How To Create Bonuses Out Of Thin Air
If you want to add value to a product you’re selling or an offer you’re promoting, then adding bonuses to the offer is the easiest way to a) differentiate your offer and b) provide more value to your customers.
Yet some people say, “Jamie… I don’t have anything else to offer!”
I’m here to help.
After you’ve read this article, there will be no excuse for not having at least five bonuses to add to whatever product you’re offering.
These won’t cost you anything, with the exception of the last one – but even then, there’s a massive asterisk next to the idea it costs anything.
Let’s go.
Question and Answer Sessions
Here’s an easy bonus you can add to any product, provided you’re knowledgeable on the subject and not trying to do a quick take-the-money-and-run with the people you’re selling to.
Offer a direct Q and A session to people who buy your product or affiliate offering.
This doesn’t cost anything except your time, and providing you’re smart about how you organise your Q and A sessions, it won’t take much of that either. For example:
- Create a folder full of answers you’ve already given
- Use an autoresponder system to send out the Q and A notifications
- Do a walkthrough yourself and anticipate common questions (see below)
Walkthroughs
If a monkey couldn’t take your product out of the packet and use it to climb trees immediately, then it needs instructions.
If it needs instructions, and bear in mind most instructions are written in China, by a machine or even worse, some German engineering nerd, creating your own guides, walkthroughs and instructions is very much a bonus.
It doesn’t cost you anything to produce providing you have a Word document open and you use the product at least once.
Resource Lists
Everybody wants to be a blogger and make money. That’s why there are a million thin content websites with dubious reviews of products and affiliate links galore.
Despite this ubiquitous monetisation of basic information, nobody seems to do the most obvious thing ever which is just straight up say, “If you want to do X, then you’ll need these resources.”
Don’t make a big thing of it, just do it.
That said… this sort of list is a perfect example of a bonus you can give to add value to anything you offer for sale.
Selling a course on how to make money online?
“Check out the tools I use to run my business.”
Selling a power drill?
“Want to set up your own home workshop? Here are the tools that need to be inn your shed!”
Teaching stay-at-home mums how to bake?
“Here’s a list of the top kitchen gadgets that’ll save you hours of kneading and cleaning!”
This is a bonus which is essentially just a list, and it doesn’t even have to be products. It can be a directory or something similar too.
“Lifetime” Updates
You can offer updates, upgrades and similar things to any offer. This is a “bonus” that you can “threaten to revoke” at any time.
Some products don’t come with lifetime updates for obvious reasons. Others – like software – have free updates until the next major version, or yearly updates. These are all fine. The “lifetime” I mention doesn’t have to mean literally.
Although it can do. It might even be a residual income stream for you or your company that nobody has thought of.
Either way, if you change a product, you can as a good will gesture give people updates. This is a bonus and it’s also an offer that costs nothing in real world terms to promise and produce.
Reduced “Loyalty” Rates
This one requires a bit of creativity if you’re not the product owner (i.e. an affiliate) and a bit of calculator number crunching if you are the product owner.
Essentially though, a recurring customer is one of the best things you can have as a business owner, and an easy bonus to give to your first time (or any time) customers is to say, “Hey… if you buy this, you get a discount on the next thing you buy.”
It doesn’t cost you anything upfront, and for a customer to get anything out of it, they need to promise to give you more money at a later time.
This is a total win for you. It’s also a total win for your customer, who gets a free discount. This is obvious as a tactic and it’s why it exists everywhere from clothing to amusement parks and there’s no reason why you wouldn’t offer your customers the same.
Final Thoughts
The above are all bonuses that everyone can do for no money and not much time investment at all. Notice how none of them are about stealing, lying or sucking value. They aren’t cheesy or cheap. They’re not offerings of “27 free ebooks” that are just 5-page documents stolen from reddit answers or Wikipedia or whatever.
All of these bonuses are quick, easy and add value to both the product and you as a vendor or affiliate.