Online Marketing Goodies | Put to Good Use
The, “Can You Spot the Dog” Trick to Going Viral
If you go to Reddit and search for, “Can you spot the dog,” you’ll find a variety of photographs that each contain a hidden dog.
People LOVE this type of picture because they get a little serotonin hit when they find the dog. And they love to share these pictures with their friends, too.
How can you use this in your social media marketing?
Find or take photos that are relevant to your niche and have something hidden in them. It doesn’t have to be a dog; it can be anything. The important thing is that it is somehow tied to your niche, with bonus points if it ties to one of your products. And then share these photos with your followers.
Take this up a notch by branding the photos with your name or website.
And consider compiling a dozen or so of these photos and putting them onto your site.
“For more find the X photos, click here.”
Boom.
This is fun for your followers and can bring you viral traffic. The only difficult thing might be creating or finding photos that are niche relevant. Obviously if your niche is pets, then this is easy. Any niche that can be represented visually can work. Maybe you teach crochet and have a cat? Make a series of photos of your cat well hidden in your crochet projects or yarn stash. You teach landscaping techniques and you have a dog? Easy-peasy – hide the dog in the landscape shots. If you don’t have a dog, hide a gnome.
But what if your product is a course on how to drive traffic? Maybe you have photos of traffic and you photoshop your product into the photos, hiding it in a car window or on a distant billboard.
Remember those books, “Where’s Waldo?” They were simply a series of 10 or so pictures with tons of detail and one hidden person – Waldo. And they sold like gangbusters because people LOVE the feeling of finding the hidden element.
Get creative and see how you can use the “Spot the Dog” trick in your business.
Case Study: $10,000/mo in Coaching Fees without Doing Any Coaching
This one is super simple and surprisingly lucrative.
It all started when Bob (not his real name) offered coaching services to his customers.
Bob only wanted to take on a certain number of students and no more, so he referred any additional students beyond his limit to other coaches.
These other coaches thanked him profusely for the referrals, and Bob realized he’d goofed up because he should have been smarter and made a commission on the referrals.
Oddly enough, none of these coaches had affiliate programs, and so he asked each of them to create an affiliate program just for him.
On $1,000 to $2,500 a month coaching, Bob typically earns $250 to $500 a month in commissions. And that’s usually over the course of 3 or more months.
Because promoting other coaching programs to his leads and customers turned out to be so lucrative, Bob seldom does any coaching anymore. Instead, he simply refers people to the other coaches and cashes in, earning about $10,000 a month.
Of course, you could do both – coach students and promote other coaches, too – if you want to make even more money.
But if the idea of coaching doesn’t sit right with you, then promoting other coaching programs might be the way to go.
And if those coaches don’t have affiliate programs, just ask them to create one for you.
How to Get Plenty of Affiliates with Zero Hassle
As anyone who’s tried it knows, recruiting affiliates for a product launch can be a real pain.
Some affiliates have large egos and even bigger demands for your time and your money.
“I want a bigger commission.” (They ask this no matter how much you’re paying, btw. I think they read it in an affiliate how-to manual.)
“I want you to promote my products to your list in return for me promoting your product.” (Now you have to check out their product and see if it’s something worthy of promoting and a good fit for your list. 9 times out of 10 it isn’t.)
“I want you to place my products inside your sales funnel.” (Sure, I’ll just do that for 100 affiliates and we’ll have 100 upsells and won’t that be fun?)
And on and on it goes.
It’s enough to knock the wind right out of your sails, and it’s the reason why some online marketers prefer to never deal with affiliates in the first place.
But there is a way to recruit affiliates without any of the hassle, and it’s simple: Just get a JV broker on board for your launch.
Choose someone who is just getting started in launch circles, someone who is hungry and eager and won’t demand you pay them in bags of gold up front.
They should be active online and perhaps have done a couple of launches themselves. They don’t need a ton of experience; just enough to know how product launches work and how to find affiliates.
