When you start an online store, you need qualified traffic to see whatever you have to offer. Whether you are running an Etsy store, dropshipping store, an Amazon affiliate website or a general blog, if your target audience cannot see your offer, you’ll struggle to make money.
I have a background in SEO. Most of the online projects I’ve been doing in the past have been built on SEO.
However, there is a problem with SEO: it takes quite a long time to get traffic. In fact, it can take up to a year for your website to see significant traffic. Moreover, with the ever threat of Google updates, your business can be wiped up at any time.
In fact, I lost a significant amount of income during the Medic Update that happened in 2018. That’s when I vowed never to solely depend entirely on Google for traffic.
In my Project 100K case study, I have lined multiple avenues for driving traffic to my niche site. One of the traffic sources I’m keen on implementing is email.
Well, you may be wondering what’s so special about emails?
A couple of things:
- You can reach your email subscribers at any time you want
- You can almost guarantee yourself an income when you send an email blast
But the problem with email is that it takes too damn long to build your subscriber base. I know it and I only have a couple of thousand subscribers for this blog.
However, there is an easier and faster way of generating emails, and qualified ones for that matter, for your business. This method does not involve buying email lists or email exchanges.
Nope.
What we’ll be doing is reaching out to prospects that are interested in what we have to offer, enticing them with a reward or prize to join our email list, and encourage them to invite other people to our list in some sort of competition.
Basically, the more leads a person refers to sign up, the greater the chances of them winning the prize.
We’ll do all these in a few minutes using a software known as Vyper.io
What is Vyper.io?
Vyper.io is a contest rewards tool that you can use to quickly generate leads for your business. The tool has a simple visual editor that makes it easy to get your first campaign up and running. Here is a rundown of how Vyper.io can help you:
- You start a contest rewarding your users for completing tasks. All the tasks are geared towards increasing your online following, e.g. joining your newsletter, liking your Facebook page, following your page on Instagram, subscribing to your YouTube channel, etc.
- Users are encouraged to share your contest with others so that they can increase their chances of winning. By sharing the contest with others, you get more leads into your pipeline and the users also increase their chances of winning.
- Vyper.io has gamification features that nudge users to complete the tasks you have set to increase their chances of winning.
- The contest winner(s) will be chosen randomly from the list of people that entered. Generally, the more points a user has, the greater their chances of winning the contest.
With that said, let’s go step by step through creating a viral campaign on Vyper.io
First off, you’ll need to sign up for a Vyper.io account. You can get started by signing up for FREE at this link.
When inside your account, you’ll be redirected to the campaigns tab. Alternatively, you can go to the tab by clicking here.
Click “New Campaign” to set up a new campaign.
Vyper.io Contest Templates
Vyper.io offers 6 templates that are designed to make it easier for you to start generating leads depending on the type of business you are running. Here is an overview of the templates as well as what I’d recommend you use them for:
Viral Contest/Giveaway
With this template, you can run a basic but powerful viral contest or giveaway. The template is great for use when you want to increase your social media following and email subscribers.
Some of the features of the viral contest template include refer-a-friend (which will make your campaign go viral) and social media bonus action (which will grow your social media followers)
This templet is great for generating leads and growing your audience. In fact, this is the template I’ll be using to generate leads for my Amazon niche site.
Combo Reward/Referral Program
With this campaign, you can give points to your customers for buying items in your store or referring friends to your store. This campaign is great for anyone that has an online store (for example, dropshipping businesses).
With this template, both you and the customers win. The customers get rewarded for their purchases and you get new customers through referrals.
Reward/Loyalty Program
You can also use Vyper.io to run a reward or loyalty program for your brand. This campaign is useful when you want to spark some life into an existing brand. For example, you can set up points for users that purchase from your store. As the points accumulate, users can redeem them for rewards.
If you are running an online store, the campaign would be a great way to encourage users to shop more and stack those points for future redemption.
Referral/Ambassador Program
You can also run a referral or ambassador program for your brand. With this campaign, your fans or customers can earn points to unlock prizes, discounts or other types of value by referring other people to your brand.
For example, if you are an SEO agency, you can offer free consultation or some free service to users to refer a certain amount of new customers to your business through the campaign.
