A Win-Win-Win Situation: Your Visitors Helping You
The best way to advertise a site is to create buzz/virality. If your site is good enough for people to talk about on their own accord, with a little push, you should see your traffic grow substantially by itself. But for those of us who don’t have hilarious videos or images, some cool new game, or astonishing news, there is the Win-Win-Win plan.
The Win-Win-Win
The Win-Win-Win is a system designed to make your visitors do all of your work for you. They get the traffic, they get the backlinks, the subscribers, and the sales. I use to be the one who would visit all of the forums, blog, groups, Yahoo Answers, etc in my niche and post a link to my site. Now my visitors do that for me.
Create And Utilize A Mailing List
To start off, you will need is a mailing list of targetted people in your website’s niche. As a webmaster, any site you create should have some sort of mailing list or email collector. This is the golden nugget to turning prospects into customers. You can install a script on your server such as PHPList but I don’t recommend it. Some emails will not get through because your server isn’t whitelisted on the mail email providers list. Instead, I recommend using a program call Aweber. Excellent mailing system with nice reports, customer support, and easy setup. Anyway you want to do it, you need to get your first people to join your mailing list.
The method I use to get people to join is instead of calling is a “mailing list”, call it “Membership”. There is a psychological background to this but the short end is, would you rather be a subscriber to the WidgetMax mailing list or be a WidgetMax Premium Member?
Why should people become a “member”? Offer them some sort of incentive, usually information. Hype up a short guide, article, or program that people in that niche would find useful. If you offer them garbage, expect poor results from them.
Send some targeted traffic to the site until you have a mailing list of around 200 people (minimum).
Find a Sponsor
This can be a sponsor, an affiliate program or product. You will need to get some sort of shareable/everybody-gets-a-piece type prize for your members for all the hard work they will be doing. For example, I have a gaming website all about WoW. My members play WoW and are interested in any free WoW stuff I can give them. I would contact a gold selling company and either ask them to sponsor some gold. Upon reaching my goal (talked about later) I would give out gold to everyone on my list for free. This would make everyone on the list happy.
Set A Member Goal
The Win-Win-Win’s goal is to create a mailing list as large as possible. This list will in turn be used to make sales. Before you start emailing your list, set mini-goals for how large you want your lists to get before you start handing out goodies. Example: 5000 members, 10000 members, etc. Don’t set it too low or else you will just be handing out free stuff and not making any money yourself. I set my first goal for 5000, then 10,000, then 20,000, 30,000, 50,000, 100,000. The more members you have, the easier it becomes to get more.
Sending The Email
After you have a list of about 200 happy members, it time to remind them about your site and how you gave them this really great product completely free. Make them somewhat like they “owe” you a little for the work you’ve done. Don’t be blunt about it. Do something along the lines of “I worked really hard on this” or “This cost me $xx” or “I had to talk to XX experts to get this info” etc. Make sure that you finish it off asking, “How can this product be improved?” or “What did you think of this product?”.
If your members are loyal, you should get a decent amount of responses back. Be sure to reply to them! This will show them that you are indeed a real person and they will begin to like you more.
In the next email, briefly say thanks for all the great responses you got from your members and get to the meat and potatoes. Talk about our goal and the prize. Tell them that when your goal is reached, they will get the goods. As a closer, say you will be emailing them again tomorrow. Once again, expect more emails and again, respond to all of them and take what they say into consideration.
The third email will consist of ways to help them help you reach the goal. Give them link codes, sites, etc. All the things you would do and places you would visit to spread the word about your site. Make as simple as possible. I ask my members to vote for me on toplists, put my link into their signatures in forums, and just mention me to friends. The possibilities are endless but keep it simple.
From then on, email them regularly (every other/third/forth day) updating on the latest member numbers and things people have done - for both for the old members and the new ones who are constantly joining.
The Win-Win-Win
After you have had your first goal reached. Send out all the prizes. The people will now trust and like you even more (so they are more likely to listen to what you say and buy what you offer). The sponsor wins by getting all these targeted people to know about their site and which drives traffic/sales. Your members win by getting all these free things that only you gave them. Most importantly, you win by having a huge list of people who always promote for you, listen/respect you and a steady stream of traffic to your website. Having these three things, you can start sending out your own products or affiliate products for your list to buy.
I use this method on a lot of my websites and it works very well.
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