One of the most effective ways of getting people to discover and try your products or services is by offering a Free Taste – which is just that, a taste of what it is that you offer.
Free Tastes come in many forms: an ezine, an ecourse, an audio program, a special report, etc., and they are obviously free. It’s a tried and true marketing strategy that if you offer someone a free taste of what it is that you do, they are much more likely to become a paying client or customer down the road.
Once you’ve created your Free Taste, the next step is to market it to encourage people to sign up for your list. The following are 15 proven ways to promote your Free Taste:
__1. Your email signature
In your email signature (your name and contact info that you put at the bottom of every email you send out), include a link that goes directly to the sign-up page for your Free Taste or to its respective autoresponder. Entice people to click through with a compelling question, followed by the link.
__2. Your website
Make sure your sign-up form for your Free Taste is prominently placed on the home page of your website, as well as on every other page of your site. This way, no matter what page your visitor lands on, you’re giving them an opportunity to opt-in to receive your Free Taste.
__3. Other people’s ezines
Ask to be mentioned and recommended in other people’s ezines within your niche. Offer to do the same in return.
__4. Other people’s websites
Offer your Free Taste as a bonus to colleagues’ in complementary niches to offer to their lists.
__5. Testimonials you write
Write results-oriented testimonials for products or services you use and love. Give permission to the owner to post your testimonial to their website, including the URL to sign up for your Free Taste.
__6. Articles
Write and submit articles within your niche. In the author’s resource box at the end, promote your Free Taste by including the URL to your sign-up page or the email link to your autoresponder.
__7. Discussion lists
Participate in discussion lists where your target market hangs out and offer your Free Taste, following the list’s guidelines for promotions.
__8. Thank you pages
On your thank you pages for purchases, offer your Free Taste. Your customer may not have signed up before buying your product or service and you want to give them an opportunity to do so before they leave your website.
__9. Your sales copy
Peppered throughout your sales copy, give the opt-in form to sign up for your Free Taste. Most people don’t buy on the first pass, but they will likely sign up for your free offering.
__10. Your business card
On the back of your business card, tell people where to go to sign-up for your Free Taste.
__11. Teleseminars
Offer content-rich free teleseminars and make it clear that your desired outcome is to have the registered guests sign up for your Free Taste, not to sell them anything.
__12. Directories
List your Free Taste in the directories that are available to you via your membership in associations or organizations, and any directories specific to the packaging of your Free Taste.
__13. Swap ads with others
Offer to promote a colleagues’ Free Taste in return for promoting yours as ads within each other’s ezines. Run your ad for a minimum of three consecutive issues for the best results.
__14. Tell everyone
Don’t forget to tell everyone on your contact list about your Free Taste. Send them the link to your sign-up page, and ask that if they cannot benefit from it themselves to please pass it along to someone who would.
__15. Offer a free bonus
Offer a bonus or gift as an added incentive to sign-up for your Free Taste. A special report, an audio program, or something similar that is in a different form than your Free Taste. For example, I offer my ezine as a bonus for signing up for my free audio interview.
Remember: Never add anyone to your list without their permission.
These 15 tactics will help you promote your Free Taste and add significantly to your list numbers. Just implement them consistently, and you will grow an audience quickly and easily.
I’d love to know your thoughts on this – please leave your comments below.
A question I get asked by entrepreneurs all the time is…
“Where do I start? With an ezine, a website, a blog, or what?”
The answer is – it depends. It depends on where you are at in your business building efforts. But after hearing this question asked often enough, I think there’s something else going on ~ a request for a simple way to understand how all the pieces fit together. So, here goes:
First, you want to have a clearly defined target market, and be offering solutions to the problems that market wants solved. Then follow the steps below to leverage your time in reaching them with your offers.
1. Create an Invite Site
The first step is to create what I call an Invite Site. An Invite Site is a simple one page website where the only thing you do is invite your visitor to sign up for your email list by offering them something of value for free in exchange for their email address. For the record, the ONLY website I had for the first three years in my business was an Invite Site and I’ve built a 6-figure just from that.
2. Write and send an ezine
As you build your list, you’ll want to stay in touch with your subscribers. The easiest way to do this is through an ezine, or online newsletter. If you’re just starting out, know it doesn’t have to be anything fancy. A short article in text format sent to your list on a consistent basis is enough to get you in the habit of writing and sending an ezine, and for staying on your reader’s radar screen.
