Viral List Building Series: Crafting Your Offer

Alright, let’s get technical. What do you need to build a list the viral way? First of all, you need your front end offer. This is where you offer something to get people to sign-up to your list. After that, to get them to further promote your website, you need to prepare some sort of reward.

The most common way is to create an up-sell offer and giveaway commissions from the sales. This is where you would create an irresistable one-time offer (OTO) after visitors has subscribe to your list.

There are other ways to motivate subscribers into referring more subscribers. You can upgrade their membership, you can send them another ebook, you can give part 1 in the free offer and give them part 2 when you refer more… But in most viral list building projects, you would need two separate offers.

Unless you you are selling something really, really expensive, that requires a longer sales process and more education to the subscribers, I suggest that you stick with one-time offer for now. One-time offer is a straight forward method of building your list and making money at the same time. It works really well with the Internet marketing niche. If you are doing something outside the Internet marketing niche, offering money (commission) may not be the best thing to do. There are other viral list building models that you can use.

For the sake of other readers, let’s stick with one-time offer for now.

Now that we have decided on the list building model, it’s time to create the offers.

Obviously you need two separate offers to make this work. You need your free offer that you present in the front-end and the one-time offer that you present during the sign-up process.

Now, here’s a disturbing trend. I have seen many people put together the OTO-type viral list building project. They offer a simple but rather unique front-end offer. But when it comes to the OTO, it’s all rehashed junk. It’s the same resale rights products I see being offered everywhere. They pile it one after the other making it like a $10k package and sell it to you for just $47. To tell you the truth, I get sick of that.

You are here reading this now, and that makes you my student. And I don’t want you doing that – it’s not what I teach. Create something of value, that really adds something to this world. Something that really helps. It’s OK to add a few resale rights product as bonuses to your offer, but at least have your main product to the offer. Something new that you created yourself (or paid others to create for you).

Don’t just gather all the resale rights product that you can get for pennies at eBay and just dump them as an OTO. And when you do add resale rights product to your offer, at least package it nicely. You can at least create a new ebook cover.

And lastly, about the OTO, you need to make sure that you they are related to your main offer. That’s what they signed up for in the first place. You can’t offer a free report about cooking, and then offer an OTO about car repairs. Of course that is totally extreme, but I am sure you get what I mean. Some people put a website offering free report on Adwords and later offer an OTO about copywriting. Maybe those two offers are for online marketers, but you can’t positively say that every Adwords guy wants to be a copywriter. So don’t do that. A little trick is to offer an upgrade version. The OTO can compliment what your subscribers already have in the front end offer.

Alright, enough rant. Let’s take a look at some viral list building project out there. With DIYMiniSite.com, I offered free videos, templates and ebooks on mini site building and marketing. And in the OTO, I offered videos to my Netpreneurs Online Classroom, an advanced web design course. In my WOWPopUp.com, I offered the codes and graphics to creating unblockable DHTML pop-up with PNG graphics. In the OTO, I offered 20 more PNG graphics that they can use with their website. In my OptinDesign.com, I offered 2 squeeze page templates and squeeze page case study report. In the OTO, I offered 120 variations of squeeze page templates.

In the last installment of this series, I express a little regret about a few opportunities that passed by. There were events that I could have piggy-backed on and create a viral list building project. But I think I know why I didn’t create a viral project then. Those were the topics that I am not really good at.

Bum Marketing was very hot a few months ago. You see every Tom, Dick and Harry putting out a report on the subject. I didn’t. Well, I am not really good at it. And that will make my offer a fake.

So the lesson here is that you want to create offers about something that you are really good at. Think of what you really know and start turning that into an info-product. Just to give you an idea of what you can do:

• case study
• cheat-sheets
• workbook
• how-to reports
• mind maps
• spreadsheet document
• a list (of suppliers, specific businesses, etc)
• review
• process diagram (makes people understand better)
• template documents

Some people are good at speaking and giving speeches. You can even get a software that dictates everything you say and just let the computer do the typing. Alternatively, you can pay someone to transcribe an audio of your voice teaching the things you know. Talking about audio, you can even interview an expert and have it recorded, and then transcribed. With VOIP software like Skype, you don’t even have to leave home.

You can even hire a programmer to create a software out of what you know. You can even create a website and compile it into a software. It’ll be like a kiosk software. If you can code in Javascript, that too can be a software. I’ve heard about a guy who created a domain name suggestion software using just javascript.

Creating a product doesn’t have to be difficult. Create one for your free offer, and then give more in your OTO.

Alright, it’s time to get cranking… your homework:

1. Brainstorm on your offers.
2. Get it created.