 How to explode your business with giveaways and viral contests. You know, it seems like it takes forever to grow a business. I mean, it just takes so much time and effort, but does it really have to? In this video, I'm gonna show you how to use contests to explode your business right off the bat. If you haven't done so so far, make sure you subscribe, hit that subscribe button below. Don't forget to ring the bell, turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I do a new video or I go live. In this video, you're gonna learn everything you need to know about running contests for your business, so let's get started. Back is the proof is in the pudding. I've done contests in the past, they always seem to do well. Now you can do surveys or you can do contests. I think contests do well. I think the reason contests do so well is because what we do is we put up a product that somebody would want to buy and we give it away for free. Now the cool thing about this is as they enter to win this particular item, they're obviously interested in that particular item and understand we sell survival food. So when we put up a product, it's survival food. That is a very niche market. Somebody who wants that particular product is very niche down. It's not the average person that's gonna enter that contest. It's somebody who actually wants that product. So what we do in the end of that contest, if they don't win is we offer them a discount on that product or a coupon, which also explodes our sales and our list. So let's get into it in all the details. There's three major components you need to have for any one of these. The first thing you need is well-defined goals. Why are you running the contest? Yeah, I know, we all wanna make money, but why are you running this particular contest? Is it to build your email list so you can email them later on and make money? Is it to get people on your list that are interested in your niche? Is it to increase the number of followers you have or the number of subscribers you have? Get that clear upfront because this key performance indicator, this KPI, is something you're gonna have to look at all along the way. Number two, have an exciting prize. You gotta have an exciting prize. It can't be something boring. It's gotta be something that's gonna get your audience really excited. Is it gonna be a product? Is it gonna be a membership? Is it gonna be a collection of items? Is it gonna be cash? So you wanna be careful when you're picking this product because you wanna grow your list. Like if we decided we were gonna give away an iPad on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or whatever, everybody wants one of those. That would not be a niche product. That's not a product you wanna give away. You wanna give away something that's related to your niche so that you're getting the right people in the group. Now to get your contest going, you can partnership with influencers, with celebrities, people like that. People that are celebrities within your market. So if there's somebody who's, let's say, into survival and we're trying to sell survival if we may select somebody there, if you're into building websites, maybe there's somebody who is really into websites and that type of thing and they're known for websites or a company that's known for websites. That's another good way to partner. The next thing I would tell you is try to use some tools. You almost have to have a tool to do any type of contest or giveaways. A couple of the ones I like are Gleam. Let me pull that up on the screen here right now. And you can see a screenshot of Gleam right there. It says the business growth platform marketing apps designed to help you grow your product sales, powering growth for over 5,000 customers. There's also Rafflecopter. You can check that out. Really good site for doing this. And also PromoSimple. Either one of those are really good sites to help you do your promotion. The next thing I tell you is try to get everybody involved. And what I mean by that is anybody who does business with you, maybe it's somebody who supplies some type of software for you. Maybe it's retailers of your product. Like we have a lot of people who actually sell our survival foods and we could send that link out to them and say, hey, share this with your customers. We're doing this giveaway and we could get more people that way onto the contest. You can offer them a little premium. Maybe a discount at your store. Maybe you can offer them a cash value if they send out your link. Something that makes them want to do it. And then of course, you wanna let your current customers know about it too, right? You wanna get them involved. That engagement and the fact that you're giving something away is also a really good thing for brand loyalty and to keep people involved with your company. Now you wanna make it go viral and the best way to do that is use one of these softwares because almost all of them have where if they enter the contest and then they share that with two or three other people, they get more entries into the contest. So that encourages that virality so that your contest blows up even bigger and bigger. You just let them know, hey, share this with your friends and family and you're gonna get five more entries or 10 more entries, whatever you choose to do that's usually baked into the software. The next thing you can do is give updates. Couple things you can do updates, you can let them know when the contest is gonna end. So for those people, let's say on your email list or want an ad who have not entered yet but they've seen it, that's gonna encourage them to do so. Maybe if you're calculating how many entries the person gets by how much they share it, you could let them know who's in the lead, who's in first, second, third place. If they see they're in the top 10 or whatever, they may be more encouraged to go out and get more people into your contest. Now at some point, your contest is going to end. And when it does, you need to select somebody who's going to win your contest. When you pick that person, you should highlight them. You should take their picture or ask them if you can take their picture with the particular product. Maybe you want to get a little quote from them. Maybe you want to put that in an email. Maybe you even want to run another ad saying this was last month's winner. Maybe you should enter this month and maybe we could have your picture in our next ad. Now you can do these contests for a variety of different reasons. Maybe it's a contest because you're starting a new product, okay? Maybe it's a launch for a new product. Maybe you're doing this contest because it's an occasion. Okay, maybe it's a Christmas giveaway. Maybe it's a Thanksgiving giveaway. Maybe it's your birthday of your company. Maybe you started your