Talking With Internet Inforpreneur Will Barden

by Bonnie Boots

You’ve heard it over and over—building a list is one of the most important things you can do to market your business on the internet. And the sheer volume of information available on the subject tells you just how difficult list building can be.

So when I first heard “joint venture gift giveaways” being touted as the easiest way to build a list, I was skeptical. That is, if you define “skeptical” as “doesn’t for one second believe one single word of it.”

Still, I tried participating in a couple of giveaways and had mixed results. I gained a few subscribers, lost a bit of skepticism and became far more curious about how to do it better. That’s why my interview with Englishman Will Barden took a sharp turn towards the topic of joint venture giveaways when I found out he’d made good use of them to grow a list for his healthy internet-based business.

Bonnie:  Hi, Will. Let’s start this interview by telling folks about your business.

Will: I have several products and services available, but I use the umbrella name “Barden Media” for the business itself. That helps with branding so that people will hopefully start to recognize my name across the web whenever I release new products.

Generally, my business involves creating and selling information products like ebooks and software. Coping fro a computer science and software engineering academic background, the majority of products I create are c9omputer programs (either web based or run on your PC desktop), although I’m moving more and more towards traditional info-products, including videos.

So far, I’ve mostly produced products in the Internet Marketing niche, but I’m moving out of that and into more ‘real world” niches these days. The IM crowd is becoming quite jaded in my eyes, and while there are still tons of “newbies” looking for home business opportunities, I don’t like selling to them because it’s usually done on false promises and I don’t want to be lumped into that group of sellers.

There are plenty of other niches in which people spend just as much money, just as frequently. Plus, there’s no big secret to finding those niches. They’re everywhere! Just look around you!

Having your own product is really the best way to build a business online. You get complete control over the whole sales process, and you can decide where to direct your business in the future.

Bonnie: How did you get started on the internet? Did you move on to the internet as an extension of a business you were already involved in, or was establishing a business on the internet a completely new enterprise for you?

Will: While I was growing up and studying computers at school, college and eventually university, I started doing the odd bit of web design and technical support for friends, family and at their workplaces. Eventually, I put my profile up on Rent-A-Coder, [a job-posting board where people hire freelance code writers.]

Through RentACoder, I found work with several international companies. After seeing how successful my products were for them, I decided to have a go at creating my own .

At that same time, I was running a very popular programming community website that filled a serious need on the web, and I started thinking about monetizing it. I slapped AdSense all over it and got banned pretty fast…probably because some of the members took the ideas of “supporting the forum” a little too literally and got a bit click-happy.

For a while, I felt like my business life was probably over and I’d never make any money online without AdSense, but the fog soon cleared as I realized there were plenty of other business models available to me.

My first product was a book documenting Alex Tew’s Million Dollar Home Page. I wrote about how he’d built the site to be the success that it was, and how other people could use the same principles to do the same. I sold it via Pay Per Click, and pretty much broke even at the end of a few months. I’ve been much more successful with more recent products, though!

Bonnie: What skills did you already have that helped you in establishing an internet business?

Will: I suppose I'm an ideas man really. I've always been very creative, and I'm passionate about doing things myself, and doing them properly. That means when I have a good idea, I often work tirelessly until I've realized it, whether it be writing a book or building a new website.

Being technically minded and able helped a lot too. I can't imagine the frustration many entrepreneurs must go through trying to get a handle on all these technologies. The best thing to do is to outsource the bits you’re not  comfortable with, but I'd strongly recommend dedicating a few months to getting to grips with things like HTML, PHP, databases and FTP. It'll help enormously with day to day tasks, save you time and money.

Also, I guess I'm good at spotting opportunities. Over the years I've made dozens of predictions to friends that have all come true in the business world, in the form of hot trends. Here's my latest tip: mobile phones as a means of micro-payments via text messages. Keep your eyes peeled - they're doing it on TV and have been for years.. It'll move onto the web very soon indeed.

Bonnie: What skills did you lack that you had to develop in order to do business on the internet?

Will: I guess I'm not very organized. I have "to do" lists stuck all over my desk and laptop, and I constantly have to write things down in case I forget. Also, I tend to get distracted easily, so I can sometimes lack focus. I'm so creative and full of ideas that I want to do them all at once! It's a common problem, and one that I'm finally getting control of.

