How do you get more traffic?
Easy. Bribe people to tell their friends about you. 🙂
Think about it…
A few years back I started using Dropbox. Shortly after I signed up, they told me that if I would refer a few friends to use their service, then they would give me more storage.
Referring people is easy. So I did. And as a result they upgraded me from 2GB of storage to 10GB.
This is a smart bribe and it’s extremely effective.
How can you use this?
Check out what Noah Kagan and the team over at SumoMe are doing.
Step 1: Offer something for free.
SumoMe wants more people to use their product.
The perfect SumoMe prospect wants more traffic to their website.
So SumoMe put together a free course that will teach you how to get more traffic.
All you need to do is enter your email to get the course.
Step 2: Once they get the free thing, bribe them to tell their friends.
Watch closely and you’ll see the bribe.
Immediately after getting you to sign up, they bribe you to get your friends to sign up.
Who doesn’t want more cool free stuff?
And all I have to do to get it is send a tweet? I’m in!
Step 3: Lots of people you don’t know sign up for your product.
As a result, over 9,900 people shared the free course with their friends.
With the average social media account having around 200 followers, SumoMe was exposed to roughly 1.9 million new potential customers.
And (according to Nat Eliason who worked for SumoMe at the time) they added over 2,000 subscribers to the course.
All by using a smart bribe.
How can you do the same thing?
Three basic steps:
Step #1: Identify the most popular sign-up form on your website?
For me it is my homepage.
Tip: If you are just starting out, your homepage will be your most popular too.
Step #2: Create a small bonus that incentivizes people to share the page once they opt-in.
Here are a few things you could offer to incentivize people to share:
Thing #1: Curated content from your site (past blog posts, collection of eBooks)
Thing #2: Access to a private community (Slack channel or Facebook group)
Thing #3: Invitation to a group Q&A session
Thing #4: Anything you would normally use as a content upgrade
Step #3: Use SmartBribe to get your new subscribers to tell their friends about you.
We created SmartBribe to make setting this up super simple.
Just go to Smartbribe.com, setup your account.
I’m thinking about creating a tool to make setting up these bribes quick and painless (they would look and operate just like the example above).
If you want me to do that, let me know by doing two things:
First, comment below and tell me what your website is (link it up) and what form on your site you want to use a bribe on.
Second, share this article with your friends.
If we can get 100 comments and 200 shares, I’ll create the plugin and give you a free copy.
You in?
Update: The app has been created and it’s called SmartBribe.