Archive | October, 2017

Imagine growing your e-commerce site from nothing to $50,000 in monthly revenue just three months after launching. Impossible?

Actually, I’ve seen case studies that prove it can and does happen.

“But it takes a big marketing budget, right?”

Nope. If you know what you’re doing and you’re willing to put in the work, every single sale can come from free online marketing tactics.

In fact, when you learn these methods, not only can you grow your revenue quickly – you might also be able to raise significant VC funding and gain some primo customers or clients very quickly.

Here are 33 free marketing tactics to consider. Will you use them all? Not likely, unless you have some good virtual assistants to help you out (hint hint!)

1. Submit a free press release for distribution using a service such as PRlog.

2 Create a lead magnet and use it to capture and market to leads. Promote your free lead magnet on forums and guest posts.

3. Create a white paper or “how to” guide showing how to achieve a certain goal (using your product, of course)

4. Haunt Quora and respond to questions in your niche. Look for questions that are getting a lot of play, or have a lot of people waiting for an answer.

5. Share your startup on Betalist, the daily list of newest startups.

6. Sign up for a social monitoring service like Mention.com. Respond to anyone that mentions your brand or one of your competitors. Answer relevant questions about your niche.

7. Cross promote with other companies or movers in your niche. Offer to trade mentions and tweets with social media accounts that have a similar number of followers.

8. Join Meetup, find appropriate groups and message the coordinators, asking for speaking gigs at their meetings or events.

9. Film yourself when you speak before a group, and post those videos on YouTube and your blog.

10. Create a Crunchbase page.

11. Share your website on Erlibird.com.

12. Write a post for each one of your competitors, comparing it to your product. This should attract search engine traffic looking for reviews of your competition (Sneaky, right?)

13. Launch your own topic at Scoop.it and place your website into your topic page.

14. Search for blogs using your most relevant keywords. Leave posts on those blogs linking back to your site.

15. Have infographics created that are highly relevant to your business, and then share them on free distribution sites such as Pinterest and Visual.ly.

16. Ask your existing users to help you by promoting your company or giving referrals.

17. Get your business featured on blogs and websites by showing specifically how it can help their readers. Offer the site owner an affiliate commission for each person who joins your list from the post and/or for each person who buys your product. This works especially well outside of the IM niche.

18. Guest post. A lot. Read up on how to guest post and become an expert at it. Entire businesses have been built from scratch to six or seven figures through guest posting alone.

19. Find newsletters that focus on startups – such as StartUp Digest – and get featured there.

20. Use a tool such as Majestic to discover who links to your competitors. Then reach out to those websites and ask for links.

21. Submit presentations to Slideshare.

22. Run a free giveaway or deal on social media to get your target audience to follow you.

23. Submit your site to Product Hunt.

24. Teach a class on Skill Share about your niche.

25. Find out what questions people in your niche are asking, then answer those questions in blogposts (great for SEO).

26. Create a deal on AppSumo.

27. Reach out to Twitter followers of your competition.

28. If you’re a B2B, reach out directly to possible customers on LinkedIn.

29. Grow your site traffic by making it super easy for your readers to share your content with a tool such as Twilighter.

30. Reach out to influencers in your niche on social media.

31. Give away your product free to influencers in exchange for reviews.

32. Become a source on your niche for ‘Help a Reporter Out’.

33. Write roundup posts – pick the 30 or so experts you would most like to mention you, your product or company. Ask each one to answer a super relevant question, then post all those answers in an article with a link back to each expert’s site. Let them know the article is live, and some of them will link to it from their sites or from social media.

Just a few of these, done properly, should see your new business growing fast and strong. Do them all and you will be an unstoppable powerhouse.

Yes, you read that headline right. In fact, you might even want to read it again.

You can totally get affiliates to PAY YOU for the right to send you buyers.

I ran across this a couple of years ago, and I have to say I was impressed. In fact, I just about joined this myself, and I’m a seasoned pro. This was done by a group of seasoned marketers, but there’s no reason why a new marketer or marketers couldn’t do it, too.

