Follow Our Launch
Joint Venture Partners & affiliate launches
Promoting via JVs and affilliates helps increase outreach. Affiliates do marketing for you and bring you more visitors; this gives a boost to the income and makes everyone happy. It sounds simple enough but needs business savvy and effort on your part. Useful tips that we have employed. 
a- It is essential that you maintain uninterrupted communication with your venture partners and affiliates. You have to build a relationship with them and win their trust. Your main focus while communicating with them should be to convey what is in it for them. Don’t make it all about you.
b- You have to motivate and influence them by keeping them updated about your progress and giving them fair warning in advance about your pre-launch and launch plans and timelines. This will give them enough time to plan their part of the promotions. We usually assist our JV partners and affiliates with swipe messages that they can use in their promotional campaigns. These swipe messages are prepared by content writers and can be slightly customized according to the conversation - they help in getting the message out.
c- Keep in constant contact with them so they don’t forget about you. If you have a whole bunch of venture partners and affiliates, then choose your A-list. These are the ones who will bring you the most business so take extra care of them. These are the people whom you call more often, send special updates to. We have email campaigns set up in our autoresponders that go out to all of our partners and affiliates. These emails help us in keeping the promoters in queue with the launch status, as well as provide them with useful information that they can use in their promotions.
d- We have planned separate launches for our JVs and affiliates. This will give them a head-start in our application so that they are in a better position to market it. It also allows us to build stronger relationships with them as early adopters and users of the app. Even in our mini-launches, we have an ebook launch coming up. We’ll be sharing our ebook for free with our super promoters before it is launched publicly to give them an edge over the others. This will help them read the book and review it candidly.
Never Ending Conversation
Our conversations with our prospects started way before launch. We have 9 different email campaigns running in parallel, targeting different sets of groups. We have video tours walking interested people through the application. We have a presence on facebook, myspace, linkedin and all major social networking sites. We encourage people to follow us on twitter, friendfeed and of the likes. We have 3 blogs running in parallel to our launch campaign. We are open to feedback, discussions and conversations with people - as they are the most important enablers of our business.
Conversation is the key which opens doors to people’s minds and hearts. I believe that more than anything else, marketing thrives on communication. You have to get to know them and find out what they want. It is a false assumption that the more populated your lists are the more popular you are. Popularity is not achieved just by adding people to your list of contacts. They should be able to recognize you and know you. Be one with the people, bond with them and most important of all, LISTEN to them. From the conversations that you have with them, you can make each stage of your launch a raging success. Remember that “there is no such thing as a worthless conversation, provided you know what to listen for.”
We would know in advance what people want and expect from our launch just by talking to them. We intend to keep everyone updated, as everyone likes to be in the know, and this will help us build the buzz around launch. The main reason for us to engage in conversations is to build trust.
Trust is one of the most under-rated things in marketing - if people don’t trust you, they won’t believe you and you’ll have a hard time convincing them. Get them on your side. The basis of any relationship is trust and it is important for you to win it as it is a great defense against naysayers and competitors. Don’t put an end to this relationship after your event has been launched. You want these visitors who have become buyers to become permanent customers so don’t break the thread of this conversation.
Seed launch tactics
If your pre-launch goes bust then you can say goodbye to an amazing launch. It is the pre-launch which determines whether your launch will do good or die - this is because the pre-launch is meant to build hype uo to launch. Its supposed to be like a bridge from now uptil the launch day.
We’re offering a world class e-book about event launch strategies applying the latest and greatest strategies using social media and ubersyndication, as part of our seed launch campaign. Our pre-launch campaign builds the perceived value of this book to be priceless as its content is cutting edge - the very best of the best.
We give the book away to some existing followers initially against video testimonies of what they think about the book after reading it. We encourage them to be completely unbiased and candid. We then contact event associations and industry leaders who have lists of event planners, club owners and marketers offering them a FREE copy. We’re also offering sneak peaks and free copies to our super promoter lists, to give them an edge over everyone else.
Then we invite them to distribute the book to their contacts list, tracking those contacts who download the book. Our system ensures that these promoters are signed onto Events Listed under the person (industry leader) who initially introduced them to the Events Listed account. We then give these industry leaders 50% of all revenue earned through ticket sales commissions throughout the life of their account with Events Listed. This earns the referrer a lifetime, in perpetuity royalty for introducing us to their lists. In some cases certain industry leaders have over 60,000 event planners on their lists - you can do the rest of the math yourself.
