Episode 111: How to use freebie giveaway websites to drive TONS of traffic to YOUR website – with Ron Rule

Episode 111: How to Use Freebie Giveaway Websites to Drive TONS of Traffic to YOUR Website – with Ron Rule

Mike: Hi there, everyone! Welcome to Episode 111 of The Mike from Maine Show, the place where we do daily interviews with successful online entrepreneurs. This is your host, Mike Thomas. And today on the show, I’ve got Ron Rule on to talk about how he got 58,000 visitors and I think about 600 backlinks and $16,000 in sales, not profit, sales in three days. Now, when I first saw this, it sounded too good to be true, like one of those over-hyped things that you find a lot on the Warrior Forum but I took a look at it, he sent over a copy and yeah, it looks legit. He’s got tons of proof on it. It’s an interesting method. So I got him on the show today to talk about it. We can’t give away everything that’s in it because it would give away its product and then no one will wanna buy it. But we do get into a lot of how to use it and what kind of results you can expect to get from it. So, if you’re looking for something that’s a little bit different and pretty much completely free in the way that he does it. I mean, there’s a little bit of something you have to give away but yeah, you’ll see in the interview. Okay, here’s Ron Rule.

Mike: We are here today with Ron Rule. Ron, welcome to the show.
Ron: Thanks. It’s nice to be here.
Mike: Ron, why won’t we start off by having you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Ron: Mainly I’m known for developing ecommerce strategies. I’m the, currently at least, top ecommerce expert in Google. I work mostly with nationally recognized brands. I’ve done interviews for Forbes and CIO magazine and Young Entrepreneur and done a little set of publications and I do cable TV business news commentary also. Just mostly, I was talking about ecommerce strategies and ways traditional businesses are using the web to get more visitors and conversions.

Mike: So, how did you become an expert in ecommerce?

Ron: I kinda got my start about 9 years ago. I was handling all of the ecommerce and web ventures for an infomercial production company. This company owns a studio that mostly infomercials you see on TV are shot at. It used to be Billy Mays, now it’s Anthony Sullivan, Mark Yale and those guys. So, it gave me a lot of access to a variety of consumer products. And with completely different audience as for them. So over time, I was able to develop strategies that would work for different segments of the market and really dial in those conversions. By doing it on TV, it gave me access to a large customer pool to do multi-variant testing and try a bunch of different things and really dial in what works and what doesn’t.

Mike: So now, your business — are you making money specifically from websites of your own, through consulting? How are you making a living?

Ron: Primarily, through consulting. Companies come to me when they usually already have an ecommerce site and they’re not getting what they want out of it. And so, I take a look at what they could be doing differently and develop a strategy that’s specific to them, for whatever it is they’re looking for. Whether it’s driving traffic or search engine visitors or just increasing the conversion rates for traffic they’re already getting.

Mike: Cool. And the reason why I brought you on the show today is because you list a product in the Warrior Forum and it was how you got 58,000 visitors, 600 backlinks and $16,000 in sales. And it’s kind of a secret formula that you had developed there and it picked my interest. You let me take a look under the hood and it’s definitely something that’s interesting for me and something that I would consider trying. Without giving away everything, can you kind of explain what the basic idea is behind his whole system that you use?

Ron: Yeah. I mean, the way that it’s all come about is I came up with this theory and I thought you know, maybe must be a good way to get some backlinks and drive some traffic for a product that I was working on about a year ago. And um so, I went ahead and did the summations and went to bed. And the next morning, I wake up and I got 1700 something contact form request from people who would come through to this site. And I thought something was wrong at first. I thought that there was someone gaming the system and they’re trying to take advantage and then just get freebies for themselves and that sort of thing. And I looked through and they’re all unique people, unique IP addresses, unique visitor and I just kinda let it run for a couple of days and by that time, we just received a ton of traffic. It was more than I got out of any ecommerce play that I’ve been doing for the last 15 years I’ve been in the space.

Mike: Okay, let’s look a little bit more under the hood here. Like, the — I mean, I know what it’s all about and I know that we talked about this earlier, you don’t wanna give away everything but let’s — what initially — how did you set this up initially? How were you able to get all this traffic and all these links?

Ron: The first one that I did — there’s a whole audience of what I call free loaders out there. There’s a couple of websites that are very popular where large companies go to push product samples out to an audience and they’re very low conversions. They’re mostly just people looking to score a freebie. And so, I didn’t realize what kind of traffic these sites got until we did — when we have a product it was low cost of goods, I said, you know let’s just — let’s give a couple away and we’ll get some quality backlinks out of it and that will be that. And I was expecting maybe a hundred or so people would take us up on the freebie. So, the next morning when we had all these sample requests and there — I ended up having to shut it down and go back to my client and say, okay listen, I screwed up and you have to ship all these free product to people now. And that’s what started it. Well over time, I thought you know there’s something to this audience. There’s a way to get this people to convert and not just take the free sample. And that’s what I’ve developed in the guide is that over the next year, I kept using this audience to test a couple of different areas on how we could them to convert without giving away product. And that’s what the guide says. It’s a way to get that audience, to get all of that traffic to your site without actually having to give away a physical product.

Mike: Now, I’m thinking like okay, the person watching this right now, they want to get the traffic, they want to get the backlinks but they don’t have a physical product to give away and I mean, for me personally, I sell websites and I was thinking okay, I initially sell my websites. The initial listing price was $97 for the websites, sometimes I give a discount and I’ll sell them for cheaper. Now, could I use this as a way of giving out like a coupon to say okay, this websites are normally $97, here’s 20 bucks off or 50 bucks off or something and I mean, is there a way for someone that doesn’t have a physical product to be able to use this method?

