USING LINKEDIN EFFECTIVELY: Log into your Linkedin account, and search for the keyword which is most related to your project. In this case we will use “video games”. Join the largest groups you can find, you can join a total of 50 groups so don’t be shy, but if the membership is low, it would be best to search a 2nd keyword and join a larger group, let’s look at the illustration below.
That’s a lot of groups, over 400 and each has thousands of members. Click “join group” and you’ll see most groups are happy to have you. Don’t worry, we won’t be spamming, we’re going to enlist the group admin in our project and we’re going to do it totally white hat. In the illustration below, we can see our e-mail inbox. That’s right; Linkedin is nothing more than a targeted mailing list. No need to pay big money for what you can get for free. Mailing lists are expensive, but using Linkedin your mailing list is bigger, better, and totally free. But linkedin is a “slow” social network, you need to do this before you launch. Additionally, you need to enlist the support of the group’s admin; what you’re looking for is a “sticky” post. If your project is digital you can offer a free download of your project contingent upon it funding. You can also offer credits, a link back to their group or any number of things even if the end product is not downloadable.
FACEBOOK METHODS:
In the above illustration we’ve moved onto Facebook, and we’re going to do the same thing. Join groups. Just look at that audience, over 6 million. Can we get our project backed with an audience like that? You bet!
Once you’ve joined the Facebook groups and commented, the other group members will see a Facebook notification just like in the illustration above (depending on user settings). These notifications are INSTANT traffic makers. Your notification typically has about 8 words; so make them your best!
FACEBOOK AD’S – CHEAP & EFFECTIVE
Facebook ad’s are not expensive, but extremely difficult to learn. You will need to create and re-create your ad over and over again. If you are paying more than 10 cents per click, you need to do it again. The ad should be directed for “fanpage likes”. You can fund an entire project off of a fanpage, and you need to be able to get in contact with your previous backers for future projects in ”one click”; for this reason, fanpages are crucial. Below we can see people who may be interested in our project.
These are big pages with a huge audience for us to target. Each and every user has what’s called a “Facebook e-mail ID”. This allows us to promote directly to that audience for well under $2.00 per day. Gathering these user e-mail ID’s requires 3rd party software, we’re not going to get into these types of programs, but you can get user ID’s of the groups/pages of your choice using any one of the service providers at http://fiverr.com for as little as $5.00 Once you’ve found a good group of user ID’s for your ad’s simply upload the .txt file to you Facebook Ad’s Manager, the .txt file should have one set of numbers per line as illustrated below.
You’re now ready to upload your custom audience. Your audience is going to look a little different than the audience above. Your audience will be Facebook e-mails. You’ll find the option to upload your emails right in your dashboard under “Manage Ad’s” as illustrated below:
Upload your .TXT file. That’s it, your project will get a ton of highly targeted traffic for $2.00 per day.
GETTING TARGETED TRAFFIC WITH GOOGLE FOOTPRINTS: Here’s how you can bring laser targeted traffic to your project right now for free. These are called “footprints” and they work for anything, not just Facebook. Let’s say were launching a zombie related project on Kickstarter and we need to get some traffic right now. The two groups below are pretty big, we’ll start with those. 1) https://www.facebook.com/TheWalkingDeadAMC - audience 30 million 2) https://www.facebook.com/TheZombieSurvivalGuide - audience 1 million Now we need to convert these popular pages into footprints and add our keyword, just like this: 1) site:facebook.com inurl:thewalkingdeadamc/posts/ 2) site:facebook.com inurl:thezombiesurvivalguide/posts/ Simply paste your footprint into Google as illustrated below and check out the results:
Those two footprints were very basic and could be done just as easily by going to Facebook and commenting. But let’s take a look and some more complex footprints so we can see their true power. inurl:zombie onpage”powered by disqus” inurl:walkingdead “facebook social plugin” There are no limits to the amount of footprints we can create, what’s important is that we command Google to only return results that allow us to post our project and that other commenters will be notified about your project. You can also command Google to only return results that have several thousand commenters by adding “+1000” to the footprint, or however many you like. As a note, if you are not familiar with “disqus” – it is a huge mover of traffic. Crowdmonsters recently launched a crowdfunder on Indiegogo to raise money for a charitable cause. When checking the analytics we found 50% of our donations came from Disqus. We’re working on a complete list of footprints customized for crowdfunding at: http://crowdmonsters.com
GOOLE PLUS: Google plus is different than other social platforms. In general you conversate with people you don’t know as opposed to Facebook. Because YouTube and Google+ are now integrated, you can take advantage of big pre-existing traffic about your project niche and drive traffic pretty quickly.