In this way we build our own prospects list through giving away our e-book which constitutes great value without a barrier to entry. The quality of content in this ebook earns us brand recognition and some authority to these professionals. The book also outlines the value of using our application for staying ahead of the event marketing curve.
The industry leaders who generated hundreds and thousands of visitors to our book giveaway page earn credence from their lists for sending them to a page that represented great value at no cost. At the same time they discretely earn a recurring commission in the backend when these professionals move through our sales funnel from the book onto a free version of our application and finally onto selling tickets & merchandise off the page.
We charge a small 1.5% fee per ticket sale on Events Listed which constitutes our first revenue since launching our Free Line campaign all those months back. This is how we’ve set up one element from our seed launch campaign. All of these elements indirectly drive focus towards the real deal - our application.
Traffic Through E-mail Marketing & List Buying
Email marketing is one of the pillars of our communication with prospects. We have different email campaigns running in parallel for different sets of lists. We’ve already talked in detail about how we’ve gathered followers through our networking strategies on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. All of these followers have been added to their respective lists and into our email campaign categories. We use aweber.com to manager our email lists and content - its a great tool that simplifies the process of managing multiple lists for different audiences going out at different instances of time.
With so much of our focus being on launch implementation, loading and locking the emails ahead of time has saved us from last minute confusion. Our email marketing campaigns slowly guide the readers through different steps of our sales cycles - thus giving them a chance to directly enter the sales funnel. For example, we may direct them to our survey or a specific blog post - which will lead them to our tours - which would lead them to sign-up as a user/member/promoter (depending on the list category). We currently have six list segments that all have separate email campaigns.
Essentially, you can consider every step of the process like a sales call. Every step has to lead to the other to eventually close the deal.
Lists are the key to your success in online marketing. If you have lists, you have contacts and relations and if you have those, you are bound to have money in the bank. We are a member of toplinked.com, a service that provides us with lists of members with open gates on LinkedIn - i.e. LinkedIn people who are open to networking with anyone. They send these lists off for a low price/month, which is almost nothing compared to the value that you get. These lists are like gold to us - as it helps us add a huge number of people to our contacts in one go (without any restrictions or limits). Once you have them on your contact lists, you can communicate with them directly.
Similarly, if you’re interested you can choose between 60,000 lists to rent at http://www.nextmark.com. Make sure you search through the lists and qualify the list source before renting leads per thousand - since irrelevant contacts will only add junk to your lists. Each list has a different price and you can pay between $80 and $125 per 1000 or 8 cents to 12.5 cents per lead.
While qualifying a list, carefully check the source and exactly where it was derived. Do check if it has been generated through filling out or completing forms. If the people on it got there simply by clicking a link, then it’s not much better than cold calling. Were list recipients required to second opt-in to confirm email addresses or was it just a ‘fill out a field’ list in which case the quality of recipients will be low.
All this data is available to you when choosing a list so use your common sense and choose wisely.
When writing the content, ensure that recipients open the mail. Have a subject line that appeals to them. The main content of the mail should be worth the effort and time spent reading it. Marketing through e-mail is not simply sending mails to people. It needs to be carefully thought out and phased.
a- Your initial mail should be an ice-breaker. Introduce yourself in a way they can relate to. Find a common ground related to the eventual event that you’ll market but do it subtly. Engage them in a conversation by asking questions and their views.
b- You should always followup with another email after 3-4 days.
c- In the later emails, you may want to offer quality stuff for free, e.g. to make them blend in; you can send a PDF containing all the responses you got. In the email, send a link to ‘opt-in for the free offer’.
d- In the next phase, you can send out another interesting email with quotes of well-known people or authority figures regarding your product or service. This will build a sense of association. They need to feel that something big is coming. While doing so, send them links to the landing page again. Basically give them a feel of what to expect from the event.
e- With the next email, send a link to a short demo video that highlights all the interesting aspects of your product/event. This will get them excited, feel exclusive and will invariably help in building hype.
f- Always send an email every few days before the launch. Tell them how thrilled you are about the launch and that you are looking forward to their feedback. After this they shouldn’t want to miss the event/launch. Here you can show them another video clip to build social proof and enthusiasm.
g- Email them on the launch day and keep them updated about availability of tickets etc. Send another email as soon as you launch to notify them that your launch site is live and they can get going.
h- It’s vital to send an email afterwards telling them how cool the launch was and how it exceeded your expectations. Get their views as well and remember to thank them for their participation.
