deals with time sensitive issues.

Like I said, you can't use this method with a fixed length series because the archive will never be updated. And you have to wait until you have a few installments that you can upload. But if your newsletter seems to be a good fit for this model, you might want to consider it.

Because even if just ONE person reads your archive and joins your mailing list, that's one more person than you had the day before.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Your First Giveaway Event   

3 Tips for Building a Profitable Email List

This article reveals 3 tips that will help you to build a profitable email list. Whether you are already building a list or just intending to build one, these tips will come in handy to make your email list profitable.

Tip 1

Focus on building a relationship with your subscribers and sale later. Some marketers concentrate on nothing, but sending offer after offer to their list. While your overall objective in building a list is to make money, you need to consider what your subscribers' objective is and try to deliver on it. In the long run, a combination of both relationship building messages and sales messages would do you good in improving the profitability of your list. For example, you may choose to send out one sales offer for every two or three free offers or conversational messages.

Tip 2

Segregate prospects from customers. Most lists would have been built using free offers. The people who get on the prospects list after taking a free offer are later introduced to paid products. Now these become customers, and at this point they should be moved to a customer list. The reason for having a customer list is such that you do not continue pitching the same products to them that they have already bought. Plus, you can now start promoting second level paid products to those who would have bought the first level product. As for the prospect list, you would be continuing to sell the first paid product to them.

Tip 3

Make it a point to test and truck your email campaigns. This will help you to find out the best days and times to send out an offer, which subject line catches the attention of your subscriber and the kind of offers they mostly respond to. There are different variable that you could be testing, ranging from headlines, email length, day and time, type of offer, to mention a few. The point to remember though, is that you should test each of them individually.

When testing a headline, test only the headline and headline alone. Be sure to crate two messages with different headlines in order to compare which one your subscribers respond to better. On another day choose another variable to test, say, the type of offer you send to the subscribers. Over time you will find out what works best with your list in terms of producing the best results.

This article has concentrated on a 3 of the many tips you could apply to ensure you build profitable email lists. It has discussed relationship building, segregation of customers from prospects and testing the various variables that affect the success of your email campaigns.

Your First Giveaway Event   

7 Step Emotional Survival Guide To List Building

How do you build a list without getting bored? That's a question I see in many forms online. So I'm turning it around! Here's your spark, your sparkle of excitement. Your 7 step emotional guide to list building.

I'm sharing four F's so you can overcome problems with focusing, fearing, finding, fondness. I'm also sharing 3 vital ingredients so you can offer hope, value and solutions.

Why? I'll tell you why.

(1) Reading complaints!

(2) Knowing how to fill in the gap for you

Because there is relief, joy and gratitude waiting for you in the simple task of list building.

It feels to me like small business owners seem to need an emotional survival guide to list building. Here goes!

7 Tips

(1) Focus

Focus on what you love to do. That's the most important thing for being a small business owner.

Figure out what parts of what you love to do interest you most. Focus on those and the people who you help and what they want most.

(2) Fear

Fear's a big part for many business owners. Are you scared of list building?

What you must know:

Using list technology is like learning to drive a car. It takes time and effort up front so you can learn new skills.

But once you learn the basics your list technology is your vehicle to true freedom. Much as your car is your vehicle to get to a picnic at the beach!

Your list technology is your vehicle with the power to change your hot summer day into delight.

(3) Find

Find your list with fun habits. Write simple articles like this one and share them with other people online.

You'll be amazed to discover the power of the Internet to share what you love to do. Power you can use to turn your financial well-being toward abundance and prosperity.

(4) Fondness

Want a sweet way to build your list?

Write down what you love to do. Turn what you wrote into article titles.

Write! Share! Invite people to learn more.

(5) Hope

Want hope for your list?

Get out there online and people will find you. Not overnight!

24 hours a day 7 days a week.

(6) Value

Want value for your list? Ask the person in your mirror about problems you've had and solved! Deliver that.

(7) Solutions

List building through article marketing lets you deliver solutions.

Your First Giveaway Event   

3 Criteria To Choose The Best Solo Advertisement For Your List Building

I had been buying solo ads for quite some time and I can attest to this: Best rated solo ads sellers are not necessarily the best and vice versa. There are several criteria that you should consider before getting the solo advertisement of your choice.

Before you go for buying spree, you should have these to stand by:

a) A proven to work opt-in or squeeze page - Your webpage should be good enough to entice someone to subscribe to you. This will be entirely a new article to discuss about

b) The correct website link for the advertisement seller to forward their contacts to - sounds trivial but if you gave the wrong link, the seller is not responsible for your loss

c) Traffic checker and analyzer to make sure that the seller delivers the goods to your website (this is also useful to check whether the solo ads are of good quality or not)

Without further ado, check out these criteria to choose the best solo ad:

1) Quality of the website that trades solo advertisements

This is the easiest to consider. All you have to do is to conduct searches on Google or on internet marketing forums to determine which websites or forums are the best to trade solo ads. Personally, I would recommend websites that purely trades solo advertisements and also advertisement swapping with active members.

2) Review of each member who trades these advertisements

As trading advertisements are based on mutual trust, it is not so easy to determine outright who is honest and who is crooked. Preferably, I love to buy solo advertisements from websites that provide rating systems for members who trade advertisements.

Before you buy, sell and swap with a member, consider by looking at their trading profile first. Information like how long have they joined the website, ratings from other members who had traded with, how active they are and how big is their subscriber list are important considerations to form your decision to trade with them.

3) Ask the seller what kind of niche their subscribers are in

This is one of the more important questions buyers often forgot to ask. Whichever niche you are in to, you should ask the seller what niche their list is focused on before you plunk down the cash.

It is never silly to ask more questions before you consider buying a solo advertisement because once you accidentally paid it, most likely you will end up getting the wrong kind of advertisement and your money will not be refunded.

Your First Giveaway Event