Pay them for results, such as giving them a percentage or your profits or giving them access to the list you build from selling your product, or even placing their product inside your funnel.
The more sales they generate, the more they earn.
You set up the affiliate page and you decide on the contest prizes and commission structure. Then your JV broker’s job is to schmooze affiliates, send out launch reminders, perhaps provide ongoing motivational emails to affiliates, answer affiliate questions and anything else having to do with affiliates.
This is going to take massive stress off you. In fact, the only thing you’ll need to do other than set up the affiliate page and commission structure is send out a thank you email to affiliates after the launch ends.
And don’t worry about your JV broker. They won’t have to endure half the B.S. that you would need to go through because they are “just” the JV broker. When someone asks them for special favors like higher commissions than other affiliates and so forth, your JV broker can simply say they don’t have that authority.
If you don’t enjoy recruiting affiliates, scout around and find yourself a JV broker. If they’re good at their job, they’ll bring in more sales than you probably could, paying for themselves and building your list even bigger. And they’ll free you up for the important stuff, like tending to your new customers.
Affiliates – 3 Tricks to Making More Money with Little Effort
Here’s how to find and use even the most obscure affiliate programs. Let’s say you’re in the fitness niche and you write a blog post about Kettlebells – those weird gym weights that look like tea kettles without spouts.
In the past you would post the article and move on to something else.
But today you got just 1% smarter and you asked yourself… “I wonder if there is a Kettlebell affiliate program?”
First Trick – Too Easy?
You go to Google and you type in, “Kettlebell affiliate program” and you find SEVERAL affiliate products that are specifically for kettlebells. Some are workout plans and programs and others are selling the actual Kettlebells themselves.
You sign up with two affiliate programs and make a couple of quick changes to your blog post. First you recommend to your readers where they can get a great deal on Kettlebells, and then you recommend your favorite Kettlebell workout program.
This didn’t take much time at all and yet you’ve potentially got two more affiliate programs making sales for you.
Second Trick – Kicking it Up a Notch
Now imagine you do this with every single blog post you publish, as well as going back to your most popular past posts and doing it for those as well.
You could end up with several new affiliate programs making you sales. And again, it didn’t take all that much work.
Third Trick – Never-ending Kettlebell Commissions
And then imagine if you keep track of which affiliate programs are converting the best.
Remember that kettlebell workout plan you promoted last month? It’s selling like crazy. How about writing a SECOND blog post about kettlebells and promoting that affiliate program again?
Or even making a kettlebell lead magnet and segmenting your list to find out who is interested in kettlebells, and then sending them an autoresponder sequence promoting perhaps 3 or more kettlebell programs over the following weeks?
Now you’re not just 1% smarter, you’re an affiliate sale-making machine!
Bottom Line:
Every time you create a new piece of content, have a goal in mind. Whether it’s to get more subscribers with a lead magnet upgrade or make an affiliate sale or some other end goal, every piece of content needs to be working to build your business…
Even the article about that weird cannonball with a handle.
Last Note:
Never promote a program or product you do not 100% believe in. Your good reputation is worth infinitely more than a handful of sales commissions.
Death by Committee – Killing Your Biz to Save $5
In the age of Covid19, things change. What was once offline is now online. For some the transition is easy, but for others, it’s not.
Take a Fellowship group in the U.S. I won’t name names, but I will tell you their story.
Every year this Fellowship (sort of like a church, but without the rules of a particular religion) holds a HUGE rummage sale. The members donate tons of items and for a week volunteers sort and price everything.
Then people came from all around to buy lots of goodies and go home happy.
Enter Covid19. Everything is now being done virtually via an auction site. The problem is…how to get the word out?
There’s social media sites like Facebook and Nextdoor. Then there’s Craigslist, the big classified type of website (not available in all parts of the world.)
That’s a start.
But how about asking members to send out the short, snappy URL to their friends and family in the area?
And maybe texting that memorable URL to friends and asking them to pass it along in conversations to others.