Traffic through RSS Feeds
Back in 2006, it was reported by Rok Hrastnik, owner of MarketingStudies.net that “RSS is currently used or is planned to be used within the next 12 months by 63% of consumer product marketers, 65% media and communications marketers, 37% retail marketers, 37% financial services marketers and 38% equipment and tech marketers.” This was two years ago and the trend has certainly not petered out.
In its simplest form, RSS allows content distributors to syndicate a web feed which allows users to subscribe to it. A web feed is a data format that provides updates on frequently changing web content. A number of web feeds can be made accessible in one place, like Friendfeed’s service. Blog readers and services like Friendfeed are a good examples of the useful implementation of RSS.
We’ve submitted our blogs to various aggregators in our industry - thus making the content available to relevant prospects in an on-demand or opt-in basis. Only those people searching for such content can get their hands on it, thus driving the rigth kind of traffic to the sites. Also, we have accounts and active followings on friendfeed - where we regularly send out links to our posts, twitter messages, bookmarked pages and so on. So essentially, all of the different applications we use are linked to our Friendfeed account and consequently to our blogs. These feeds collectively tell a story around our launch that is being followed by numerous people. We also have specific internal groups on friendfeed for events related links and resources, which will be opened to public after our launch to benefit other people in this industry.
You can follow me on friendfeed here.
Scarcity, exclusivity & our word is our word
Exclusivity is a part of every good campaign, and we’ve thus used it in ours as well. Exclusivity gives us a chance to focus on groups during our launch and gives the audiences (users) a chance to be part of something bigger.
Firstly, our launch drive is built on limited access seats. We’re not bringing people into the platform all at once - we’re running open gate windows for adding interested users onto the app.
Secondly, we’re introducing our app to a limited number of early adopters first - our initial set of users, instead of opening to public.
Thirdly, we will be working with handpicked super promoters throughout our campaign - everyone can not just become a promoter if they don’t meet the requirements.
Fourthly, our upcoming - and much sought after - ebook will be available for free to a selected group of promoters.
All of this exclusivity is important for our application and our launch, alike. More than that, it is important for our users. We want our most valued users to get the attention they deserve right through the launch. It’s human nature that people in general like getting attention and feeling important. Also a part of human psyche is the fact the people fear scarcity. For successful marketing you have to build on these emotional aspects. Another important factor that I should mention here is that if you promise anything through your campaign then be sure to fulfill that promise. People may let you play with their emotions but nobody likes being taken for a ride.
Exclusivity: Tell the people that it’s all about them and do this on an individual basis. I am not saying that you treat all the visitors to your website exclusively; instead go for the early adopters. You can give them special offers like sneak peak to videos or photos. Make sure these are the people who get any info first so they feel special. If you do this the right way and make them feel like part of your team, this select group will do wonders marketing your event for free!
Scarcity: For this to work, you have to get the people excited about an event first. Build the hype slowly and gradually and don’t give away too much info. There are people who will be interested just because there is a shortage of tickets but you are catering to a wider market and for this reason you just don’t want last minute buyers. Get the people hooked from the very start so they know that missing your event would be a huge loss.
Once you have the people interested, you can subtly convey that there are not enough tickets to go around. This way they’ll queue up to get the “golden ticket” so to speak. This creates a sense of urgency and makes people take quick decisions. Another powerful aspect of scarcity is that it can help you increase the price. If you have built the hype in such a manner that people believe that the event is not to be missed at any cost then they’ll even pay more to get the tickets. Remember timing is everything, don’t be too early or too late or it will all boil down to nothing.
Final word of warning: keep your word. Don’t promise people something you can’t pull off.
When we open up our application for the initial set of users, only those people who know someone in the initial set will be able to request access instead of a full-blown public access. Anyone who is interested in trying out the application will have to find users to request access from. You can read our posts here and here to understand our strategies better.
