We Spent $27,000+ and 456+ Man Hours Creating A Done For You Marketing Campaign For Steemit...And We Want You To Help Make It Even Better!
You read that right. About 2 weeks ago I was watching some of the old BitShares.tv videos we made to educate people, and I ran across this one from @dan & Max about referrals that jarred me into thinking...
...Steemit has no marketing campaign for it, and there were a lot of requests for a referral system to invite people to Steemit, and discussion about marketing initiatives. I noticed them all over the place over the last 6 weeks.
So...we decided to build one for everyone to use, and give you a license to sell the product, and keep 100% of the front end sale. That's right. you get all of it, and it is paid instantly.
It is a completely done for you self-funding marketing funnel, complete with professional emails, banners, pages, referral system and more.
Instead of worrying about 500+ different marketing attempts, we thought it would be really cool to collaborate with the community on content and direction to really make this thing great.
We want you to come help us make it even better!
This Self Funding Marketing Initiative Launches Tomorrow @ 12pm EST.
Where Did This Original Idea Come From?
When I was consulting on a near daily basis on the BTS project, @dan , @stan , @michaelx , Max and a few others came to the conclusion that we should create a done for you marketing campaign and product funnel for BitShares to spur adoption and education about the BETA platform.
This funnel would have case studies to build subscribers, a product, a faucet to register new users, banners, a full marketing funnel with offers, graphics, an educational product to show them how to use it, and a referral system for members and people to refer people to it.
That is the reason the Bitshares referral system was even created in the first place. For the marketing campaign we were going to run. It was going to be self funding...so we figured out how it would all work.
Unfortunately too many things and internal changes at Bitshares caused us to place these campaigns on the backburner.
Until Now.
The Details Of How The Marketing Campaign Works
It's simple. You refer someone, they buy the product, you get 100% of the sale. It is very similar to what we planned with the BitShares funnel and marketing initiative in the rewards system, the deliverables and how it all was going to work.
We want to reward you for the time you spend getting the message out there, pay your ad costs through this commission, and hopefully help you put a couple bucks in your pocket referring new Steemit users.
The payments are instant for all affiliates & referrers (unless you have no sales history, then we make you show some non fraud sales before they go instant - no worries we will still pay you promptly).
You get paid to a Paypal account directly. If the product is refunded, the money is clawed back via PayPal (they do it not us) and deposited back in the buyers account. This protects us, you and them and makes sure everyone is taken care of without accounting headaches.
All other products involved you get 50% commission for.
Obviously I need to make some money to cover my costs, and hopefully make some extra by grace of having the initiative to do this, and the resources to gamble with the success of this.
What are we offering?
Free Community Tools
We are in the midst of creating a Windows Wallet that is standalone and will be offered for free as a way to assist in easy adoption of mainstream. Cli_wallet is not user friendly for anything. We want to change that.
Once we are finished we will put together pages for this, and squeeze page campaigns to push user adoption.
Squeeze Page
We send people here from banner ads, email ads, social media shares, and other places. This gets them to give an email address in return for something free. In this case it is a PDF interview transcription of Mark interviewing @xeroc about Steemit, some of the behind the scenes stuff, and a few other things.
It is meant to get them interested in Steemit.
We plan on doing several of these pages, and would love for those that would like to contribute to come do an interview to add to these pages.
It will increase your overall exposure, add you as a known valuable member of the community, and likely get you more exposure to your blogs and posts.
Win - Win for them and you.
Sales Page $7 increasing @ .02 every sale until it hits $9.00
Sales of a basic product that explains steemit, walks through creating accounts, passwords, best practices, etc.
We do a dimesale style on the front end offer to see if conversion rates flag at a certain price point or maintain conversion rates throughout. With this data we can adjust pricing for max conversions.
Upgrade 1 Page - $17 one time
Advanced mentoring and live seminar training from Michael, advanced training modules, tools, best practices, live mentoring channel. We also discuss mining, and other topics.
Upgrade 2 Page - $37 increasing @ 0.02 every sale until it hits $47.00
Software for following certain voters the users designates. Uses can be for friends that create voting groups, or to support your favorite authors, topics, etc.
Upgrade 3 Page - $37 increasing @ .02 every sale until it hits $47.00
Software for commenting.
We are taking constructive feedback on features and variables that will limit spamming while still allowing for use. I know that this one in particular will be a hot topic, however, I look forward to figuring out a solution that works or another option that works with the community and devs as a whole.
Resources Used #lotsofmyownmoneywithoutguaranteeofreturn
A few hundred hours of my time, Marks time and our staffs time. We have no guarantee of return on any money we have invested in this project. We have taken a massive risk to assist this community with it's marketing efforts. We have no way of knowing if we will be out the money or now, but we are willing to take the risk to do this because we have the resources to put together this campaign
Affiliate Recruiting
We have already recruited a few hundred affiliates that are already signed up to promote this offer. They will be promoting hard to get people here. That means eyeballs on Steemit whether they buy or not.
Copywriter $7,000
My copywriter writes copy for Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazier, among many other world famous marketers. His copy always converts at a high rate. I spent $7,000 USD for front end sales copy, and OTO (one time offer) sales copy, and email copy.