Basically, I have 3-4 projects on the go at once. That means I can satisfy my craving for diversity at the same time as actually getting something useful done during the day.

Then I have "to do" lists - these help tremendously. They keep my on track because I know that these are the things I need to do in that day. Once they're done, I can play with new projects or go off and count my money. They also mean I can look back at the week and see how much I've really accomplished when it feels like all I've done is sit around and watch videos on YouTube!

Bonnie: I love the design of your web site. Its clean, simple design makes it both attractive and easy to navigate. Did you create that design yourself?

Will: I did, yes. I studied Art and Design a lot at school and college, and did very well. It kind of comes with my natural creativity, really. Having an eye for the aesthetically pleasing is very handy.

If you're not so hot at design, you can become hot very quickly. When you're browsing the web, bookmark pages that you like the look of. Also, get down to your local magazine shop and get a couple of web design mags and tear out pictures of web pages that you like the look of. If you don't want to buy mags you can visit a few web design companies' websites or general show off websites and have a look through those. Then when it comes to producing your next page, you have a mountain of material to help you out. Easy!

Bonnie: Can you explain what a JV Giveaway is and how you got involved in them?

Will: JV Giveaways are actually very simple. Basically, a collection of info-product marketers get together and offer free gifts to the general public. These gifts are listed on one central page, and then all the partners email their subscriber lists to send traffic to that page. So if you have 10 marketers with 2,000 people on their list, 20,000 people will hear about the event and visit the page. Those 20,000 people will then click on the gifts they like and be taken to a signup page belonging to whichever marketer offered that gift. Once the visitor is on that marketer's subscriber list, they get access to the gift. So the contributing partners win by gaining more subscribers, and the visitors win by getting a ton of free stuff.

 I got involved in giveaways through the Super JV event, run by Alex Sysoef. I think I heard about his event through the Warrior Forum, but I'm not entirely sure.

I'd been blogging about building my list for a while, and heard that giveaways were a great way of adding subscribers quickly, so I went ahead and tried it out. As you can see from the results, I did OK :)

Bonnie: What kind of impact has participating in JV Giveaways had on your business?

Will: A huge impact. I've built a list of 4,000 subscribers from giveaways alone in the last few months, which has brought me many thousands of dollars in income. Those subscribers have been introduced to my free Library of reports, guides and tools which delivers ten times the value of the initial free gift that they received.

Within the Library they can also see the various products I'm offering so some will purchase, and of course they receive the occasional newsletter from me, usually with one or more freebies and content and a sales pitch.

Plus of course having a bigger list means I can get joint ventures more easily.The size of your list pretty much determines the amount of respect you get from other marketers, so the bigger the better.

Through being in various giveaways I've made personal contacts with several high profile marketers with enormous subscriber lists. I've been invited to participate in many more events, both products launches and more giveaways.I can usually get into the top 5 or 10 highest referring JV partners in giveaways I participate in now, which helps raise my profile. No doubt several people who wouldn't have heard of me before giveaways, will recognize my name now. Heck, Jason James even called me a "super affiliate"! He may have been exaggerating a bit, but that's a nice quote to be able to throw around :)

Bonnie: Is there anything you’ve learned to do to get the most impact out of your participation in Giveaways?

Will: The most important thing that will pretty much dictate your success in an event is the quality of your gift. The better the quality, the better the response. If you're offering a tired, beaten up master resale rights package that has been doing the rounds for the last 10 years, no one will be interested in it and no one will download it. You have to offer something new, original and valuable. If it's new and original, no-one will have it yet so you've got the maximum possible audience. If it's valuable, then most people will want to get their hands on it.

The best way of deciding whether or not a gift is valuable is to figure out how much you'd charge if you were selling it. Remember, you might take a loss on the initial sale (in this case it's free), but your back-end and follow up offers are where you'll make the money.

Gifts should be just that - gifts! They're free, but that doesn't mean they have to be useless old garbage that doesn't provide any value to the subscriber. If you deliver junk, that person will leap off your list faster than you can shout "Geronimo!".

 So, first: offer a GOOD gift. There are three ways you can do this:

1. Offer a paid product at no cost (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED)

2. Create a new gift specifically for that event (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED)

3. Find something that's free, and give it away (not so highly recommended...)

My personal preference is to create unique gifts for each event. For a recent giveaway I created a set of 3 Photoshop ActionScripts for producing metallic text, and it went down a storm. People even emailed me thanking me for the original and high quality nature of the gift!

