FP - Another iMontie KILLER Money Making Method

[iMontie]

This one is pretty nuts guys. Let's say you have a drop ship company of your own. For example, let's say you're selling iPads or replica iPads

You wholesale whatever it is or you just get a dropshipper to do your work.. whatever im not here to teach you about dropshipping and shit.

So basically here's a pretty unique method of virally advertising your dropshipping site. Make sure looks totally legit (like super ****ing legit) and make sure your prices are pretty damn low.

Now here comes the cool part...

Register to ALL forums in your niche. So for the iPad niche we would register at every forum that comes up when you search apple product forum or ipad forum or mac forum or some shit. examples would be: macrumors.com or mac-forums.com

Make a new thread in the section that pertains to your product (in my case it would be... iPad). Title the thread something like "Is this a scam?"

then in the content you would say:

Hey guys... I'm thinking about buying an iPad from sitename.com but I can't tell if it's a scam or not. I sent the owner an email and i'm still awaiting a reply but i figured i'd just come here to see if any of you guys have ever purchased one.

There are a few different things about this method that make it so interesting.

1. No one will think it's a spam post or an advertisement. Your dropship site gets free hits and maybe some bookmarks when they see your super low prices and that you look legit.

2. You've said in the post that you emailed the owner and are awaiting a reply.. so it looks like you're taking action as well and not just leeching off the members (building trust with the community).

3. 2-3 days later, if interest in the thread has died off.. you can come BUMP the threads by saying that the guy actually did email you back and provided you with a tracking number and all that so it's not a scam... and that you'll update them with the fact that it's a real ipad or not.

4. come back AGAIN and tell them that it's a real ipad



PS: this is a completely unsaturated method and i literally just came up with it.. i've never heard of it like this anywhere else

[Luka]

Great method, but there are some negatives.


Like the prices super damn low, it's super damn hard (lol) to find a very cheap dropshipper, I want to get into dropshipping business (I got a cheap game seller) , but having issues right now with Ebay, a/c gets banned for some reason (let's not go off-topic).

But this in fact is a really great method, A+!

[springer98]

PS: this is a completely unsaturated method and i literally just came up with it.. i've never heard of it like this anywhere else

Montie, you may have just thought of it but it is not new and not completely unsaturated. People have been doing this on places like craigslist since the beginning of time. Granted, perhaps not with a DSing business model, but with CPA offers.

Manually posting to and keeping up with all those forums seems like an awful lot of work for potentially pretty low pay. There's typically not a lot of markup on your ipod/ipad example. Generally, all electronics pretty much suck for profit, but everyone still wants to do them.

DSing isn't a hands-off business. You not only have to do the promotion but have to do all the back office work too. Your back office work is essentially equivalent to that done by the actual supplier, minus the shipping part.

I'm not knocking DSing and I'm not knocking you, but this method has too many holes in it to make it worthwhile. Keep the ideas flowing, though. One day you'll hit one out of the park.

[iMontie]

Lol I'm just spewing ideas out onto the forum to get a little action going. I don't do anything besides flip for now I'm making bank doing it. I'll get into CPA when i find more time in the day -.- lol

[springer98]

Lol I'm just spewing ideas out onto the forum to get a little action going.

Well you just keep spewing kid. I really liked your stuffing bookstores idea last week. You have some good ideas and, like I said, one day you'll hit one outta the park.

You really need to begin trying some of your own ideas. I know, from personal experience, one day you'll share an idea but not do anything with it but someone else will run with it and really bank. You'll kick yourself for not having done it yourself.

[GreyWolf]

Well like springer98 says this isn't actually new. Actually if you spend much time on forums you see this all the time and if done wrong it actually does look pretty spammy and sometimes even scammy. Most people do it wrong and so either the post gets flamed, gets deleted, or potentially even gets that account banned. That might not seem like a big deal since you don't care about those accounts, but it makes the effort pointless.

So what's the right way to do it?

Well basically the same as iMontie says, except that you can't just join and then make that post. No one trusts posts like that from a one post wonder. It's actually a great technique, basically a Word of Mouth (WoM) marketing method. But to make it effective you need to do a little work. First find the group of forums you plan to market on. Then make your accounts and post an introduction post in whatever introduction forum they have. Then log into each of those forums over a period of a few days and make a few posts relevant to the topics of those forums. After you have 5 or 6 decent posts in those forums and about a week since joining. Then you can make that WoM cloaked sales thread.

Just post it in one relevant subforum on the board, (if you crosspost it most forums will spot it right away and ban you). Then do the same thing again logging into the forums over a few more days making other posts and replies relevant to the forum, and also responding if necessary to the replies in your WoM thread. After about another week has passed you can make the second WoM post about recieving the product and how great it is.

The thing about WoM marketing is that people will only trust the Word if they think the Mouth is credible. Give the WoM profiles the appearance of credibility and this can be an extremely effective advertizing strategy. If you take the time to make the profiles seem legit you can even get your links posted on Yahoo Answers and similar forums.



@freejazz - even doing it the way I suggest, you could still automate as you suggest. It'll take a little more effort to set up the tools, but you can still do it. You can't make the posts be too general sounding though. Just make a series of posts that will be relevant to those forums. One day set up the profiles, then each day thereafter send out the next post to the entire list. It'll be most effective on the forums you can do manually though. It's just a lot easier to seem credible when you can actually interact with some other members. Best result would probably be a combination of manually working the largest most active forum and then automating the posts for the masses of lesser forums.

[springer98]

Thanks Grey.

I use a similar system with twitter. Once you get it going, it's pretty easy to automate.

I just began reading an interesting book, Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. It's a book I'd probably recommend to anyone who wants to be successful at forum, twitter or facebook marketing. It doesn't go into detail how to do all those things, it's more about the psychology of building trust. Once you know how to get people to trust you, then you can figure out how to work it into your online marketing efforts.

[GreyWolf]

Yeah, that's basically what I was talking about. Trust is the key to all marketing. That's why WoM methods can be so effective. It's a way to get the message to come from a somewhat trusted source. Without the trust though the effectiveness will drop off dramatically.

This type of advertising is for direct traffic. It isn't the search engines your targeting but the actual visitors of those sites. You can get more traffic by becoming a credible trusted member on a few forums than by blasting out spammy messages to thousands. Without the trust factor, the message will be ignored.

That sounds like a good book you mentioned. I'll have to put it on my list of things I should read and start looking for it.