Aiming for better engagement, thoughts?
 

Hey everyone. I wanted to run something by you because there is something that I am rather frustrated by. I market in a relatively competitive niche, I know that I have competitors who are trying everything possible to ‘get attention’ – sometimes that means throwing buzzwords around to get people interested. The problem is that it appears to be having an opposite effect, people are becoming jaded after being inundated by these messages and are tuning out all those related message (including my own it seems)

I felt that perhaps instead of trying to mass-target everyone, I could try a different approach. What I am thinking about utilizing is called ‘solo ads’, which as far as I can tell means that someone promotes your product on their mailing list. The difference is supposed to be that these people are far more engaged, actively having discussions with their audience, and thus have markets that are less likely to tune you out.

One of the examples I stumbled across was Heather's Solos where a woman named Heather Alessandra is going to target her followers for you. I am considering testing it out because while it looks ‘just another beautiful woman’ promoting a product at first, both her Facebook and Flicker appear to have some real engagement.

I know that some people are going to say that good content is more important than getting your name out there – but I already have the content. I have a good website and I have some interesting information available on it, I just need people to experience it for themselves. So my question is, do any of you have any thoughts on this? Do you think that it may be worth thinking outside of the box (e.g. AdSense and Facebook Ads?).

Thank you again for any feedback that you might have.

Re: Aiming for better engagement, thoughts?
 

Hi Juan,

I'm not sure if this will help you, but I find the following approach works with emails...

I like to give good information, then "segue" into a related promotion. For example, let's say I was promoting a cookbook. I would first give good, useful, interesting information for free - in this case, maybe some useful recipes or cooking tips. Then, I'd segue into a promotion, where I'd "tease" them on why it would be great to check out the item I'm promoting, which would give them more recipes, or even more powerful cooking tips...

Give for free - then everyone wins (even those who don't buy your product). And... a certain percentage will want more, and some of those will buy your product...

What I like about this approach is - it works, I feel good about giving people value, and people like to read it, so they keep reading new emails I send, too...

(I haven't promoted cookbooks by the way - that was just an example of how the technique could be applied...)

This works well for information-type products, anyhow...

Best wishes,

Dien