Creating full info-products isn't nearly as hard as you might think. I use a particular system and can create high quality eBooks in an afternoon: When choosing or creating a gift, try to make it relevant to what your business is, but make it relevant to what's "hot" at the moment too. So, if you mostly do PLR in the Internet Marketing niche, create a new PLR package on a topic that is currently selling well, for example Squidoo.

Secondly, have good graphics. Although you're giving something away for free, you still have to sell it to the visitor because either a) they don't want to waste time downloading everythingonly to find out 90% of it is junk, or b) they know you're going to squeeze them onto your list, and your gift will provide an indication of the quality of being on that list.

So, create good, custom, high quality graphics and write a compelling description. Make sure to use plenty of keywords in there since most giveaways now have at least a basic search feature.

Thirdly, have a clear and concise thank you page after the squeeze that shows the visitor how to confirm their subscription to receive their gift. Many people will fill in their details and then not confirm simply because they're also filling in their details for a dozen other gifts and yours gets lost, or just because they don't know how to. Make it very, VERY clear what they have to do, and your confirmation rates will climb.

I'd recommend using double opt-in lists (vs single opt-in where the user doesn't have to confirm their subscription via email) because you WILL get spam complaints. Also, while you're being very clear about how the user should confirm their subscription, be even clearer about what they're signing up for in the first place. Always make sure they know they're subscribing to your newsletter, and that they can unsubscribe whenever they like. This will seriously reduce your false spam complaints. Be upfront and honest, and your subscribers will thank you for it.

Bonnie: In general, what does a person need to do to participate in a JV Giveaway?

Will: You will need 3 things.

1. A free gift (see previous section).

2. A squeeze page to get someone onto your subscriber list. Once they've filled

in their name and email address, you can redirect them either to the gift or to a thankyou page showing them how to confirm their subscription.

3. An autoresponder like aWeber.

These services will manage your subscriber list for you and take care of sending bulk email in an anti-spam compliant way. Their deliverability rates are much higher (99%) so more people are likely to actually receive your emails.

Oh, and if you've got a subscriber list already you'll do much better. Most events will rank the gifts inside the site in order of how many people that contributor has referred to the site. So, the more people you refer to the site, the higher your gift ranks.Obviously the higher your gift is the more attention it's going to get. If you're number 1 then pretty much every single visitor will see your gift, but if you're number 10 on the 5th page, you're not going to get much action.

Build your list through other means at the same time as participating in giveaways. Traffic Exchanges, ad swaps, co-reg, articles, forum signatures, natural traffic.. all these things can help you drive traffic to your squeeze pages and build your list.Giveaways are just another way of driving lots of traffic very quickly to a particular squeeze, and it helps if you have a list already.

Bonnie: How do we find JV Giveaways to participate in?

Will: The best way to find more events is by participating in them. The likelihood is that anyone who's running an event will hear about other events and will let you know about them to increase their standing within the site. Another way is by keeping an eye on JV forums and websites. For example, there's the Warrior Forum JV board, the Conquer Your Niche JV board, JVNetwork.com and a whole host of others. Just search on Google and you'll come up with plenty.

Plus, there's my own site: http://www.JVGiveawayEvents.com in which I maintain a pretty comprehensive list of events that are upcoming.

Bonnie: Can people form their own JV Giveaways?

Will: Of course. You can either run your own just using a plain single webpage you have created yourself, or you can get a nifty piece of software to do it all for you. Brad Smith of Easter JV fame has released Giveaway Manager which he's used to run his events and add thousands of people to his list, and there's also JV Firesale Automator which you can get for a few dollars.

I'm running an event which only has 10-12 carefully selected participants, so I'm not using any fancy software. I've got a single HTML page with the gifts on, and all the partners have to do is drive traffic to that one page.

If you're planning on having several hundred partners (my Summer Boot Sale event had almost 700) and you want everything managed for you automatically, buying a piece of software is the way to go.

Bonnie:  Will, I’ve registered for about 10 JV Giveaways but only participated in 4. Some of them had such complicated requirements, or were written with so many acronyms and abbreviations, that I couldn’t understand how to participate. Others were so poorly planned that people who registered for them couldn’t figure out how to get their gifts, or complained to me that they were bombarded by the flood of “buy this” emails they received after registering. And overall, the majority of people that subscribed to my list through these events were not my targeted readers and quickly unsubscribed.