Last time I checked, this funnel I’m about to describe is still up and running and going strong. I don’t want anyone to actually steal their exact system, sales copy and funnel, so I’m going to just give you the highlights and you can fill in the rest:

First you start with a sales funnel. You’ve got a squeeze page offering a terrific little “how to do marketing” type of lead magnet. Once visitors grab the lead magnet, or even if they try to click away without picking up the lead magnet, they are then directed to a sales page for an online marketing membership site.

The membership site has several levels, with the lowest level being free to join. Of course they highlight the free level in the headline to keep people on the page, and then they extoll the virtues of the other levels. Each level has more and better content, better support and so forth.

The free level is fairly basic, but does give enough info for a newbie to make a start in making money online.

And of course each level is more expensive than the previous level, with the prices skewed a bit to encourage visitors to choose the highest level.

I’ll give you an example of that pricing to give you an idea of what I’m talking about:

Level 1: Free

Level 2: $29 per month

Level 3: $44 per month

Level 4: $49 per month

These aren’t the exact price points they used, but you get the idea. You see there is very little difference between level 3 and 4 in terms of price, but in terms of content there is a big difference.

This is a great psychological strategy, because it gets the prospect to study the differences between levels 3 and 4 while forgetting all about level 2.

And of course if they’re going to get a paid membership, they’re most likely to choose level 4.

The content is drip fed each week…

…and if you’ve been paying close attention, you’ve realized I haven’t really shown you anything new yet.

Here it comes, so hang on to your seat, because THIS is how you get affiliates to PAY you to send you a list of BUYERS:

(I love this bit!)

All of the levels offer a built-in affiliate program that sets the affiliates up to sell their own memberships for all of the levels they qualify for.

This means if they are a level 2 member, they can give away level 1 and sell level 2. If they happen to sell level 3 or 4, they still get paid, but not as much.

But if they are a level 4 member, they get to sell all four levels and KEEP ALL the money.

That’s right – they get to keep 100% of what they sell if they are level 4.

I hope this is making sense. It sounds complicated at first, but it’s actually fairly simple once you understand the concept.

Thus you’ve got affiliates paying (in our example above) $49 a month for the privilege of selling memberships and keeping all the money.

That’s a great deal for the affiliates, right? Absolutely. You can see why I almost jumped on it.

The affiliates don’t have to worry about hosting, fulfillment or any of that stuff, because the membership takes care of all of that.

The affiliate gets a unique salespage URL, squeeze page URL and membership area.

The content is automatically drip fed into that member’s area. The subscriptions are managed for them, the levels are managed for them… all they have to do is make sales by promoting their squeeze page URL.

The affiliate gets to build a list of prospects and buyers simply by promoting the URL, and of course they are earning residual monthly income, too.

The list of prospects and customers stays in the system and cannot be exported. Affiliates can only email their lists from inside the system. So if they drop out and stop paying their monthly fee, they lose their lists.

This can make for some very sticky affiliates who never leave.

Now for the icing… in the terms and conditions, it is made explicitly clear that the membership site operator(s) have access to all of the prospects and customers who sign up.

This means they can email prospects and customers any time they like, making any offer they like. PLUS the site owners can also place offers in the membership area as well.

Now think about what I just said… affiliates are paying you $49 a month (or whatever price point you choose) to be able to build you a list of prospects and customers.

And the affiliates are getting a terrific deal, too, getting 100% monthly commissions and the ability to email their customers and prospects from within your website.

It’s a true win / win for everyone involved, and done correctly it can yield a tremendous amount of prospects and buyers for you, as well as excellent monthly income to pay for a very nice membership site and have money left over.

When I heard about this, they were making five figures a month from the membership site fees alone. This doesn’t include what they were earning from mailing to their ever-growing email lists, or from the special promotions they continually placed in the members’ area.

Imagine if you were earning 5 figures from your membership site AND having a team of affiliates working hard to build your list of prospects and buyers. Sweet.

I wish I had started my first site this way – I’d probably be retired today.

Yes, you read that headline right. In fact, you might even want to read it again.

You can totally get affiliates to PAY YOU for the right to send you buyers.

