Website promotion

Sometimes when you create an account in some websites they send you promotional material like stickers and shirts of their company and other companies. I am starting a website and want to do a promotional event where I send such a promotional material of my company and other companies to the first 500 members (or so).

• How do I find out which companies are interested?
• Do I directly contact the companies that I would like to be participating to this promotion? Or perhaps there exists a website that lists the companies interested in such a promotion events?
• Do usually these companies charge for giving their promotional material or they give it for free?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

I've done this very thing with one of my businesses. To be the most effective you should think about who your clients are and what they would find benificial. For my company at the time the clients where drivers , so I found them promotions on driving releated items rather then say discounts on flowers. By doing this you gain two major benifits. First your clients receive something they will actually use and want, and second you've essentially discounted your product or increased the value of your product without dropping your price. If the promotional item is valued say at $200.00 and your item is $175 your client essentially got your product for free. If they don't actually want the promotional item this effect is lost. Another benifit is that you establish releationships with other companies roughly in your industry they could return the favor and promote your item.

Here are the steps.

1. Identify three of your major clients. Who are they? What do they like? and why do they use your product.
2. What other companies service these identified clients
3. Go to yellow pages or other directories where these companies likely advertise and write down all the contact information you can find (hire a VA to do this if you can and the task is simple enough... saves tons of time)
4. Deterime what kind of promotional product or discount these target companies could provide that would most benifit your client.
5. Deterime what is the best form of delivery of the product, coupon code, "Mention blah at the store" These methods should be low risk and low commitment for you and your clients.
6. Write a pitch e-mail and pitch phone script make sure to point out the benfits to this company as to why they should participate , helping them get more clients is a great selling feature. Remember people mostly care about whats in it for them. Use the puppy dog close.
7. Offer cross promotion (try and get them to promote your stuff if they are really open to it)
8. Do a test run with early participant companies 9.Measure the success
9. Expand the concept to more vendors and more clients.

I hope this helps.

Keep me posted!