Outsourcing
I’m sure most of you have heard of the four hour work-week. Is it really possible? Thanks to the “leveled playing field” and “following the sun work hours” it may be somewhat realistic. So you like to be in control and keep an eye on each and every tiny wheel that turns and keeps your business running smoothly. Instead of burning the candle at both ends and killing yourself, it is better if you get other people to do the job for you.
Outsourcing is really cool because you can get area experts with special skills and training to do a million things which take up your time and resources. It also gives you an outsider’s view about your business. It can be a bit scary at first as you might feel that you are letting other people in your own territory but remember it is you who holds the reins and these people are just providing you their services.
There are some really good outsourcing platforms out there. You can read my post on an analysis of different outsourcing sites here. I have personally used Elance.com to find most of my team - everyone from designers, writers to SEO experts. I make sure I meet with them over Skype regularly to keep a tap on the work. Having a solid plan for performance measurement and deliverables helps in managing the teams better.
We’ve outsourced much of our SEO and writing related work to different offsite teams. Once you get over your initial hesitation to outsource, it actually ends up becoming much easier to manage your time this way. Also, in this way we have dedicated people working on their areas of expertise. We mostly use Elance.com for finding providers. Outsourcing is a heaven-sent so do make your life easy with it.
An excerpt from one of my previous posts on outsourcing;
Sometimes you come across people who seem like African guides walking you through a game park at night. These are gems that you need to have on your team to become successful. They’re people who have already treaded the path and know it well enough to be able to make good decisions.
In the case of Events Listed I have been the guide. Years ago I had walked the same park without guides and was mauled by lions - so I learned how to tread it through experience. Ever since this experience I dedicated my life to learning everything their was to know about the park, its risks, dangers & pitfalls to ensure I became a guide who could navigate it without depending on others.
The best lessons in life are the most expensive ones and I can assure you that the cliche that failure leads to success if experienced by an optimist is also quite true.
Where should you find engineers? There is a lot of discussion in India pertaining to the value in using Indian Developers for development. I can tell you this for FREE, Indians are great mathematicians who just have a different culture. There outlook is different to western people because their values differ. Social and cultural norms may differ but the corporate world has been flattened out so much that it hardly matters.
Even in the States, if two different people look at the same piece of art they will in all probably see different sides to it. Every perspective varies. Have you ever watched an interaction between two people then discussed it with someone else who saw the same thing you did and to your amazement, what they perceived to have happened was completely different to what you perceived. Theres a cool movie that came out recently that demonstrates this called Vantage Point. Do see it if you get a chance.
Traffic through wikis, forums & groups
In Hawaiian, wiki means “fast” and this is how your marketing flourishes if you use wikis. What makes wikis powerful is their ability to enable multiple people to work on the same plaform from miles away - it promotes values of contribution and sharing. It is the basic foundation of the openware movement that began a few years ago and continues to be so. For those of you who don’t know, wikis support hyperlinks, allow you to create new pages and link several internal pages.
We’re driving traffic into our sales funnel through multiple channels and sources, including (but not limited to) wikis, forums and social groups. The groups are from different social networking platforms like Yahoo, LinkedIn and Facebook. We already have a presence on those groups and have active followings. The idea is to drive that traffic into the sales funnel so that they can individually decide whether or not they want to be part of our launch.
In certain groups, such as LinkedIn, we’ve used their Q&A system to get in touch with industry leaders and other prominent people in the market. We’re running a side campaign of super promoters alongside our launch preps and are going through a heavy drive to identify and sign up prospective promoters into the system. The promoters are people who wish to monetize on their lists and are looking for a means of significantly chunky side income. Through the Q&A we get in touch with prospects and direct them into our sales funnel - which typically involves their participation in our surveys. The surveys are meant to put a realistic picture on the usage of social media apps in the industry which will not only help us identify our markets better, but will also give us an idea on how much detail to get into in our upcoming ebook; these people are, after all, our targeted readers. Valuable insight into the statistics of these surveys will also be beneficial for anyone working in or curious about the industry.
Attracting people from forums follows a similar strategy. The thing about forums is that you can jump into them and start promoting yourself, and you shouldn’t. Its a mutually benefitial platform that thrives on helping others without motives.