With this in mind, do you have any general advice for my readers in regards to participating in JV Giveaways?

Will:  Most events are very similar: you sign up, register your gift, and then promote the event to your subscribers using a special link you'll be given inside the site.If you have trouble with anything, it's best to email the owner and ask for help. After all, they want you to help them promote the site. Without a ton ofpartners working together to promote the event it'll probably flop and then nobody wins!

Plus, you should always be able to unsubscribe from any mailings you're getting. The mail should contain information inside it telling you how to unsubscribe. If it doesn't, get in touch with the owner again and ask him toremove you.

In terms of other general advice, I have a couple of extra points I'd like to make. Firstly, you will usually be given the chance to recruit JV partners for an event. Do this! Each time you refer a user to the site you'll be given some points, and these points add up to form the ranking order for the gifts. The thing is, JV partners that you recruit will earn you MORE points than regular users. By recruiting other partners you get a decent head start over everyone else. That's what I do!

Secondly, giveaways are all about bringing subscribers into your business world. Giveaways drive the traffic to your squeeze pages, and then people are on your list. Once they're on there you have to treat them like real people! Give them lots of valuable content. Educate them in the ways of your nichebusiness. Be personal, nice, relevant and make a good impression. DON'T immediately start bombarding them with offers because they'll just leave.

Make sure that what you're emailing them about is relevant to the gift they got. It's all about using giveaways to siphon off targeted traffic and visitors. For example, there's no point offering a gift about AdSense if your main business and other products are all about eBay... right?

Don't email your new list too often. Remember, they probably got 10 or more other gifts in the same event, so these people will be emailing them too! Give them a little while to warm up to you, and stand out above your competition. It's this early phase of contact that will lose you the most subscribers, so tread carefully.

I like to make a personal impression right away. New subscribers onto my list get introduced to my Library of stuff and a hand written "About Me" page the day after they subscribe. So far, this has certainly reduced my unsubscribe rate, because it helps quickly develop a personal relationship between me and my new subscriber.

Bonnie: Is there anything else you'd like to mention?

Will: I thought I should also mention a couple more things about giveaways. Firstly, how to use them to directly make money. No doubt if you're been in Internet Marketing or home based business for very long you'll have seen plenty of "One Time Offers" or upsell offers when you sign up for something orpurchase something.

Many people advise using similar offers in giveaways. When a user has been through your squeeze you can redirect them to a sales page with a relevant offer on it. If you're going to do this, bear in mind a few things.

1. Everyone else is doing the same thing. Everyone is fighting tooth and nail to get this person's money, so your offer had better be darned good (or cheap!).

2. If you skip the thank you page your confirmation rates will drop. That essentially means you'll end up with a ton of people on your list who haven't completed the double opt-in process so you can't send them email!

3. These events are touted as being completely free. Some people will be surprised when you try to get them to spend money, so if you're going to do it, make sure it's clear as ice that the offer is entirely optional.

Personally, I'd only had limited success with upsells during giveaways, but it definitely is worth doing. The same rules apply as to choosing a gift though -make sure your offer really is a super special offer, new, original, valuable and totally RELEVANT to your gift. Don't just throw up an antique resale package because it won't sell.

When it comes to pricing... it all depends. I go for cheap (<$20) offers, but I suppose with higher priced offers you need to convert less to make the same amount of money. I'd rather gradually teach people into spending money with me though, so start them off easy with a cheap deal.

The other point I'd like to make is this: giveaways are usually targeted at the Internet Marketing niche. It's very rare to see an event themed in golf, fishing or weight loss for example.

Here's a secret: there's a HUUUGE market out there crying out for giveaways. The only problem is convincing list owners in those niches to participate. If you can do that, this model of list building has enormous potential.

Don't restrict yourself to the home business niche, and don't feel like just because there aren't any giveaways in your niche that it's a dead end. If no-one else is running any, start your own!

That's pretty much all I've got on giveaways. I hope you found something useful in here, and I hope I didn't confuse anyone. Good luck participating, and may your lists be monstrous.

 
About the Author

Bonnie Boots is the publisher/editor of The Internet Wizards Magazine for people who want to create their own products and market on the internet. Register for your free 1-year subscription at http://www.theinternetwizards.com