When it comes to building your business, you need as many ideas for how to promote a product online as possible.
I suggest that you write out these ideas as a numbered list and work on each one progressively.
When you get to the end of the list, you will have traffic coming in from all over the internet!
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How to Promote Products For Sale Online
You can do the steps in whatever order works for you.
I do suggest setting up as many as you can so that you have the maximum passive income and do not have to babysit your product.
This frees up time for you to create more content to help your people.
Set Up an Affiliate Program
This is not set-it-and-forget-it. Instead, you need to be proactive. You need to ‘work’ your affiliate program if you want it to work for you.
Here are three tips to help you succeed:
Find and Recruit The Best Affiliates
If you wait around for the top affiliates to find you, you’re going to be waiting around forever.
That’s why you’ll want to find, befriend and then recruit these top affiliates. Here are a few places to find them:
- See who has the bestsellers in your niche, as these top vendors also make excellent affiliates.
- Check your competitors’ affiliate contests to see who is winning them. These winners are your potential super affiliates.
- Run a search in Google and on Facebook for your niche keywords to uncover marketers with big platforms (popular blogs, big networks on social media, and big mailing lists).
Stock Your Affiliate Center
In other words, give your affiliates everything they need to promote your product. This includes rebrandable content such as:
- Reports
- Solo emails
- Autoresponder series
- Videos
- Social media blurbs
- Blog articles
- Graphical ads/banners/gifs
Motivate Affiliates
You can do this by:
- Running affiliate contests with exciting prizes.
- Offering incentives to the top affiliates on an ongoing basis.
- Running events such as product launches, flash sales and more.
If you do these three things, you’re sure to have a profitable affiliate program. Keep in mind that affiliates are supposed to get the leads to your sales page; then you do the heavy lifting to make the sale.
Help your people to help you.
Start Your Mailing List
You already know this. Maybe you’ve even started building your list.
But have you segmented this list according to more narrowly targeted interests?
And are you following up with this list?
The good news is that you can do a lot of the follow-up automatically, using your autoresponder. Here are specific ideas and tips for following up:
- Send out a multi-part series. For example, send out a five-part series called, “The Five Steps To Creating a Bestselling App,” or “The Five Secrets for Growing Prize-Winning Roses.”
- Focus on promoting just one offer. Every email you send should promote just ONE offer. If you promote multiple offers, your prospect will face too many choices and is likely to not choose any of them.
The exception here is if you’re sending out a list of all the tools and resources someone needs to achieve some goal.
- Offer emails that are part content, part pitch. The content should naturally lead to the paid offer. For example, if your email is teaching people how to set up a blog, then you can promote a WordPress plugin within that email.
- Send out a variety of emails. This includes long articles, short tips, emails where you ask for feedback and opinions, emails that direct to your blog or social media platforms, solo ads, case studies, product review or comparisons, links to video tutorials, etc.
- Create a variety of content and see what your audience responds to the best.
Go Viral
The idea here is to get people in your niche talking about your product through the use of viral marketing. In other words, let your customers spread your marketing message among their networks.
Here are 4 tips for optimizing this strategy:
Keep it short.
Anything that’s quick and easy to consume is more likely to go viral.
This includes memes, infographics, quotes, short articles, Reels or TikTok videos (less than three minutes), and similar content.
Create share-worthy content.
This is the most important factor in creating good viral content. You need to share content that creates an emotional response. This response might be:
- Wow, I’ve never seen anything like this!
- Whoa—this is such a clever idea!
- This is so inspiring!
- Awwww…
- Ha ha—love this!
- This makes me so mad—I want to do something.
Offer a call to action.
People are much more likely to share content if you specifically tell them to do so. G., “Click here to share this with your friends and give them a big smile…”
Give people an incentive to share the content.
You might offer them a valuable and desirable freemium in exchange for them sharing your content on social media.
You can do this using a tool like RaffleCopter.com if you’re running a contest.
Become a Guest Blogger
A good way to get exposure, establish yourself as an expert in the niche, and drive targeted traffic back to your site is through the use of guest blogging. Here are tips for optimizing this strategy:
Look for blogs in your niche that accept guest authors.
You might start with a Google search to see if anyone in your niche has put this sort of list together (e.g., “list gardening blogs that accept guest articles”).
Or you can search directly for these blogs (e.g., “gardening blog guest author,” “gardening blog guest article,” “gardening blog submit article,” “gardening blog content submission guidelines”… etc.).
Read and follow content submission guidelines.
Popular blogs get a lot of submissions, so they’ll toss yours out in a millisecond if you don’t follow their submission guidelines to the letter.
Offer exclusive, unique content.
Blog owners don’t want to publish content that’s already been published all over the web. That’s why you’ll have a better chance of your content getting submitted if you give them something unique.
Use your byline wisely.