To gain online visibility you have to be visible here, there and everywhere. Make your presence felt. You can do this by joining different forums and groups. We can’t stress enough that it is not merely enough to join and then watch the world go by. You have to be out there yourself. To market anything you have to market yourself first. You have to be proactive, take initiative, reach out to people, bond with them and win their trust.
Different forums allow you to leave links to your site - use this to the utmost to generate traffic for yourself. Remember, people are more likely to visit your site if you are an active participant yourself. This way they know you, trust you and are willing to have a look at what have to say. But participate with good quality content and give useful info if anyone asks a question. However, be careful that you are not taken for a spammer or you’ll end up with a closed forum account. Also, choose forums that are populated with a growing number of active memberships.
Customer Feedback
Feedback is one of the essential elements of good communication and we take it very seriously. Feedback is a chance to understand what the customers want, what they like or dislike, what their expectations are. Once you interact, relate, bond, build trust; then only can you market and promote. We always encourage feedback at every step of the way throughout our prelaunch and launch campaign. We have dedicated people parsing through the feedback to get valuable insight and information out of it. If needed, we alter our tactical level plans to be best in line with the customer’s feedback and expectations.
This communication doesn’t stop at the initial stage. You have to be WITH the people at each and every stage and be able to gauge their thoughts about what you are doing. You can and you must use your visitors feedback to make your campaign perfect.
At Events Listed, we believe that getting to know the mindset of your visitors and getting their feedback can turn them into buyers and eventually regular customers. The easiest way of getting feedback is that you simple ask them. NEVER assume that you know what they want or what they are thinking. And don’t just ask but act accordingly.
You can ask them through online questionnaires and surveys. The questions should be simple, succinct and to the point. If you have a questionnaire, ask a few key questions and keep them interesting so people feel like answering them. Convey to the people that giving feedback is in their best interest as it will mean better quality for them. Remember that you can strengthen your relations through feedback. You can collect the feedback via email, feedback buttons on your website, polls, blogs or through a ratings list.
Don’t be nervous about negative feedback. Huge Prather, the American best-selling author and lecturer knew what he was talking about when he said that negative feedback is better that none. I would rather have a man hate me than overlook me. Work on this premise and fix the drawbacks in your marketing campaign quickly before things get out of hands.
You may be marketing one of a kind event but if you don’t know how people will react to it then you are wasting your time and resources. Reach out to people as feedback is the key to improvement.
A case in point. We’ve built surveys using surveymonkey.com to gather information about people’s usage and perspective of social media. This information will lead to very interesting stats on using social media in the events marketing space and will be compiled and added to our upcoming ebook. If you’re interested you can fill out the survey here:
* Event specific: http://www.eventslisted.com/survey/social-traffic-marketing/1.php
* General: http://www.eventslisted.com/survey/social-traffic-business/1.php
Traffic through the media
Most of our traffic is coming in from social media sites. I dare say, we’ve learned how to master the ride of directing useful prospects using online tools without having to spend money on risky advertisements. We have videos up on youtube, we have blog posts going out in three different blogs. We have active participation based interactions on social networks like facebook, linkedin, twitter and more.
The thing that I want to stress is that all of this traffic is useless if it isn’t channelized properly. Its better to not have traffic at all rather than wasting the opportunity to covert curious onlookers into customers. Our sales funnel goes through multiple paths (tubes, if you like) all leading to our platform. During the journey through the paths, the prospects are introduced to a multitude of things (depending on the path type); such as surveys, blogs, email campaigns. We’ve put a considerable amount of time to make sure that our funnels are without leaks and are optimized as much as possible - we don’t intend to waste anyones time, just the way we wouldn’t want our time to be wasted.
If there is one thing I strongly believe in, its mutual benefit. Finding and offering value to all stakeholders - whether they are vendors, prospects, promoters, customers, staff, anyone. Shared value benefits all involved and is the key to any businesses success. Value can be montery or non-monetary; regardless, it is the only ingredient that can make relationships grow healthily. Having said that, we’ve focused our entire campaign on providing value to everyone involved.
MySpace
FaceBook 
BeBo
Linked In
Pownce
Twitter
Friendfeed
Tumblr
Second Brain 
Wink
Live Journal
Simpy
Get Boo
Net Vouz
Yahoo
HelloTxt
YouTube
del.icio.us
Digg
Stumble Upon
Technorati
Furl
Reddit