Creative Marketing Ideas for Home-Based and Small Business Entrepreneurs in the USA and Canada
Using the right creative marketing resources and ideas, you can build a selling system that allows you to give away free products as a way of building a list of customers and prospects. The key is to establish some strategic alliance marketing partners (more frequently called Joint Venture partners online) and allow them to give your product away for free to people on their mailing lists.
Your Joint Venture Partners Are Also Your Top Strategic Alliance Marketing Resources
You ask your JV partners to send an email to their list, explaining your free business-building marketing resources or business tools. When the people on those lists receive that email, some of them will click through to the gift page to collect their free sample of your product. Obviously, a digital product works better than a physical product for such a giveaway, so offer them a PDF report, or an ebook or some software, since there is no appreciable delay or cost in delivering it. People can simply download it after entering their name and email address in an opt-in box (a co-registration, or co-reg, box) so both you and the JV partner who sent the visitor to you will be notified of the name and email address of those people who opt-in.
Now Your Powerful One Time Offer - OTO - Captures Their Hearts & Their Money
Once the email opt-in form is complete, the respondents are taken to a Thank You page that also displays a one-time offer, or OTO. This OTO would present another of your products (or someone else's product for which you are paid an affiliate commission per sale). This OTO special deal is available this one time only at a very attractive price that will be hard to resist. A certain percentage of those people who claim the free gift will respond to and purchase this time-limited special offer. It is of particular importance that you select your strategic alliance members or JV partners properly. Not only should they be honest and professional marketers, but the types of people they have on their lists should be as similar in profile as possible to the types of people that you want to have on your mailing list. For example, let's say you produce books about yachting and someone tells you that they can promote your yachting books to a list of seven million email addresses. That sounds exciting, right? Well, when you discover that the names represent all the people who had been turned down by the Jerry Springer Show in 2002, you realize that you may not sell too many yachting books. First, identify your target market and then serve them what they are most likely to consume.
Creating The Irresistible Offer Will Grab Their Attention and Demand Their Respect
You should test various offers, headlines and sales copy to come up with the very best offer imaginable.
In fact, this is so important that you really should invest the time, energy (and money, if necessary) coming up with what my marketing hero, Mark Joyner, calls The Irresistible Offer, which itself represents the first step in a four-step process which Mark calls
The Great Formula. If you don't yet have these two books, you are missing a few key ingredients in your marketing strategy. They are available at Amazon.com for less than $15 each. Click either title below to read the reviews that have been posted at Amazon. By the way, I earn 4 percent commission if you buy through these links. (Let's see -- 4 percent of $13.17. That's 52 cents per book. I'm a bookselling tycoon.). The links are here more for your convenience.
How Giving Away Products Can Produce Far More Income
If you run a membership site, your potential JV partners should be given a deluxe free membership, along with a free copy of any product you are going to be promoting.
If you can, write a personal email to each of your JV partners or members of your strategic alliance marketing team. Tell them that your free product is ready and instruct them as to where they can get it.
“I’ll pay you ___% and I always let my Joint Venture partners launch any of my products before I launch it officially myself, even though you might capture sales from some people on your list who may also be on mine. I appreciate your support and I don't want to compete with you.”
In Strategic Alliance Marketing, The More You Share, The More You Keep
NOTE: You may want to give as much as 90% or 100% of the price to a powerful JV partner who could introduce you to the many frequent buyers and big spenders on their list. Any sales coming from that list will earn you substantial income in the future on the next products you offer in the future. That's why it is so important to have the strongest strategic alliance members as you can find. Focus on quality rather than quantity.
I would prefer to have five honest well-respected JV partners with small but responsive lists than to have dozens of flaky characters with large lists but who abuse the priviledge of permission marketing by sending far too many offers far too frequently. I like to say that they have their own Frequent Flyer Program, because they send you frequent flyers, offers and business opportunity offers. Too bad you can't collect points from these Fly-By-Night airheads.
They are 24/7 marketers -- they send you 24 offers over a seven day period
These Deal of the Day type hucksters are the same people who used to try to recruit you into a different MLM scam every time you heard from them. Well, guess what? They've all moved online, so I guess we should call them internetwork marketers now.
Most of these clowns are broke because they have no sense of how to run a real business. They are bizopp hunters, not business people. You know them - every few days they're sending you another of their latest, greatest junk offers that for $27 or $47 or $97 is going to turn your site into a cash cow overnight. They may have large lists, but people on their lists have become numb to their solicitations, so their response rates are very low.