User Generated Content
Getting your customers to post photos or videos of themselves with your product is a great way of generating buzz and building social proof. User generated content can also help to generate new leads and customers as everyone will be seeing other people with your products.
You can entice users to share user generated content in return for free products or prizes
Milestone Contest
With a milestone contest, you will reward your users for completing various milestones. This type of campaign is great for creating more engaging among your users. You can then reward those that regularly engage with your brand.
Users will simply have to sign up, collect points to reach various milestones, where they can unlock prizes.
Pre-Launch /Waitlist
There is nothing as great as launching a business when you know eager customers are waiting for your product or services. With Vyper.io, you can quickly build a pre-launch or waitlist with this template. Simply start a campaign to inform users of the new product or services you are launching. Users get points by completing different tasks, which make them eligible for a prize.
Leaderboard
There is also a leaderboard template which can work for any type of business. With this campaign, contestants will be incentivized to complete the actions you have set to rise up the leaderboard and unlock great rewards (prizes, free services, discounts, etc), all the while helping you build your audience.
How to Set Up a Lead Generation Contest in Vyper.io
For my Amazon affiliate website, I’ll be using the Viral Contest/Giveaway template.
For this example, we’ll be launching a contest for Niche Site Vault readers to unlock some rewards. First off, we’ll start by editing the title and the information about our reward.
Vyper.io Integration
Next, we’ll choose the email integration that we want. The leads that we collect will be sent directly to our email service provider. At this time, Vyper supports the following email services natively:
- MailerLite
- MailChimp
- Sendy
- ConvertKit
- AWeber
- Klavyio
- EmailOctopus
- Drip
- Campaign Monitor
- ActiveCampaign
- SendLane
- AutoPilot
- GetResponse
If you are using an email service that is not supported above, you can still integrate it with Vype.io through Zapier.
Cheater security & Confirmation Emails
So, you may be thinking, what if someone just creates hundreds of fake emails and refers them to win the prize? Won’t you be left with junk emails from your campaign?
Well, Vyper.io has in-built measures to prevent cheaters. On the settings pages, you can tweak your campaign to be as strict or as relaxed as you want.
For example, you can set your campaign in a way that cheaters will be automatically disqualified. With this setting enabled, you can be sure there won’t be any bots signing up for your campaigns.
If you notice fraud is originating from a particular IP address, you can also ban the address at the backend.
I also like to enable email confirmation just to be sure that people won’t be giving fake emails when signing up for the campaign.
This is how the fraud prevention settings section looks like on Vyper.io backend:
Advanced Features
There are also a couple of features that will improve your branding and contribute to making the campaign go viral.
First off, you can upload a favicon for the campaign. This is an excellent feature to stamp your branding out there.
Then there’s also the social proof feature. I usually leave the social proof feature on as it’s great for showing people that the campaign is on and people are signing up.
There we go. Our campaign is now ready for launch.
You can see the campaign that I’ve just created for this tutorial at this link: campaign
Now that the campaign is up, you have to find a way to get people to see and take part in it.
Here are some quick ideas you can implement:
- Set up Facebook ads and run traffic to the contest
- Get your contest listed on sites that host contest
- Partner with bloggers in your space to get the word out about the contest
- Share the contest URL in relevant Facebook groups and forums
I have a couple of more ideas that I’m testing, which I’ll be revealing in my next post. So, stay tuned.
So, there we go. You can sign up for Vyper.io for FREE here and test it to see its capabilities.
Vyper.io Case Studies
You can see what other brands have been able to accomplish with Vyper.io and get some ideas for your own campaigns. Here are some select case studies that will show you the capability of this contest domination software, as well as get your creative juices flowing:
- Waiakea Collected 62K emails and 124K Instagram Followers
- Foundr Launched their Viral Course With a Contest
- Coconut Bowls Grew their Instagram Account by 37K Followers
- Birch + Fog Used Contests to Drive Traffic & Increase Facebook Following by 1,842%
The four case studies above will open your eyes on the immense possibility of generating leads through Vyper.io contests.
And I haven’t forgotten about my Amazon niche site contest that I set up.
Want to see the results I got from running a contest for my Amazon niche site? Sign up below and you’ll receive the results in your email.