Getting Traffic to Your Website with Promotional Giveaways

Getting traffic to your website with promotional giveaways is a common practice in all forms of marketing. The idea behind it is that if you give a potential customer a little taste of what your services are, or otherwise give them a freebie, they will be more inclined to actually buy what you’re promoting. This can go several ways. Some ideas are good, and some are bad, depending on the scale of your business.

Electronic Format is the Cheapest and Easiest

For instance, if you can give them something in an electronic format, it will cost you virtually nothing to create and takes almost zero work to keep providing, especially considering the potential draw you can get from it. This is especially true if the freebies you’re offering give your potential customer a small taste of what your product has to offer. This can take the form of videos, audio clips, viral e-books, newsletters, and more. Depending on what services you provide, these can be instructional or merely entertaining. Another great thing about doing giveaways in an electronic form is that it costs you nothing at all in shipping and handling costs.

Other types of freebies can come in a physical form. This is a more valuable venture for your company if you are on a larger scale and not just a beginner. It’s a bit more expensive to provide physical goodies, but people like having “stuff,” and the more tangible, the better.

Starting Small with Physical Promotional Giveaways

Again, what you provide will depend on your scale. If you are just testing the waters in physical promotional giveaways, you should probably just stick with small things like bumper stickers or buttons. If there is a noticeable difference in your sales from such offers, you can probably safely move up to t-shirts and posters.

By and large, I would say avoid more fragile or heavy items like coffee mugs until you really hit the big time. The shipping and handling costs for those items will tend to be more expensive than stickers and t-shirts. Above all, unless you are absolutely certain that your market will respond positively, avoid items such as trucker hats. This would exclude a large number of people, since most people are just not interested in trucker hats. You could very well lose lead interest if you give out the wrong stuff.

Promoting Your Business While You’re at It

However you go about promoting your business by doing giveaways, your company’s name and website should be prominently imprinted on every item and every page if it’s a text, electronic or physical. It not only keeps your business at the front of their minds (after all, it IS a promotion, right?), but it also prevents someone from reselling your material. To that end, make sure that everything is clearly described as being copyrighted. It’s altogether too easy for someone to claim someone else’s work as their own without copyright protection, and they can even claim the copyright out from under you! You have to be extremely careful that you’re protected or you WILL be stolen from.