3. Post your ezine article to your blog
Create a simple blog for free at WordPress.com, give it a name that incorporates what it is that you offer (for example, advice about marketing, dog grooming, real estate, etc.), and cut and paste your ezine article as a post to your blog. The search engines love blogs because of their text-based format. They also love fresh content and with a blog you can post new articles consistently, keeping the content fresh, whereas on a static website, the information doesn’t change very often.
BONUS: Record a podcast from your ezine article.
Give your audience another way to get to know you (and take advantage of the millions of people who are downloading and listening to information on their MP3 players) by offering a podcast. Simply take the content from the article you wrote for your ezine and use that as your script for your podcast.
I know this seems simple, but that’s because it really can be this easy. If you put just the first three steps into action, your business will start to grow. As it does, you can start adding more bells and whistles, like graphics or different sections to your ezine, or jazz up your blog. In the meantime, keep pointing people to your Invite Site to grow your list, stay in touch with them via your ezine, and post your articles online so more people will find you.
I’d love to know your thoughts on this – please leave your comments below.
Taking my struggling consulting business online and following the business model I now do turned everything around for me, financially and otherwise. So when I started hearing from my mentors that I might want to add some offline marketing tactics back into the mix, I was hesitant to say the least.
But then I started studying and learning more about some specific direct mail strategies, and recognizing the power they have, I started wondering if maybe I wasn’t missing an important piece of the puzzle to take my business up another notch.
Then I started seeing some amazing results from my colleagues who were using direct mail in addition to their online marketing efforts – things as simple as a postcard – and I decided I needed to get into this game myself.
How do you get started adding direct mail marketing to your mix? Here are 5 simple steps:
1. Start collecting physical addresses
You may have the addresses of those clients and customers who have purchased something physical from you already, which is a great start. But you also want to start collecting snail mail addresses from those people who sign up for your list. This way, when you’re ready to send a physical mailing out, you’ll have all the information you need. AND, if email deliverability gets muddier, you’ll always have this other option of reaching your audience.
2. Plan a campaign
I always tell my clients to plan an online promotion campaign when they are ready to market a specific product, program or service, instead of sending out a single announcement. The campaign I recommend typically includes a minimum of three emails.
Same goes for an offline mailing. You need to plan a campaign, with more than one mailing, in order to truly get and discern a return on your investment.
3. Go cheap the first time
Something I learned when I was the public relations/marketing director for a university was NOT to do an expensive mailing until we had cleaned our list. Peoples’ addresses change for a variety of reasons and you may not always have the most up-to-date ones when you’re ready to send your mailing.
So, here’s a tip to clean your list before you start investing in some higher-end mailers. Send a postcard that has your return address on it to your current list. Then update your list via the returned postcards you get. Then make sure you have your return address on every mailing you do to keep your list as up-to-date as possible.
4. Keep it simple
Do a postcard, which gets read right away, with a simple, direct, compelling message and an immediate call to action, with graphics that don’t distract but support your message.
5. Track your mailings
The easiest way to do this is to send your readers to a simple website address (URL) that you only use for the purposes of that mailing. All you have to do is redirect that URL to your existing web page (where your offer resides) using the tracking link feature in your shopping cart. That way you can tell how many people typed in the URL and how many people took advantage of your offer. This is how you measure your return on your investment.
Getting started with adding direct mail to your marketing mix isn’t difficult. And by combining your online strategies with offline ones, you’ll be gaining a lot more clients and customers and bringing in a lot more income.
I’d love to know your thoughts and if you’re already using direct mail marketing or if you’re ready to start using it. Please leave your comments below.
Over the years, I’ve developed very strong boundaries in my business, which have contributed to its quick growth, and I coach a lot on setting and standing strong in boundaries with many of my clients. I wanted to share some of the ways I’ve created and strengthened the boundaries within the way I run my business so you can do the same.
Here are 4 ways that you can gracefully set boundaries in your business:
1. Have a policy page
For every product, program or service you offer, someone is going to ask you to do something different for them. It could be to offer it in a different format, at a different time or day, with a payment plan option, or dozens of other scenarios than I can’t possibly cover here.
