NEW! The Offer Mindmap

The one thing that you can do to get more followers is to tweet often, the one thing you can do to get more people to join your mailing list is to make it enticing for followers to sign up.

In preparation for the members webinar for November 2009 I created a mind map of offers, I realise that I left off the key offer of a newsletter from the mind map, but still managed to detail over 21 offer variations without that key proposition.

You can download the entire mindmap as a pdf by clicking here.

Let me know of any more ommissions (!) I will update it and let you know.

Further to this post and ‘that’ mind map, I have been reminded to expand on my thoughts on using a newsletter as a promotional offer. Clearly newsletters are a popular proposition. However, I have to disclose that they are not the best offer you can make, great in the early days of the internet, but now so many people offer newsletters that the likelihood of sign up is much reduced. The novelty factor has gone. Visitors see them as a trap and they have to consider whether they want to regularly stay in contact, with all it can bring.

There are other issues, as the author you have to write all the stories, this can take time, then you will have to publish them all together, so some stories will not necessarily be of the moment. Heat maps – tests – show that mainly only the key story gets read! So for most people all that work, effort, design, time and cost is wasted.

The solution, that in my experience overcomes these difficulties is simply to produce a one story newsletter. Publish each as you write it, convert each to a page of content (my favourite – repurpose the content), and promote each individual story.

Publishing each story individually gives you the benefits of a fast read, a short email, zero or little design, and the ability to constantly stay in touch.

Of course, you can also promote each news story on Twitter and if you publish via a wordpress blog, as this is then each new story will appear on your RSS feed. Thus publishing and promotion happens the moment you publish. Even better!

This understanding I know has already helped a good number of people take sighs of relief.

Now there is one more thing you can do, and this is something I have done and will be doing more of – is using the story as the basis of a video. Videos are currently still novel and they can help get the story across so much easier.