Here's a tool to help you get funding for a project you want to get off the ground. It's called "crowd funding". Here's a video with an interview with Tom Antion, one of the internet marketing gurus. Below the video are some of my notes. Here's an article I found at another website that helps people who are producing games and it compares the fees and funding model of the top crowd funding websites. One of the things I teach is that you can also use this as a source of marketing. This works very well for books and other tangible things. Recommended: Just do one project at a time.
There are many options of where you can set up your project to get people to donate to your project or become a backer. Kickstarter.com is the biggest. It is tied to Amazon (which will take 3% of the funds for processing the payments) and 5% of the funds will go to to Kickstarter. The way it works on Kickstarter is that if you don’t get complete funding, you don’t get any of the funds. So, set a reasonable amount as your goal because you can be overfunded. Have a contingency plan: have a friend standing by who can pay off the last bit and you can pay them back. Indiegogo.com is another well known site. Fundageek.com is for technical projects Rewards: Go onto the website to see what other people are offering as rewards. It should be something that is related to the project (e.g. for a book it could be an acknowledgement in the book, for a film it could be a credit). Look and see what everyone else is doing. You'll want 5-6 reward levels. Rewards can be shout outs on blogs, ebook, something that won’t cost a lot. How do you get exposure to the project? First of all, make a list of everybody you know. Compose letters or a voice mail. Make a video telling people what you’re doing. Write the text of what you’re doing. These last two are required to be accepted on the site anyway. You can’t expect your friends to drop everything they are doing, you’ll have to work it! After you are accepted, but before you make your page go live: get 5-10 of your friends/supporters to commit to jump in right away so it looks like there’s great activity. The pattern for these things is that there is a spike at the beginning (you need to work to get that really going!) and then it will lag, and spike again at the end. In the middle when it lags, add some more rewards (!!) and let the people who have already committed know with a communication through the site and some people will up their participation and commit to more to get the extra reward. The projects can go 30-60-90 days and 30 days is most recommended so that it doesn't lose momentum. Recommended: Thank backers right away! Send a note or even call personally. You can also tweet or Facebook about backers (if they are not backing anonymously) to publicly acknowledge people who are backing you. Now, take action, and get to it!
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Here's an example of a real pro marketer and what he's got going on at Kickstarter. Go ahead and model after him if it works for you (not copy, model). You can "swipe" some of his copy style and ideas but of course you need to make it your own.
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Who is Laya?Laya is an author, speaker, and solopreneur. She has thousands of hours of study and experience in both applied and positive psychology. Learning that it's not enough to write a book, you actually have to market in order for the book to get into the hands of a reader to make a difference, she studied online marketing as well as writing copy and branding. She knows the power of a mastermind group and wanted to bring this to her home community. With her son in the IDF and her daughter married, she lives with her husband, dog, and hens with an occasional sighting of the turtle. Archives
April 2017
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