As a general rule of thumb, don’t accommodate. Yes, there will be times when you make a different decision, but most of the time, stick to the parameters you created in the first place. You can’t please everyone, and every time you accommodate someone, you a) typically un-accommodate someone else who was just fine with the way your offer stood in the first place, and b) attract more people who will ask you to bend things for them in the future.
What do you do with the requests you get? Create a policy page from each and every decision you’ve made on how you will or will not run your business. Then when the next person makes a similar request, you simply send them to that page that explains clearly what your policy is, and that the policy applies to everyone. It takes the edge of it feeling like saying ‘no’ was a personal decision as much as it makes it super-simple for your team to handle these requests.
2. Be fair to ALL your clients
Being fair to all my clients is one value that I hold that makes it easy for me to be clear about the boundaries I have in place in my business. If you remember that it’s NOT that you aren’t willing or don’t want to be accommodating, but that it simply wouldn’t be fair to the rest of your clients and customers by doing so, it makes it much easier to say no graciously, and it keeps your integrity intact.
3. Have a buffer
Having someone on my team who manages these requests is imperative. First, as the business owner and leader of my company, it’s not the best use of my unique brilliance to be dealing with these requests personally. Second, my team is quite capable of knowing when a request may require my attention, and I trust them to let me know. And third, it makes saying ‘no’ less personal and much more graceful and respectful to the person making the request when they get an answer from my team instead of from me.
4. Be willing to let go
Ok, this one used to pop up for me a lot when I still struggled with a tendency to over-explain. I liked to craft just the right words to make sure someone understood my decision about something. I’ve realized that in doing so I wasted a lot of time, energy and emotion. So I stopped doing that for the most part. Once in a while when I found myself back in that loop again, and when I realized how much of my team’s time I was wasting, it bopped me over the head and I instantly went back to my short-but-sweet way of responding.
Here’s the thing: there’s always going to be a tiny percentage of people who want you to customize and accommodate them. But let them go play somewhere else. Because what happens when you stick to your guns is that you honor your value, your time, and your self-respect. You attract more clients and customers who are ideal and who are respectful of you and your team as well, and your business runs more smoothly and more joyfully.
Which one of these boundaries can you set in your business today?
“You either have excuses or you have results. Which one do you have today?”
This was a tweet posted by a former Platinum client of mine, Liz Dennery Marks, owner of SheBrand.com and Dennery Marks Inc., a very successful brick-and-mortar branding and celebrity outreach firm in Beverly Hills.
And it really struck a chord with me. Why? Because I’ve been having that conversation more often than ever lately, with both clients and colleagues.
So let’s see if I can help you figure out which is true for you:
Think of *one thing* in your business right now that is frustrating you.
Once you have that ‘one thing’ in mind, what was the next thought that popped into your head?
Was it…
– I’m waiting for so-and-so to get back to me first.
– I don’t have the time, money, resources.
– I don’t know what to do next.
– I’m not sure this is right for me.
– I’m feeling lost, confused, unsupported.
– Anything thought that has ‘yeah, but…’ in it
All of these thoughts and feelings are absolutely valid. And they are all excuses. Choose a different word than ‘excuses’, if you’d like, but if you’re not moving forward and getting results, then I’m going to suggest that the issue isn’t truly any of the above.
By the way, I worded it that way – ‘what’s one thing’ – on purpose, because how we do anything is how we do everything.
And that’s my intention here – to shine the light on the fact that as long as you focus externally as the ‘reason’ something isn’t working for you, you’ll continue to be frustrated and stuck.
I had a client who was frustrated by what she considered to be my lack of support of her and her business. When she shared this frustration with me, I didn’t get defensive or take on her frustration. What I did do was ask her a series of simple questions that drilled down to the real issue.
In this case, it was that she wasn’t taking any action, including asking her coach (me) for the support she needed. Once she realized that she had everything she needed to move forward, including the very help she was paying for, everything shifted for her. She began asking for direction and implementing the information she already had, and her business started flowing immediately.
But more than that, she realized that she was doing the same thing in her personal life with her husband. She was frustrated by his lack of support, and yet as soon as she asked for it, he immediately sought out ways to help her.
So let me repeat:
How you do anything is how you do everything.
Think about that.
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