Put this eye-catching URL on posters, too, and post them where ever people are coming and going.
Except… the Fellowship wouldn’t spring for the $5 (GoDaddy coupon) to get a short URL. Which is a shame because the name of the town with the word ‘sale’ was available. That’s a super easy to remember 9 letter, 2 word URL with a dot com.
But according to the consensus of the committee who knows nothing about marketing, $5 was just too much to spend.
So instead, their url was something like this:
Auctionsitename.bit/rtufannualrummagesaleonline2020
Yup.
You see where this is going.
No posters around town. (Who’s going to remember that URL?)
No word of mouth. No mention in the local paper (they have a limit on URL size.)
Most people didn’t even try to text it to others.
This happens all the time, from the biggest corporations to the smallest one-man businesses.
The marketing minds need $X for their campaign. The bean counters say no. The marketing campaign fails. And everyone blames the marketing team.
Odds are YOU are your marketing team and you are your own bean counter.
What expense are you saying no to that could totally revolutionize your business?
Is it money for advertising on Facebook? Sure, you might lose money while you’re getting your campaign worked out. But once you figure out what you’re doing, spending $1 to make $2 can be clockwork. But hey, you don’t want to lose that initial money, right?
You want to sell t-shirts, but you know that when you’re first starting your initial 10 or 20 campaigns might be duds. Sure, that 11th
or 21st campaign can put you in serious profit, but you don’t want to spend the money to learn what works and what doesn’t.
Maybe you need a website overhaul but you don’t want to hire a professional. Or you need software to automate a process, or rights to a product you can resell like gangbusters, or something that will cost you money now to make MORE money later.
Don’t let a $5 or even a $500 investment keep you from success.
Determine what is a luxury and what is a necessity to get to the next level. Ignore the luxuries (for now) and invest in the necessities.
Doing so will allow you to buy all the luxuries you want down the road when you’re raking in the dough.
Using Pinterest Treasure Hunts to Drive Traffic
Here’s an interesting idea I observed in action last week…
Plan out an online treasure hunt using several images.
Then contact a few of your partners and ask each one to pin an image on their Pinterest board. Each image gives a clue to the next image in the treasure hunt.
Publish a blog post about the promotion along with a link to the first image. Fans then go from image to image by following the clues. The last image forwards them to a hidden page where they enter their info to take part in a raffle, or they get a free download, coupon, or whatever you choose.
One note: Make the treasure hunt fairly easy and lots of fun.
Mastering Hashtags to Drive More Traffic
Hashtags organize social media according to conversations and topics, making it easier for you to find your target market for your brand.
To like, retweet and reply to posts under several hashtags, use a social media monitoring tool such as Hootsuite. Hashtagify can also help you find other hashtags that are related to the one you’re targeting.
Now here’s the tricky part: Not all hashtags are to be treated the same on every channel. For example:
On Twitter, tweets with a single hashtag typically generate more engagements than tweets with 3 or more hashtags.
Conversely, Instagram posts receive the most engagement when using multiple hashtags, even as many as 10 or more in a single post.
Then there’s Facebook, which tends to do better without any hashtags.
Have you heard that hijacking hashtags to promote your own products is a good idea? Don’t fall for that mistake. Hijacking a hashtag is essentially spamming and the vast majority of people will ignore it (if you are lucky) or take you to task for it.
Instead, contribute to the conversation in a meaningful, helpful way that is natural and non-pushy.
Create posts that align with trending topics to reach new people. Watch what’s happening in your niche and look for opportunities to add your voice to the conversation.
Or you might even parody what’s happening in the world. For example, brands might run their own ‘candidate’ during political elections or feature their own ‘movie star’ during Hollywood awards shows.
One last thought on joining in on conversations on social media: When possible, use humor. Funny posts and tweets can sometimes gain enormous traction, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be related to your product. Brands like Oreos do this all the time. Just make sure it is always in good taste.
Irving
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