Author: Jay Shaffstall

I wrote an ebook (Link Cloaking 101) recently for an Internet Marketing related giveaway. While regular readers are probably tired of hearing about it already, I’ve learned a lot from the process of seeing what other Internet Marketers to in giveaways, and wanted to share.

Here’s how to maximize your results from participating in a JV giveaway.

Do Not Provide A Direct Download Link

The giveaway sites will ask you for a direct download link, so that upgraded members can download your gift without filling out your opt-in form. This is bad, because you don’t get that person as a subscriber. But it’s good for them, because they don’t have to fool with opting in.

Most giveaway sites are fine if you provide a link instead to a web page that contains a direct download link to your gift. On that web page, provide the direct download link at the top, but just under that tell them what they’ll be missing by not opting in to your list.

Michael Badger did this extremely well in a recent giveaway. I can’t post the link here as an example, because then you’d be able to download his gift directly. But basically, he provided the download link first, and just after told people about the one-time offer that list subscribers could get. And yeah, the OTO was nice enough to convince me to sign up to his list and pay for the OTO.

So, do not provide a direct download link, but instead provide a link to a web page that contains the download link. You can do your best on that web page to convince people to sign up for your list even though they don’t have to do so.

Use An OTO

You have two places you can provide an OTO. One is the direct download page mentioned above…below your attempt to convince someone to sign up for your list, you can also make an OTO that you think they’ll enjoy.

The second is after someone becomes a subscriber, you can do a one-time offer after they confirm their email address. The OTO has to be on target with what you’re giving away, or you won’t get many takers.

I recommend using Rapid Action Profits to manage the list subscription and OTO process. No need to mess with payment options or secure downloads, RAP takes care of all of it, and integrates with whatever autoresponder you’re already using.

Do Not Automatically Give Resale Rights

Give a gift that is just for personal use, and provide a link for people to opt-in to get resale rights. What you’ve done is taken a list that is interested in the original topic of your gift, and transformed it into a (smaller) list that is interested in selling the product themselves.

That second list is more likely to be open to tools and training that will make selling things online easier.

How’d I Do?

I pretty much missed the boat on every lesson with Link Cloaking 101. I’m too lazy to go back and fix the problems with that ebook, but the next one I write I’ll do from the ground up with all these lessons in mind.

What techniques have you found helpful with giveaways?

Seems like everyone is writing a Stealth Traffic Report of one form or another recently.

This one is from Michael Badger, and was given away at the Auto Pilot Cash Streams giveaway (the link in the first paragraph is directly to the PDF itself, no need to join the giveaway to get it…if you’d rather join Michael’s list to get the report, click here).

The report lists 6 tactics for driving traffic to your website. Some of the tactics will drive targeted traffic, and some drive untargeted traffic. The report does a nice job of describing how to use each type of traffic properly.

Some of the topics include using social bookmarking sites, article marketing, software development, offering resale rights, etc.

If you’ve been working online for any length of time, most of the techniques here won’t come as any surprise to you. One in particular isn’t one I would recommend (what he refers to as “Fire Linking”), because Google slapped blogs for doing it last year.

Other techniques are great. His suggested use of social bookmarking sites is a great compromise between getting traffic from those sorts of sites and avoiding abuse of the sites. You’ve probably seen his technique for using resale rights to build a list before, but it helps to be reminded of it since most of us don’t get around to actually using most of the techniques we read about. The techniques described for article marketing can help you to create more effective articles, and pull more traffic with them.

Regular readers will remember that I wrote an ebook called Link Cloaking 101 in order to participate in the Auto Pilot Cash Streams giveaway.

Turns out that pretty recently, Paypal decided they didn’t like the concept of the site, and are requiring the owners to remove Paypal payments from it. It just shows that you never know what Paypal is or isn’t going to like, but that they’re sensitive when it comes to anything Internet Marketing related.

If you’ve put a One-Time-Offer on the giveaway site, then you’re going to have to modify it to include your own payment processing. This is a pain, because part of the benefit of using the giveaway for this was not having to figure out payment processing.

But it’s also good, because you’ll get 100% of the sales price instead of most of it going to the giveaway site and the buyer’s sponsor. You can also take the opportunity to build a list of buyers, if you’re comfortable with payment processing.

I’ll assume you’re not comfortable with payment processing, and tell you how I modified my OTO on the site to handle taking payments. I used Oronjo, a free service for selling digital products online.

You can set up your product to be sold via Oronjo, and then simply paste the HTML for the order button at the bottom of your OTO page. You’re instantly set up to take payments!

