Giving away your content may seem counterintuitive to your business goals of making money. Yes, you want to make a profit but sometimes you need to give some content away for free to build trust and to show your audience that you know your stuff.
Your social media posts are free content as are your blog posts. Your downloadable lead magnet and your awesome webinar are also free content examples. What if I told you that you should give away one copy of your signature class? Would you think I’m crazy?
Here’s my rationale:
This term “giveaway” is really equivalent to a sweepstakes or contest. In a sweepstakes, no purchase is necessary and a winner is chosen at random. With a contest, entrants are asked to do something and whoever submits the entry you like best is the winner.
One note: Always check the legalities of your state or Canadian province before starting a giveaway. Also check the rules of your chosen social media platform to be sure you don’t get banned for breaking those rules.
People absolutely love the idea of winning something for free so you can easily create huge buzz around your business and your giveaway product by promoting your sweepstakes or contest. Not only are you attracting more people to your business page and website but you never know how many of these people are browsing your site and looking at your other products and programs. You’re raising the possibility of attracting new customers even if they don’t win the coveted prize.
For your own clarity, understand your final goal:
Do you want more email subscribers?
More social media followers?
More one-on-one clients?
Are you celebrating a special anniversary or event?
Knowing the reason WHY you’re doing a giveaway will help you craft promotions and will help you stay energized, especially if you’re filming videos to market the giveaway.
What should you give away?
Use this opportunity to promote a brand new product or revive an older product to giveaway. A giveaway could also be part of your product launch! As always, choose a product that addresses your target market’s biggest pain points. Your audience will also become more interested in the giveaway the more expensive your product is, so be sure to publicize the product’s value in all your promotional materials.
How set up your giveaway.
You’ll need a concrete way to gain entries from participants and the easiest way to do this by far is to require them to sign up for your email list. Create a separate landing page just for the giveaway and create a separate list with your autoresponder service dedicated only to the giveaway. Creating a new list automatically separates giveaway participants from your current list without you having to do any manual sorting.
Offering a tiered entry system is another option to get more widespread reach but also requires a system for keeping track of all participants and their number of entries. Tiered entry simply means offering many ways to play and each action is worth a certain number of points. For instance, one entry for a newsletter sign up; two entries for sharing a blog post or photo; 3 entries for referring friends, etc. This system encourages people to take multiple actions to promote you but WILL require some work on your part to tally all the entry points. As I mentioned earlier, check the social media rules before you publicize your tiered entry options.
Lastly, be very clear about the terms of your giveaway.
- What dates will it run?
- Who is eligible to enter (generally entrants must be 18 years or older)?
- What do entrants have to do to earn points?
- Describe the prize and its monetary value.
- How will the winner be chosen and notified?
- How will the prize be delivered?
One other note: Make the giveaway rules easy to follow. If you add too many steps or require too much work to enter, you’ll have dismal results.
If running a contest or sweepstakes seems too complicated, consider running or participating in a bundle to spread the news about your business. What’s a bundle? Quite simply, it’s a group of collaborators who donate a product or service to the bundle which is then marketed and sold for one price. For that one price, customers can download as many or as few products in that bundle as they need.
Whoever runs the bundle keeps the money and pays affiliates but all the collaborators grow their lists as new customers opt-in to receive their product. Collaborators can also earn affiliate commissions by doing their own promotions but for all intents and purposes, collaborators are giving away their product for free to get in front of new eyes.
One example of a successful bundle is BC Stack, the annual digital marketers’ bundle run by Blogging Concentrated. You can see their past offerings on their archive pages. They always attract the biggest names in the industry, which helps them spread the news far and wide about their bundle sale. Anyone with an online business product can go through the submission process.
No matter if you decide to contribute to a bundle or you want to run your own giveaway, these are great ways to gain more exposure to your business and your products.
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