Incentivizing Offers
By David Turnbull
This is only for those interested in incentivizing select offers and not basing a site around the incentive model.
Remember…..
Not all offers are allowed to be incentivized, don’t risk having your account banned – check if you can incentivize an offer (there is a special category for incentive-allowed offers) before you start incentivizing.
Why Incentivize?
Incentivizing generally allows you to get more conversions, but due to this incentivized offers usually:
a) are harder to complete OR
b) cost the user a small fee OR
c) do not pay much
Incentivizing for Support
If your site has a nice following with dedicated members you may consider incentivizing for support. Basically you tell your visitors “Please complete this offer so I can keep the site running”. If your visitors truly are dedicated that’ll be more than happy to spend a few minutes of their time to help keep the site running.
Incentivizing for Services
People are usually cautious when parting with money for services (such as design, coding, writing etc) so why not give your services out for free? Instead of getting customers to pay you, give them an offer URL with a sub-id (of their name) in it. Simply they complete the offer and they get a certain job done. For the harder jobs you may consider asking them to get 2-3 friends to also complete the offer so you’re getting a fair commission.
The term services could be translated into many things. You may offer free hosting if people can guarantee they’ll get 3-4 offers completed each month – the possibilities are endless and beneficial for all parties (you, the person completing the offer, the advertiser, and Azoogle).
Benefits to Incentivizing for Services
· Free. It is only costing the advertiser money, but they still get registrants so no worries there, they get what they’re paying for.
· Build your Portfolio. It’s a good way to build up your portfolio. Getting customers without much to show is hard, and giving your skills away from free is also usually hard (not too mention time consuming). Seeing as it costs the customer $0 they get peace of mind that even if you do a crappy job at least they aren’t spending any money, and you can go to sleep at night not worrying about making money.
· Azoogle Rewards. If you’re making enough money from doing this don’t forget that you could possibly claim a reward each month – definitely a nice bonus every once in a while.
Incentivizing for Competitions
Launching sites with a competition usually adds some buzz, especially if the prize is of good value, the thing is new site owners rarely have enough money to supply a decent prize, and lack the magic of sponsors. So to supply a decent prize, and get more entrants do this.
1. Select a good offer that pays at least $1 per registrant (or whatever)
2. Add a page to your site for your competition
3. Have users enter their e-mail, and then be redirected to a new page
4. This page should contain a link to an incentivized-allowed offer, and use the e-mail they just entered as the sub-id. Not only do you get paid for the lead once they complete it, you also now have an e-mail which you can use at a later date to tell them about site updates etc.
If you can drive enough traffic to this competition you should be able raise enough money to purchase the prize, or at least save a ton of money.
Tutorial : Incentivizing for Competitions - Programming
This a tutorial in relation to the above section, Incentivizing for Competitions. Here I will go through on how to create a simple system that will:
a) Insert a Users e-mail address into a Database
b) Dynamically create a sub-id for this specific user
This is perfect for those people looking to incentivize offers in competitions as you will be able to easily keep track of the entrants and check if they’ve actually completed the offer (this is very similar to how a full scale incentive site works, without the bells and whistles). All the source files are located at
http://www.drawingtips.net/competition.zip
What you will need:
· PHP installed on your Server
· 1 MySQL Database
1. Edit the details in settings.php
2. Add the offer URL you plan to use in settings.php
3. In your MySQL database run the script data.sql
4. Simply browse to competition.php now and it should be all working.
There are multiple comments throughout the scripts, any text next to a hash (#) or double forward slash (//) is a comment, these are designed to guide you through the script.
Once the script is set up, direct users to competition.php and have users fill in the form. Once the form is completed they have the option to continue with their entry by completing an offer (which you specify in settings.php). Once the competition is over you can cross check with the entries in your database, and the sub-ids in your Azoogle members area that the person you choose (most likely randomly) has a valid entry.
