Post a comment and receive a FREE item...Post a comment and receive a FREE item...
Post a comment and receive a FREE item...
... ok so sometimes you want to get your site noticed just like we wanted you to notice this blog posting.
Getting traffic can be one the biggest challenges of owning and operating a website. But what happens when you're getting a whole lot of traffic that you don't want?
Maybe you can relate to the following story:
A certain ministry decided that they would like to offer a free calendar in an online give away. The intention was to generate a new list of potential donor names and email addresses. The interest in the calendar was quite high; the form generated about 5,000 new names per day! The ministry development team was ecstatic. However, as they tracked the new names over the course of a twelve month period they found that only 1% of those names converted into donors. Considering all the material cost, postage and staff hours, the return on investment was horrible.
So, does that sound familiar? Hopefully not. We've seen several sites get flooded with people coming to take advantage of freebie give-aways. And let's face it, if you operate a ministry (or non-profit) web site you tend to be giving away items for free. This can backfire, however, if a freebie search engine spider finds your site or if you get listed on any of the numerous freebie forums. The standard pattern goes like this:
- You post your freebie offer hoping to add a few names to your promotional mailing list
- Your site gets trolled by a search engine spider and posted to a freebie forum
- The traffic from the forum(s) come(s) flooding in
- You end up filling orders for hundreds or thousands of requests for your item and in return you get hundreds or thousands of names of people who really aren't great potential for your marketing materials
Giving away free items in exchange for information is still a sound marketing strategy. However remember this key as you prepare to do any marketing
Always strive to get quality names over quantity names.
Here are some tips that should help in your endeavor to get quality names over quantity names:
- The main thing to do is think through your strategy up front.
- Just because you may give something away in an offline manner does that make sense to offer it online?
- How are you going to measure success of this give away?
- What plan do you have in place if things turn bad?
- Think of digital items you can give away free that will lower your expenses. For example a free download is much cheaper to give away than an item you will have to mail.
If you do decide to give away a material item for free online, keep the following in mind:
- choose your wording on your web page very carefully. Avoid using buzz words like "free" and "give away" unless you want to turn on the runway lights for our freebie seekers. The trick is to communicate your offer without triggering the buzz words. You may want to discuss with a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialist what words to use and/or avoid.
- Be extra careful what text you are using on your homepage, as this is the page most likely to get search engine spiders. If you put offers on the homepage consider putting the text in an image that links to the offers page.
- Make sure to modify your robots.txt file to disallow search engines from spidering your give-away pages.
User-agent: * Disallow: /this-dir/giveaway.html - Be aware. Watch the traffic to your give away page and your email inbox. If you start getting results you weren't quite expecting you might want to look into your server logs to see if you can determine where the extra traffic is coming from.
- If you've been listed already, you (or a coding guru you know) can do some nifty checks on your site visitors to see where they are coming from and act accordingly.
And honestly there are sometimes when you do want to give away as many items as you can for branding exposure. However, keep some of these thoughts in mind as they will only help your ROI in those endeavors as well.
So, do you have any freebie or give-away horror stories?
Or methods you use to protect your free gift campaigns from improper requests?
If you've had a successful freebie / give-away campaign, to what do you attribute it's success?
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