Building Your List With Giveaways

Written by Susan on March 4th, 2009

If you’ve been in the IM business for more than 5 minutes, then you’ve probably heard about how useful giveaways are to building your list. (Of course, if you been in the biz for more than 10 minutes, you’ve probably taken a good 15 years off your life, but that’s a post for another time.)

So, giveaways, huh? What’s the big deal, and does it really work, and what’s in it for you, anyway?

Pay attention, younglings, and learn the sweet, simple process to finding subscribers and creating a following of like-minded people who want to learn (and hopefully, buy) from you.

What makes a good giveaway? One that offers items of real value to the people who are offering up their email addresses to get them. People aren’t stupid (well, not all of them), and they are getting increasingly savvy about what constitutes good value for the investment of their email privacy. Even if they are downloading free products, they don’t want to risk “paying” for them by having to weather a hail of email bullets for a crappy 3-page ebook written in 1999 by a language challenged IM wannabe, or a piece of software that has so many problems setting up that lives have been wasted in the obsessive attempt.

So the first thing you want to consider when preparing for a giveaway is just what sort of gift you’re going to bring to the table. Most giveaways have a mechanism in place that assures the gifts on offer are new and of high quality – no old, oversold PLR products. The better your gift, the better your chances of being accepted, and the better your numbers in terms of downloads and optins. It can be anything from an ebook, to videos, audios, club memberships, training programs and services. If the gift is of your own creation, even better.

If you are targeting a specific niche, keep that in mind as you choose your gift. While most giveaways are targeting the Internet Marketing field, there are a few that specialize in particular niches, and you may have some luck even with a regular IM giveaway if your gift is a really nice one.

After deciding what your gift is going to be, you’ll want to check the upcoming giveaway events. Here’s a link to a site that keeps up with what’s going on in the giveaway world: greatgiveawayguide.com. Pick as many as you feel you can handle and start signing up. Be prepared, as there are a few things you’ll need to have set in place before you begin filling out the application:

1. A squeeze page. If you don’t know how to make a squeeze page, or don’t have the html software needed to create one from scratch, I have a free squeeze page generator here that you can download and use. I made the page you’ll see from this software, so you can see what it looks like. If you fill out the optin form (which still must be generated from an autoresponder site like Aweber, so be sure you have an account with one), you’ll be able to download the software and create a squeeze page of your own.

2. A download page. If you wish, you can take advantage of this opportunity to present other offers to your new subscribers, and/or bonuses as a thank you for subscribing. As a general rule, it’s best to keep the bonuses to at least two and the sales pitches to no more than one, for maximum gratitude and minimum pissage. Again, if you need a template for a download/bonus page, you can go here and sign up for free to access a very nice tool that will create one for you. If you signed up to download the squeeze page generator, you’ll see what this download page looks like, in its simplest form.

3. Remember to upload all your pictures and pages to your server, as you will need the URL to them for both the giveaway application and your autoresponder messages.

4. Speaking of autoresponder messages: be prepared to set up a series of these. At least be sure to have your initial Thank You and Welcome message set up for your new subscribers to see as soon as they fill out the optin form. Once they’ve agreed to receive your emails, you want to be sure they don’t forget you. So have some emails prepared in advance – helpful, info-packed, relationship-building stuff – that can be automatically sent out on a pre-set schedule. You get to decide how often your subscribers hear from you, and how often you want your emails to be sales pitches.

Once you’ve prepared the above items, you can use them over and over for a number of giveaways, cutting down on your prep time.

Timing is key. It’s a good idea to join giveaways as soon as you can, because that gives you the maximum amount of time to promote it to your friends, peers, or the people already on your list. Because how you rank in the listings is not a matter of first come, first served…it’s a points system, and it all depends on how many people you refer who sign up, either as contributors or as participants. You’re given a unique link ID that identifies who and how many you brought with you to the game, and you climb the ranks accordingly, being rewarded with a spot on the first few pages – kind of like in Google. It helps to be early for another reason too – if you’re the first in with a popular freebie, everybody else who shows up with the same gift will not be able to sign up, giving your gift a unique opportunity to entice subscribers. The first few days of a giveaway have the heaviest traffic, so waiting to get in will only give you disappointing results.

Don’t worry if you’re just a beginner and don’t have a list of your own; you’re leveraging the traffic that is being driven to the giveaway site by every JV partner who’s participating. You may not show up on page one or two…or 12. But it’s a start, and you WILL get signups. You build from there.