Creative Ways to Promote Your Website and Drive Sales
by Larry Slusser on February 5th, 2008
Promotions and special deals are a great way to increase your sales and get more traffic onto your website. People love free stuff, and when it is something they can use it becomes an even more effective marketing tool.
Compensate your visitors for leaving you their email address
One good marketing idea is to offer people something in return for their email address. If you have a site offering advice or a newsletter and you are trying to build up an email list for your newsletter, you can offer something such as an e-book in exchange for an email address.
You can contract with an author to write a short e-book (10-12 pages) for you, or you can buy one with the right to resell/give it away. An e-book serves 2 purposes: it gets you an email address, and you can add links in the e-book to your site or sites that you have.
The customer or prospect is happy because they get a resource to use that contains knowledge and help about something they are interested in. Obviously the e-book you give away needs to be about a subject related to your site and the products or services you offer, or there is no point. Also, the customer or prospect feels valued because you didn’t just hit them up for their email address; you offered them something in return.
Get creative…have a contest!
In order to experience growth, there are also some fresh new ideas you can try that are a little off the beaten path. For example, say you have an online business selling antique tools online. Your niche is selling tools to those individuals who want to invest in and collect antique tools. While the traffic through your site was say approximately 1,000 visitors a month, it wasn’t generating enough traffic or sales in order to make your business viable.
Subsequently, you start experimenting with different traffic-building strategies. One of the ideas you have is to hold a contest, where you give away an antique tool. To gain excitement about your products, you use antique tools to promote selling antique tools.
The contest asks each visitor to the site to register a wish list of the tools on the site in inventory, valuing from $10 to $500. Once a month, an entry is randomly selected and an item from the person’s wish list is given to them and announced online.
After the establishment of the contest, you will notice an increase in visitors to the site, and you can potentially even double your traffic in just a month or two after the contest begins. Additionally, the day after the monthly e-mail goes out to those who signed up for the contest, you will see an increase in sales for that day.
People like free stuff, and people like useful free stuff even more. Promotions, contests, and giveaways are great ideas to spice up the interest level in your website and sharpen the focus of those visitors. Make sure what you give away is related to your site and useful to your prospect or customer, and have fun!