I ran across this a couple of years ago, and I have to say I was impressed. In fact, I just about joined this myself, and I’m a seasoned pro. This was done by a group of seasoned marketers, but there’s no reason why a new marketer or marketers couldn’t do it, too.

Last time I checked, this funnel I’m about to describe is still up and running and going strong. I don’t want anyone to actually steal their exact system, sales copy and funnel, so I’m going to just give you the highlights and you can fill in the rest:

First you start with a sales funnel. You’ve got a squeeze page offering a terrific little “how to do marketing” type of lead magnet. Once visitors grab the lead magnet, or even if they try to click away without picking up the lead magnet, they are then directed to a sales page for an online marketing membership site.

The membership site has several levels, with the lowest level being free to join. Of course they highlight the free level in the headline to keep people on the page, and then they extoll the virtues of the other levels. Each level has more and better content, better support and so forth.

The free level is fairly basic, but does give enough info for a newbie to make a start in making money online.

And of course each level is more expensive than the previous level, with the prices skewed a bit to encourage visitors to choose the highest level.

I’ll give you an example of that pricing to give you an idea of what I’m talking about:

Level 1: Free

Level 2: $29 per month

Level 3: $44 per month

Level 4: $49 per month

These aren’t the exact price points they used, but you get the idea. You see there is very little difference between level 3 and 4 in terms of price, but in terms of content there is a big difference.

This is a great psychological strategy, because it gets the prospect to study the differences between levels 3 and 4 while forgetting all about level 2.

And of course if they’re going to get a paid membership, they’re most likely to choose level 4.

The content is drip fed each week…

…and if you’ve been paying close attention, you’ve realized I haven’t really shown you anything new yet.

Here it comes, so hang on to your seat, because THIS is how you get affiliates to PAY you to send you a list of BUYERS:

(I love this bit!)

All of the levels offer a built-in affiliate program that sets the affiliates up to sell their own memberships for all of the levels they qualify for.

This means if they are a level 2 member, they can give away level 1 and sell level 2. If they happen to sell level 3 or 4, they still get paid, but not as much.

But if they are a level 4 member, they get to sell all four levels and KEEP ALL the money.

That’s right – they get to keep 100% of what they sell if they are level 4.

I hope this is making sense. It sounds complicated at first, but it’s actually fairly simple once you understand the concept.

Thus you’ve got affiliates paying (in our example above) $49 a month for the privilege of selling memberships and keeping all the money.

That’s a great deal for the affiliates, right? Absolutely. You can see why I almost jumped on it.

The affiliates don’t have to worry about hosting, fulfillment or any of that stuff, because the membership takes care of all of that.

The affiliate gets a unique salespage URL, squeeze page URL and membership area.

The content is automatically drip fed into that member’s area. The subscriptions are managed for them, the levels are managed for them… all they have to do is make sales by promoting their squeeze page URL.

The affiliate gets to build a list of prospects and buyers simply by promoting the URL, and of course they are earning residual monthly income, too.

The list of prospects and customers stays in the system and cannot be exported. Affiliates can only email their lists from inside the system. So if they drop out and stop paying their monthly fee, they lose their lists.

This can make for some very sticky affiliates who never leave.

Now for the icing… in the terms and conditions, it is made explicitly clear that the membership site operator(s) have access to all of the prospects and customers who sign up.

This means they can email prospects and customers any time they like, making any offer they like. PLUS the site owners can also place offers in the membership area as well.

Now think about what I just said… affiliates are paying you $49 a month (or whatever price point you choose) to be able to build you a list of prospects and customers.

And the affiliates are getting a terrific deal, too, getting 100% monthly commissions and the ability to email their customers and prospects from within your website.

It’s a true win / win for everyone involved, and done correctly it can yield a tremendous amount of prospects and buyers for you, as well as excellent monthly income to pay for a very nice membership site and have money left over.

When I heard about this, they were making five figures a month from the membership site fees alone. This doesn’t include what they were earning from mailing to their ever-growing email lists, or from the special promotions they continually placed in the members’ area.

Imagine if you were earning 5 figures from your membership site AND having a team of affiliates working hard to build your list of prospects and buyers. Sweet.

I wish I had started my first site this way – I’d probably be retired today.