I bet you’ve read/seen/heard this before,
but one of the best ways to build authority is to provide value.
As people are getting to know you, it’s good to provide valuable content, for free, that they can use to help them with something they want to do.
Sure, there are a lot of freebie seekers out there, who are only interested in freebies.
This is why you don’t drop a bombshell of golden nuggets,
but there’s nothing wrong with providing them a little gold dust.
Like how I have a list of cool stuff on my Cool Stuff Page. All free tools.
As a thank you for reading my blog.
As well as the tips, tricks, info I have in most of these posts. For free.
It’s to help people out, and they’re getting to know me.
What I’ve seen, that works well on social media, is offering a free course.
You could even set this up totally for free.
You can make some quick 5 minute videos on your computer with free software,
a screen capture software like Loom or Screencast-o-matic.
Then, what you do is create a FREE mini training site on google sites.
You put your videos on YouTube, to host them there.
If you don’t want your videos to be found by anyone on YouTube,
you can change it from public to unlisted.
That way, only the people who have access to your site can see your videos.
With Screencast-o-matic, you can upload your videos straight to YouTube after you are done recording.
Then, what you do is post on social media, (this works well with Facebook.)
“I’ve got a free training course about (whatever) and I’m only going to share it with the next (number of) people who like and comment on this post.”
AND you can say that
“the next (number of) people who SHARE this post get an extra bonus.”
If they did share and were above the number you specified, give them a bonus anyway.
This kind of stuff does help you get engagement on social media.
Because:
1) People are curious about this free course you are offering,
2) They will clamour at getting to be one of the lucky people to get it.
3) If they miss out, they’ll want to make sure they don’t miss out next time.
You can even reach out to people via messenger to ask them if they would like access to your special video training instead of posting it. Tell them that it’s only available to a limited audience.
However, not everyone responds to their messages. So when they see others replying to a post, they’ll be more likely to reply also.
Facebook loves engagement and rewards you by allowing more people to see your post.
That’s how the crazy algorithm works.
Another thing you might want to do is use a url shortener.
There are ones that pay you for clicks. Like Adfly. It’s not a lot, but it adds up.
Adfly is free to join.
Which is useful. Especially if people start sharing your link with their friends.
You can even say this:
“Once you get my link, you can share it with 10 of your friends,
and each of your friends can share it with 10 of their friends.”
See how many clicks the link gets. Which you can do in Adfly.
This way, it could be a good thing if your free mini course goes viral.
What do you make your mini course about? Anything you want.
One of my friends did this recently and his videos were about how to use free tools.
Like the free tools on my Cool Stuff Page.
You could make videos about how to get them and how to use them.
(If you want to mention that you found out about them on my blog, please feel free).
Plus, these free courses are a great way to help you promote paid courses.
I don’t think you can protect your content on google sites to make a mini membership site, but what you can do is protect content on your wordpress blog.
If you have a blog on wordpress, you don’t necessarily have to make a google site.
You can post the videos on your blog, and protect the content with a password.
You can still use Adfly, with any link. Even with links that aren’t yours.
The more links you have set up on Adfly, the more money adds up.
Like I said, they don’t pay a huge amount, but it adds up over time.
My friend told me it is okay to share his link:
Adam’s free course about google tools.
Affiliate Marketing Frenzy 