For our Google+ marketing it’s best to use a free 3rd party application like Hootsuite. What’s great about Hootsuite is that you teach it to listen for your keywords on Google, Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms and when you log in you can see all the conversations in real time just like a stock ticker.
1) Visit http://hootsuite.com and create an account, you can do this one click by the “connect with Facebook” button. 2) Click the “add stream” in the upper left corner. Select Google+ and enter your keyword . 3) Add as many streams based on your crowdfunding project. The stream “video games” is good, but a stream like “RPG’s” is more specific.
The free Hootsuite account allows us to add up to ten streams; additionally we’re not limited to Google+ within this single dashboard we can do all our marketing for: Facebook Google+ LinkedIn Wordpress Foursquare (For Local Kickstarters) Mixi Twitter
Amazing isn’t it, 1900 comments with over 6 million readers and just under 5000 users at any given time. Your IAMA does not need to be your career, your state of being or anything other than what you want it to be. But if your imagination fails you simply use this: “ I am an entrepreneur building my XYZ business” – that’s it. You should have no problem thinking of something better, but for now that works just fine. Creating your IAMA is as simple as creating a Reddit account and submitting your information here:
It’s very important to remember to schedule your IAMA at least a week in advance, sometimes the Reddit moderators will ask for some form of “proof” that you are who you say you are, or doing what you say you are doing. But don’t overlook this instant source of free traffic and PR and don’t forget to promote your crowdfund throughout the session. You can continue your session as long as you like, but one hour should be plenty.
COMBINING METHODS: Google Hangouts are rapidly becoming the new social phenomena. If you haven’t been using Hangouts don’t worry, you will be soon enough. All you need is a webcam and a decent microphone and you’ll be just fine. A Hangout is very similar to a Reddit IAMA, the main difference is that the session is via video. You can use your Hootsuite account to promote your Google Hangout well in advance of its actual date. To set up your Hangout simply follow this link: https://plus.google.com/hangouts and you’ll be live in just a few minutes. If you don’t have anyone to invite to your Hangout and are worried that you’ll be the only one “hanging out”, well, worry not, here is a simple and cost effective way to make sure your Hangout is a hit. USING FACEBOOK EVENTS TO PROMOTE YOUR HANGOUTS AND IAMA’s Facebook advertising is dirt cheap. For a dollar a day you can reach thousands of people within a week. You can promote your fan page, your website or your virtual event. Additionally Facebook ads can be targeted to users based on “interest” in a way that no other form of advertising can compete with. Even better, when promoting as an event users will often receive an invitation right in their Facebook notification box as opposed to a general ad on the timeline. So go crazy, you can do a lot on Facebook for as little as $10 dollars!
To create your event simply click the down arrow next to the lock icon on your Facebook dashboard, and next click “Create Ad’s”. In the sidebar you’ll click “Event Responses” and it will prompt you to create an event. Be sure to link to give yourself at least a week for your promo to run and that will give you time to revise your sales copy and event images and your preferred audience. You can start with as little as a dollar per day and once you feel you have your event set ‘just right’ you can increase it to whatever level you feel comfortable with. This will give your Hangouts, IAMA’s, and virtually anything you’re promoting a ton of laser targeted traffic at minimal cost.
GET ALERTS ABOUT YOUR PROJECT NICHE FROM GOOGLE: Don’t create Traffic, Get in Traffic’s Way. Creating traffic is difficult, but taking advantage of existing traffic is fast, easy, free and effective.Simply visit http://google.com/alerts/ and enter the keywords of your choice.
Above we can see that Google has found the top articles and news for our keyword. Google will send these to us daily and do all the work for us, all we have to do it post. Thanks so much for reading our traffic guide, follow us on for more crowdfunding goodies, we’ve got some free tools under construction that we’re giving away shortly as well: https://www.facebook.com/pimpmykickstarter/ and http://crowdmonsters.com