Ron: It works for virtual products too. So, if you’re selling a — yeah, something downloadable or a package like a website, then you could use that method. Generally, these audience want something completely free with no strings attached, not just a discount. So yeah, what I tried to do is figure out for each individual business how can you give that audience something of value and that will get them to your site, so you get all of the backlinks and get all the traffics and then try to monetize as many as you can. It’s primarily a search engine play which will boost your site in the search engine. I mean, we took over 8 of the top 10 results on the page one after running this promotion. And then that leads to other people searching for what it is that you sell finding it. So, if you have something you can part with whether it’s an ebook or a little bit of information, it can be cellphone ringtone, anything that the average consumers gonna want that you can give away, then you have something of value to get those people there. And what I did in the guide was came up with something that people who didn’t have either of those things could create out of thin air to offer to these audience and get that traffic to their site.

Mike: Okay, we won’t say what that thing is but it’s interesting. You say like, give away an ebook or something. I will be afraid of giving away something and having people, like if you give away some crappy ebook — it’s 2013, everyone or not everyone, but most internet marketers and whatnot, they see a little ebook and unless it discusses something really great in it, they’re not gonna give away even an email address or something for it. Can you think of anything else that people could give away? Like, I mean, you could give away a physical product like a pen or something, but then you’re gonna have to mail it out and — I’m just trying to think outside of the box here.

Ron: Yeah. I mean, coz what you’re doing, if you’re having to ship, it can get really expensive. On one campaign for — it was a large campaign and they obviously have the budget for it, they actually gave away 50,000 samples of their product. So, even if you’re thinking a cost of goods or a dollar plus another dollar 80 or so in the mail, they spent some money on that campaign. What the goal is just to try and get something in front of people that does have some value, whether they’re interested in it or not, just take advantage of the amounts of traffic that you’re gonna get out of this audience. So, even if you have something that’s not gonna convert, maybe it’s an ebook and nobody reads it, you’re still going to get the backlinks out of it, you’re still gonna get the visitors out of it. And it’s just a heck of a play.

Mike: Yeah. I could see it working for few things. For people that are trying to do SEO — one, if you’re trying to get something to rank in the search engines, like you said you’re gonna get a ton of links and you said you got your site pushed up in the search engines. So, you could use it for that. Two, I mean, you’re already talking about lead generation here. So, if you’re just trying to get opt-ins for something, I mean you could get a lot of leads that you can market to later on using other means. And the $16,000 in sales that you got, that’s pretty interesting. Was that profit or — how did that work?

Ron: That was gross sales but it was a high-margin product. It was a very inexpensive product. The cost of goods was under a dollar and we were selling it anywhere – in packages or single unit, it was $9.99 and with packages scaling up to $99. So yeah, knowing that this audience is a consumer product audience, it’s just a matter of finding the right offer for them and that will determine how much you’ll get in sales out of it.

Mike: How many times — I mean, how often have you done this now? It’s — was that, I’m thinking that this result that you had, like you show the results in the PDF, you showed the screenshots. I’m thinking that was like a really good one. Have you done this again and had like medium good results, sometimes it hasn’t really hit well? How has that worked?

Ron: Yeah, that one will — that first one was a continuity product. So, if it was something they like and they wanted it again, they’re gonna have to come back to the table and buy it. So that kinda gave that one tremendous result because a lot of the people who get their hands on it, do wanna go ahead and start paying for it. I have had campaigns that produced $0 in results, they still get the traffic, they still get the links but there’s no direct monetization from that audience. So, it’s really just finding a fit and I tend to look at it as an SEO play where once you get yourself established with this community, whether those specific people buy your products or not, you’re getting ad visibility and other people will find you through their — sharing of your offer through social media and you know, like I said, the free stuff junkies as I call them, they’re — the majority just wants something for free. They’re on there everyday and they’re just grabbing whatever they can. One of the things that I found in a couple of giveaways was items would end up on ebay. Sometimes, people would trade them and we would get customers out of it that we never sent a product to, we never sent an offer to, we never captured the order information but we got a customer as a direct result of somebody else —

Mike: Cool.

Ron: — who took freebies and I don’t need this and handed it off to a friend.

Mike: It’s definitely a different way of getting traffic, a different way of getting leads and yeah, I think there’ll be some people listening right now that are gonna be intrigued to look under the hood there. Is there anything else that you wanted to cover today Ron that we didn’t mention that you wanted to put out there?

Ron: Yeah, the only thing I could think of is to just let people know that think of this as a tremendous SEO opportunity and traffic- driving opportunity and don’t focus so much on how much money you’re going to make off of this audience. Think about how much money you would make if you owned the 3 to 6 to 8 of the top 10 positions for your primary keyword coz this will deliver that to you if you follow the exact steps that I put in the guide.

Mike: Cool, Ron. We’ll have links to that in the show notes in mikefrommaine.com. If people wanna reach out and find you, where can they find you at?

Ron: They can visit my personal website, ronrule.com or they can email me from my gmail account directly, it’s just [email protected]

Mike: Great, Ron. Thank you very much.

Ron: Okay.

Mike: Thanks for watching the show today with Ron. If you’re interested in checking out exactly how he does this, go ahead and go to. That’s mikefrommaine.com/ron. And yeah, you can find out how he’s able to get all this traffic, all these sales and all these backlinks. I’m sure you all can think of ton of way to use this method to make money with and to either just do SEO efforts or get leads. Thank you for watching and I’ll see you all tomorrow.