There are many professional online marketing professionals who do respect the people on their opt-in lists. People such as Mike Filsaime (he launched the Butterfy Marketing Course in February, 2006 and made more than $1 million in a few days). Occassionally, Mike will take an older but good product that normally sells for $47 or $97 (but one which he doesn’t want to ask his JV partners to offer to their optin list again, since the JV partners would prefer to offer their members something fresh). Mike offers this older product to his JV partners with the right to give it away for free to their list. (That sounds rather dumb at first, right? But read on).
When Your One-Time Offer is Accepted, Your JV Partners Make Money At Zero Cost
There is one stipulation to this free gift offer, and it’s that all of the sign-ups go through a co-registration page, so Mike Filsaime gets a copy of the name and email address of the person getting the free gift. If you were on one of these lists and received this free gift offer, would you accept it? Why not, right?
You would click through to Mike's landing page for the free gift, enter your name and email address in the co-registration opt-in box, and hit SUBMIT to claim your gift. Before you receive the download information for the free gift, you will be presented with a One Time Offer for a higher value product that has been tested and which has proven to pull a conversion rate of 4% or 7% (or whatever it might be). A percentage of the sale from your OTO purchase is paid to the JV partner who sent you the invitation, and your name and email address is now on two lists.
Free Gift + OTO + Automatic JV Reruitment = Viral Marketing Formula
You and all the other people who purchase the One-Time Offer are then taken to a Thank You page which has a secondary purpose. It thanks you for your request and explains how to download your gift. It also informs you that you now qualify as an affiliate of this free offer (plus your own One-Time Offer page that they see after they fill in the opt-in box to claim their free gift). You can then earn a commission on any sales you make to your own referrals (usually 50% on digital products such as ebooks; sometimes less on software).
Instant new Joint Venture partners are recruited automatically. Now you can send this free gift to people on your list, and they can do the same to people on their lists...ad infinitum. Mike Filsaime (or you, if you want to use this little marketing tactic and give away your own product plus offer a OTO upsell page to a second product -- which does not need to be your own).
Add the Paypal Split-Pay System To Your Marketing Resources
An extra benefit that can be offered is that the referrer can be paid instantly on every sale via a split-pay through Paypal.com. Not having to wait 30 or 60 days for commissions is a great incentive for people to promote the product, wouldn't you agree? They will be encouraged to increase their promotional efforts of this free gift to their own contact list. This turns the site into a truly viral marketing tool by following the same sequence with each new person who goes through the cycle
So let’s see if you could set up an offer for a product you sell (it can be your own or something for which you are an affiliate). If you don't know ehere to find great products you can promote, we have a few excellent products that with very high conversion rates. Just drop us an email and we'll send you our top recommendations. Email .
Now It's Time For You to Build Your Own JV or Strategic Marketing Alliance
Now here are the steps to a successful joint venture or strategic marketing alliance:
- JV partners or strategic alliance members offer your free gift to everyone on their email list.
- Their list members click on the link in their email message to claim your free gift, submit their name and email address to your opt-in list.
- A One Time Offer page appears and a percentage (probably between 4% and 10%) of these people recognize the exceptional value and feel the fear of loss if they don't buy it today, since it is a one time offer, so they purchase it.
- The JV partner who made the referral for the free gift gets paid 50% of the sale of the OTO, paid instantly through Paypal. You get the other 50%.
- The new customer is taken to a Thank You page that has the download links to your free gift and the purchased OTO, as well as instructions on how to share this free gift with their own list and earn back the money they just invested in the One Time Offer.
- These new customers now become your new JV partners and the cycle starts all over again (see #1 above) and your list grows exponentially.
If you would like to learn to do this in detail, you should consider buying Mike Filsaime's Butterfly Marketing Manuscript, which teaches this technique in exact detail. Mike sold 1,500 copies of the full Butterfly Marketing course with scripts at $1,000 each (yes, that adds up to $1.5 million), but the manuscript has just become available for a small fraction of that.
SPECIAL OFFER: Subscribe to my free monthly newsletter, The Silver Bullet, and you can earn a 40% rebate off Mike Filsaime's Butterfly Marketing Manuscript.
These Powerful Marketing Tools Work. Want More Free Resources?
You have just received free useful information from me and now I'm asking for a quid pro quo (this for that). If you want more from me, I need to get something from you. In this simple barter, I will give you back 40% of the cost of the Butterfly Marketing Manuscript in exchange for your permission to share more of my marketing expertise and experience with you. Isn't this how any busienss should operate, including yours?
If you don't want to buy the Butterfly Marketing Manuscript right now, that's OK. You should still grab a copy of our newsletter, The Silver Bullet, here.
Or complete the form below and I will send you instructions on how you can claim your 40% rebate and I'll also send you a complimentary copy of the Silver Bullet.
Peace!
John Tobin
Editor of the Silver Bullet
Try these additional topics:
Relationship
Marketing
Steps in the Sales Process | 
