Last week I was cleaning out my home office and came across a lot of marketing books of which I either had duplicates, or had already read and didn’t need to keep anymore.
It’s such a hassle to sell new and used books on Amazon, and they take so much of the fees that it seems hardly worth the effort. I could’ve just thrown them in a pile for my next yard sale, but instead, I thought I’d see what would happen if I had some fun with them and gave them away on one of my blogs. The experiment turned out to be quite surprising.
The first two books I decided to give away together were ProBlogger by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett and Blog Blazers by Stephane Grenier, since they were both on the topic of blogging. I wrote a quick blog post about the contest, and all visitors had to do to register was leave a comment and subscribe to the blog’s feed.
On a blog with virtually no traffic and no promotion, this simple contest increased the average daily visits by 3000%! It also had a similar effect on our RSS subscribers. It was so successful that I’m planning to make it a biweekly or monthly contest. Even after I run out of books in my office, I’ll buy new books (which I’d do anyway) or find other valuable giveaways — maybe even some worth much more.
What started as a way to clean up my bookshelf turned into a successful marketing experiment. How can you successfully use a giveaway to increase subscribers, sales, or website traffic?
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