Do Give Away Events Really Work?

Greeting All,

Give Away events are carried out primarily in the Internet Marketing circle itself. However, it is very possible to carry out Give Away events successfully in other hot niches with the cooperation of a group of partners and contributors in the same niche.

I also suspect that it has probably been carried out in offline businesses, in a similar way, to get hot prospects and leads, though I cannot vouch for this truth. It’s a subject fit for another book, nonetheless.

So how do Give Away events really work – and how does it help YOU build your mailing list?

Well it works like this: think of a GIANT ad swap.

How Ad Swaps Work

In a regular ad swap deal, you and another list owner (who probably has a similar mailing list size as yours) do an ad exchange.

You send the partner’s advertisement to your mailing list.

Your partner sends YOUR advertisement to his or her mailing list.

Usually, you will want to send an ad that encourages the reader to subscribe to your mailing list (we’ve been talking about it until now so you know the drill!).

You can call this “legally stealing subscribers” if you want to. After all, the average subscriber is subscribed to more than 10-20 mailing lists, possibly more, which is a perfect norm these days.

While ad swapping is a perfect way to build your mailing list by playing the game of “using subscribers to make subscribers”, the leverage effect is often 1:1 in a real sense.

You can only carry out one ad swap at a time, for starters. And even if you do swap ads with more than one list owner or e-zine publisher, the leverage effect remains 1:1 because you have to send that many advertisements to your list, too, in proportionate to how many list owners you agreed to swap ads with.

This doesn’t mean I’m discounting the power of swapping ads; it’s a good and essential marketing method you can do now and then.

But if you want to discover how you can build your mailing list at warp speed, read on:

How Give Away Events Work

As said earlier, Give Away events are almost similar to what I call a BIG version of an ad swap.

The host of the Give Away event invites partners, who are primarily list owners in the same niche, to contribute a gift.

The gifts are usually digital products, like:
• E-Book,
• Report,
• Audio/Video product,
• Membership pass, and/or
• Software/Script

The host of the event then pools all the gifts contributed collectively by the partners in one page or member’s area. This is where the visitors will go to download any gifts of their choice, and the link of the gift they click on brings them to the individual partner’s signup page.

You, as the partner, prepare an opt-in page for visitors to sign up to your mailing list to download your gift. So in a real essence, anyone who wants to download your gift must opt into your mailing list to download your gift.

While the gifts are given away at zero-cost, the only requirement is that the visitors must sign up for your mailing list to receive them.

Your visitors-turned-subscribers has the option to cancel their subscription to your mailing list at any time, of course, but this is a good opportunity you should be taking to build your relationship with the newcomers to your mailing list or e-zine or membership site.

Okay, so that’s EXACTLY how you’re going to build your mailing list after all. But where DO these visitors come from?

Like ad swaps, Give Away events are really using subscribers to make subscribers.

On the launch day and during the limited time event, you and other partners are required by the host to endorse the Give Away event to your individual mailing lists.

In other words, you are going to tell YOUR subscribers to go to the Give Away event to download their gifts at zero-cost, and the reason may vary depending on the occasion. It could be a gesture of “thanks for being our loyal subscriber” or even in conjunction with a holiday season.

Whatever the valid reason is, you should be instructing your subscribers to check out the Give Away event on a website where all the gifts are pooled together. With the host and other partners are doing the same, it will be a massive gathering of traffic at the website where all the gifts are being pooled.

In this collective effort, as long as your gift is displayed there with a link to signup for your mailing list to download it, and people are interested in it, you can receive plenty of signups in a short time span!

Regards,
Muhammad Riduan Ramli (Uanz)

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