It should have cost me much more, but we are friends from way back. I also have extensive copy experience, and wrote some of the emails and pages.
You do not have to love the style of writing, or how it is presented.
Why? Because I have millions of dollars of data and my friends have pushed billions in sales in the last 5 years online.
The data shows these pages and this type of copy works.
I don't particularly like those type of copy either. But I am not selling myself on this...
That said, I am always willing to split test copy, if you write copy I am willing to see how it performs. I never am married to my marketing message..I am married to making the message work regardless of my opinion.
Data Talks.
C#, C++, C - Json, Python, Whiz Programmer - $5000 and ongoing
Try finding someone that has years of experience with all of this AND blockchain...and then look at how much you will pay. It's a lot. And will continue to be a lot.
Retargeting Campaign $2,000 and ongoing
We are targeting 1.5 million bloggers via a audience retargeting system using Google tags. This allows us to actually drop a targeting cookie on people when they perform any Google search, like "make money blogging", before they even land on a page.
This also applies if they land on our site, as in the graphic above.
I have already paid for an extensive ad budget, and created banners to be used for it. Anyone that uses a referral link will benefit from this campaign, and receive credit for the sale if they referred.
We will expand this out to other targets as we go. I have already paid a consultant to run the campaign, he does this for Toyota and other big companies.
Autoresponders $497 month
We created an autoresponder campaign to automate the delivery of the free case study PDF from the squeeze page, as well as continue to educate them about Steemit and other services that may be available.
You benefit from this because you have a few ways to get the sale if they come from your referral, and we continue to build a relationship of training and Steemit culture with them.
Multiple little things like,Multiple Domains SSL, Cloudflare, etc
This stuff adds up. And it keeps adding up. Enough said here.
Some Thoughts From Michael
I already know some of you are going to say:
--> I don't like the software options OR I disagree with any software sales.
Well, firstly - too late. There are a bazillion bots around here, and it will never go away. Ever. Sure, they will eliminate all of the shit bots, the half-assed bots, and easy bots to deal with. But some bots DO have uses, and can actually contribute without spamming. But either way we will have people making these things forever, our choice is to give a responsible option or to let them do it and run amok.
I prefer option 1. There are a few other respected members I have asked about this and they agree with this line of thought.
Either way, here is my take on it. The blockchain is open, and people are going to dev on it. We cannot stop it. We can only regulate the usage. I would prefer to regulate the usage of the people that are going to go looking for this stuff anyways. I know I will do what I can to make sure they are using things appropriately.
I would also extend to all devs and bot creators to put your input into the functions allowed and how best to allow these to interact on the network. That would give us the most leverage and power to deal with them
All software had push updates enabled, so if we decide we need to plug a hole or change something being abused, we can and will. Hopefully you can see my point on this, if not I am all ears on a different option.
I am also willing to discuss a DIFFERENT OPTION to add to that part of the funnel. I realize that there may be a better option out there, and am open to discuss anything.
--> You can find lots of good data for free online about Steemit, so why should people pay for this?
I can also find lots of data about playing piano, folding origami, etc. But I will still go buy books and pay for classes. This is not a new concept. Textbooks, training courses for software coding, marketing, etc. Check out Udemy.com sometime if you are confused about the concept.
--> How will this help the community?
It gets more people exposure to Steemit by:
A marketing campaign. Even if they do not buy or even go to the product page, they still saw a banner about Steemit. They still heard or saw something, even subconsciously.
They maybe buy the product. Congrats, you got paid a referral fee and they got a really good crash course on how to get started. On top of that, you were able to just tell people to get this training, rather than have to sit down, explain things to them, send them 100+ links to read and figure out, answer more questions later, etc.
Now we have lots of people trained on best practices and posting etiquette. How nice is that?
How Can You Help?
Case studies, screenshots, pictures, interviews in audio, video interviews, really well written posts from past or present or even something you write JUST FOR THIS PROJECT. Copywriting skills, graphics, affiliate referrals, anything really to push this along.
You can also sign up to be a affiliate referrer, and get paid 100% referral. This is a self funding marketing initiative
Contribute a post, create a post, contribute art, or whatever you can. We would like for this to be a community product that we all have a hand in.
We could also really use your upvote here. It would be great to recoup ALL COSTS BEFORE WE LAUNCH. That would allow us more wiggle room to make the conversion rates higher by giving this more attention.
Please Leave Constructive Feedback
Constructive feedback and even constructive criticism is welcome.
We want this initiative to succeed in bringing large numbers of new users to Steemit, AND educate them on how to use it in a very clear and easy way. If you have a problem with anything I have posted or said, let's figure out how we can address it and make this the best we can for all of us. Sometimes we just communicate differently, and I would rather work with people to shape this into something wonderful
This is a great way to get exposure with or without sale, and I bet you will see the site analytics start lighting up at a higher rate over the next 7-10 days, with a steady increase coming from this thereafter.
You can be a part of shaping the product for all the future Steemers out there. We encourage all of you to assist in whatever way YOU can. If you do, we will have an even more amazing product that is "crowdstrapped". I may just invented that word...
We want Steemit to be successful, and grow, and the key is community working together, educating people, and making it fun.
Want to be a part of this?
Message me on Rocketchat or Slack and I will coordinate your assistance.