company two years ago and you're doing it as a giveaway for that. There's so many ways to go about this to have a reason to have this giveaway. I think it is important though, that you do have a reason. A lot of companies will do a contest or a giveaway and there's really no reason for it, which tells people that they're probably just trying to add to their list. But if there's a reason behind it, people like to rationalize why something's going on. When we have a sale, we just did a promotion for our canned meats. And it was because we're changing our label. We have to put a new address on our label because we're moving our company from one state to another state. So that was a big motivation for a lot of people. They're like, gee, I'm getting this canned food. And the only difference is their address is gonna be different on it, but I can take advantage of this. And believe me, people really did. I mean, that promotion really took off more than anything we've done in a long time. And generally, the time of year that we're selling on this product, which is in May, that's one of our slowest months of the year, May is, okay? But for some reason, it's not because of this promotion that's done extremely well. Now, I also am keenly aware that we just got off the illness and we're still not really off it. We're still involved in it. This is 2021 and it's in May. So we're still kinda dealing with it. But the point is that that woke up a lot of people to our product. It's a great product. A lot of people wanted to have survival food. They wanted to have stuff they could put away. So I guess our timing was good too. But the point is we had a real reason for that promotion. When you're doing your promotion also, you're gonna have like a thank you page. Once they sign up for your promotion, you're gonna send them to a page. It's gonna say, hey, thanks for signing up. Don't waste that page. Don't waste that page. And what I mean by that is, since you've, let's say, entered my contest, I'm gonna send you to a page. It's gonna say, you know, now that you're entered for the contest, I wanna give you an award of 10% off or 20% off or whatever. When your first purchase, use this code below within the next 72 hours. So what that does is that turns that contestant who's just signed up for your contest into a possible customer. Because on that thank you page, I offered them something. The next thing you can do with all the people that sign up for your contest is send them an email. Let them know what date you're gonna do your giveaway and offer them a discount. Say, hey, we also have this product on sale right now if you'd like to get it. You can get it here. And a lot of times we can offer the same product that you were doing in the giveaway and a lot of people will buy it. We already know they're interested, right? We already know they're interested because they've already entered the contest. So doing these little extra things means a whole lot. Now, once you've put a link in there to whatever that product is, if they go and buy that product, offer them another product. When that thank you page, don't waste it. Don't ever waste thank you pages. They're so very important because that person's already committed to you. In the beginning, they committed to joining the contest, right? So on that thank you page, we offered them a product to buy. And if they buy that product, we wanna offer them another product that's similar or related to that so that they have an opportunity to spend more money with us. Contests are awesome. They work very, very well. Most large companies have run contests. The only problem I would say you run into is if you're running something, let's say on Facebook, something like that, they have a lot of terms and conditions. So you wanna make sure you read through those and make sure you understand what their rules are where they will cancel your account. I know I've had it happen to me before. So make sure you understand all that. Each platform that you run your contest on, whether it be Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all of them, there's so many platforms out there, YouTube, whatever it is, make sure you understand their rules. Follow their rules, okay? It's so very important that you do that. And please, please, please notify everybody who entered at the end of the contest who won. Make sure you do that. That's super important. If they never hear from you again, they're gonna think the contest was rigged or not even real. Now, have you run contests before? I know some of you have tried some of this. I think if you do it without software, you're gonna have a really hard time. It's gonna be very, very difficult for you to do. And the software allows you to really grow your contest and make it viral by giving people extra points when they refer people. That's kind of hard to do on your own. That's why I would suggest you use one of these pieces of software that I mentioned. They work really easy. They're built for this. They're very, very inexpensive guys. Don't worry about spending money. I think sometimes we get too tight on spending money. You gotta spend a little bit of money to make some money. It's nice to have all the free stuff too and the post free and all that. But the software is so very, very important to this. So I hope this helps you out. I hope you understand how the contest can build your list. It can help you build your business much faster than just social posts because it gets people involved and they see the giveaway and the giveaway doesn't even have to be that much money. Most of our giveaways are 100 to $500, which isn't a lot of money. And if you think about how much time you spend doing social posts, your time's worth something. And if you can run one contest and get 10 times the amount of response that you would normally get from your social posts, I think it's worth it. Thank you so much for watching this video. I do have a free course below. It's a $97 course. You can get it absolutely free by just clicking the link. No credit card required. Don't forget to subscribe. If you haven't done so, don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I do a new video or I go live. On my live videos, you can ask me questions, do whatever you want. Please give me a thumbs up. It only takes a second. Hit that thumbs up down there. Just hit that thumbs up. That would really help me and it would really help the channel. Thanks so much and put your comments below. If you've tried a contest, if you haven't tried one, if you're gonna try one, or if you just need some help starting, running and growing your online business, I would love to hear from you. Put your comments below. Thank you so much for watching the video and I'll see you in the next one. One of those videos there, keep watching on my channel.