Don’t use it to talk about yourself. Instead, use it as a mini advertisement to drive traffic back to your site. E.G., “Did you like this article? Now you can get five more tips for doubling your conversion rate by clicking here…”
Do Webinars
Holding a free webinar for your prospects comes with multiple advantages, including:
- You can use it to build relationships with your prospects. Delivering good content will build trust.
- You can use it to build a list and/or segment your existing list. Just be sure to have all webinar participants register by signing up for your list.
- You can use it to generate sales for your product. You can promote the product from within the webinar as well as in the follow-up emails to your new list.
Here are two tips for optimizing this strategy:
- Create high-quality content. People don’t want to watch a webinar if it’s all one big pitch. Instead, deliver part of the solution inside the webinar, and then promote a product at the end that delivers the rest of the solution. In other words, the webinar content should naturally lead to the paid offer.
Example: If you’re selling a weight-loss book, then offer a free webinar with “7 Surefire Tips For Getting Your Beach Body.”
- Engage people. Don’t just blast out a webinar that’s little more than a one-way dialogue. If people wanted that, they could just watch a video. Engage your audience. Ask them questions. Encourage them to ask you questions.
Run a Flash Sale
The beauty of the flash sale is that it can generate a whole lot of excitement around your product in both your prospects as well as your affiliates. That means that even after the sale itself is over, you’ll continue to have affiliates who are promoting your products and new customers streaming through your virtual doors.
Here are two tips for getting the most out of your flash sale:
- Build anticipation. The sale itself is short – just a matter of hours – so you want to build anticipation for days in advance. You want people breaking down your virtual door, hot with anticipation. You do this by sending out a series of benefit-driven emails the week before.
- Use a countdown timer on the sales page. This will really kick up the sense of urgency a few notches, and boost those conversion rates.
Distribute Your product to Influencers
The idea here is to get your product into the hands of the most respected people in your niche. If they like what they sell, they’ll review and promote your product.
Here’s where to find these influencers:
- Search Google for those who own the most popular blogs in your niche. Pay particular attention to those blogs where the owner reviews and promotes other peoples’ products.
- Search Facebook for your niche keywords to see who owns the most popular Pages and Groups. In particular, look for big and active groups.
- Visit niche forums to see whose well respected in the niche. The forum owner is your first-choice partner, but you may find visitors who also hold a lot of influence in the community.
Use Multimedia
This is a very simple idea, but it’s very effective: simply use video promos to reach a wider audience.
You can even add a video sales letter alongside your regular sales letter to accommodate more of your prospects’ preferences for the way they receive information.
TIP: You can either pick up a camera and do a quick “talking head” video (which is great for building trust), or you can produce a professional slide-share video using PowerPoint™ and screen-recording software such as Camtasia.
Paid Ads
We’ve talked about a lot of totally free ways to drive traffic and generate sales, but don’t overlook paid advertising. Often this is the quickest way to drive highly targeted traffic to your site.
Here’s where to place these ads:
- Facebook ads. This is a highly targeted platform, as you can define your audience very narrowly by demographics and even behaviors.
- Pinterest ads. If you are already creating and using pins on Pinterest, go ahead and put your keywords to work with paid ads.
- Google AdWords. This is a pay per click platform, so your ads will show up alongside the organic search results.
- Sites in your niche. You may know about some of these sites off the top of your head already. You can also find them by searching Google for your niche keywords alongside words like “advertisers” or “buy advertising.”
Use Your Data to Test and Tweak
One of the best way to put more money in your pocket is to test, track and tweak your sales letters and ad campaigns to boost your conversion rate. For best results, follow these two tips:
- Get your hands on a good tracking tool. Platforms like Facebook ads have built-in tools. You can also use tools such as matomo.org.
- Focus on factors that will make the biggest impact. That includes sales letter headlines, calls to action, and pricing.
Tap Into Social media
Social media is a great way to engage your prospects, build relationships with them, and then drive them to your sales pages and lead pages. For best results, focus your efforts on the top social media platforms, including:
- TikTok
Now here’s a specific way to tap into social media to drive traffic back to your site: run a contest.
People will need to join your list in order to enter the contest. And you can even give people extra entries in the contest by telling their friends about it. This is easy to do using a tool like RaffleCopter.com, and it’s a great way to make your contest go viral in a big way.
So there you have 11 smart things you can do to promote your product.
Any one of these methods will produce great results for you.
Even better is if you put in place a strategy for implementing all of them. So start snapping these pieces in beginning today, because I think you’ll love your results!
Conclusion
Sales funnels are just one way to earn money with online marketing. Use the tips from today to promote products in your funnels, from the freebie to the tripwire to the main product.
And don’t forget your affiliate products!
Other ways to earn online are: membership programs you run, coaching, putting ads on your site or paying for ads to promote products. When you create your online business, you can combine many of these for a totally unique business.
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Please share with others…sharing is caring! Let me know in the comments if these tips work for you! Until next time, happy blogging!
-Irma 🙂