So if you’ve thought about setting up an OTO at Auto Pilot Cash Streams, but this latest news put you off it, use Oronjo to make taking payment trivially easy.

If you’ve been following along with the Traffic Wave tutorials, you’ll have your autoresponder set up and your thank you pages done. All that’s left is the opt-in page.

Traffic Wave does provide an opt-in page for you, but I don’t use their pages for a couple of reasons. One is that I like to host my own opt-in pages so I can use my own analytics system (in my case, Google Analytics) to get insight into who is visiting the pages, and what percentage of visitors make it on to the various thank you pages (e.g. through the sign up funnel). Another is that the Traffic Wave opt-in pages only give you a limited selection of templates. Even though the opt-in pages I come up with aren’t that great, at least they’re my work…and when I want to, I can pay someone to create a custom opt-in page for me.

On to creating the page.

Pick A Template

Unless you’re the sort of graphical genius that can create an opt-in page from scratch, you need to pick a template. There are tons out there, just look around (or join The Advisory Panel and download a few packages from the free library there).

Your two basic choices are a squeeze page, or a sales page.

A squeeze page is a short page that can be seen all at once. It’s designed to catch the visitor’s attention and entice them into submitting their name and email. A sales page is a longer page that is designed to overcome the visitor’s reluctance to sign up by bombarding them with claims about how your product will cure all the ills in their life.

Which you use is up to you. Long sales pages are popular these days, even though I never read them and think they’re horrible tools. But they’re popular, so maybe they’re working for someone.

Whatever template you find will provide you with an HTML file and possibly some image files. You’ll need to edit the HTML file to add your opt-in form.

Creating A Capture Page

You have a template that has a space where it says, “Put your opt-in form here”. But where do you get your opt-in form?

Login to your Traffic Wave back office, and go back to the autoresponder you set up in previous tutorials. Choose the option titled “Capture Pages”.

That will take you to the area where you can define what information your capture form requires, as well as defining custom capture forms. I recommend you stick with just name and email for the information. After all, the goal here is to get them as a subscriber, not to get their life story. Time enough to get more information later once you have permission to contact them regularly.

For now, click on “Create New Hosted Capture Page” to be taken to a screen with a lot of information to fill out. For the most part, we don’t care about all of this, because we are not going to use this capture page, we’re only going to swipe the opt-in form from it.

You should put something meaningful into the Page Nickname. You must also put something into the Headline, Paragraph 1, and Signature Name, although it doesn’t matter what.

Down at the bottom, under Subscription Landing URL, put the full URL to your opt-in thank you page. This will show after they subscribe, but before they confirm. Under Confirmation Landing URL, put the full URL to your confirmation thank you page so it shows after they click the confirmation link.

Click “Create New Capture Page”.

Note that if you didn’t care about using your own analytics, and liked one of Traffic Wave’s templates well enough, you could put real information into the Headline, etc, and use the capture page as hosted on Traffic Wave.

Getting The Opt-In Form

You’ll be taken back to the Capture Pages area, and now the information for your new capture page will be listed at the bottom.

Copy the URL of your new capture page and paste it into the address bar of your web browser. The capture page will show…if you’d decided to use it hosted on Traffic Wave’s system, this is the address you’d direct traffic to to get sign ups.

I always host my own, though, so I just grab the opt-in form from this page and integrate it into my own squeeze page. To grab the opt-in form, view the HTML source for the capture page (on Firefox, use the View menu, and the Page Source option).

Somewhere in the HTML that shows will be a line that starts with something like this:

<form METHOD="POST" ACTION="http://www.trafficwave.net/cgi-bin/autoresp/inforeq.cgi" onsubmit="return myValidate.Apply('errWin')">

This is the start of the opt-in form. Copy everything from that line down to the line that has this in it:

</form>

All those lines together are your opt-in form. Remove the onsubmit section from the beginning form line, so it reads like this:

<form METHOD="POST" ACTION="http://www.trafficwave.net/cgi-bin/autoresp/inforeq.cgi">

Also remove from inside the form any script tags (these make the form check for required information, which is a good idea, but requires Javascript…I prefer to keep my forms as simple as possible).

You’ll also have to modify the table inside the form to get the look you want when integrated with your squeeze or sales page. I can’t provide advice on that since it depends on the template you’re using. Do some searches on HTML tables, background colors, etc, to tweak it to fit the page you’re using.

After you finish, you’ll have an opt-in page that you can host yourself, but will sign people up to your Traffic Wave autoresponder. Now you just need some visitors, so go submit it to a giveaway, traffic exchange, etc.