Struggling to Market my Child Safety Products

Q:  I have been involved in child safety for over 10 years and have incredible products and blogs.  I work with a couple big name organizations that love my stuff but can’t seem to get past those two.  My product is not selling on the web and I am not sure how to develop joint ventures that would benefit both parties.  I have a proven track record and I a very passionate about what I do.  I am just stuck, and I have now spent $18,000 on a marketing company to help and found out that I was one of several unhappy clients.  He took the money and left me with a mess and a affiliate program half way set up.   I am just stuck and frustrated.  So I guess the question is how to get my business positioned to make more money with my products and blogs and promote child safety.  Longest question ever I am sure:)

Melissa

Hi Melissa–

Your products seemed to be geared toward children. Frankly, I think you can gear them toward the elderly as well, especially those seniors who have dementia or are in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

Because your biggest market is children, I would try the following:

Parent-teacher associations would seem to be a great strategic alliance for you.  I’m not sure if there are a national PTA organization or state PTA organizations, but that’s worth the research time to discover. And PTAs are always seeking fundraisers.  Because you have the beginnings of an affiliate program in place, having the PTAs as affiliates would seem to be a great match.  Another one would be daycare centers, who might also be interested in an affiliate relationship.  Daycares are licensed by each state, and I know that there are state and national associations for daycare centers.

1.  Create two free giveaways that target both PTA and daycare centers. i.e. “The 3 Most Important Ways to Keep Your Children Safe in School” for PTAs and “How to Insure the Safety of Children in Your Care” for daycare centers.

2.  Create a squeeze page for each where you collect a name and an email address in exchange for your free report. I recommend Birdsend for this.

3.  Plan a series of 10 followups up autoresponders that continue to introduce your prospect to more valuable info that you have as well as doing some soft selling of your products.

4.  Now that they’re on your list, continue to make offers for them in email broadcasts of both useful info as well as great tips.  You might want to create an ezine to do this or a blog.

5.  Do your research and create a list of local PTAs and child care agencies, getting both their email contact info and snail-mail.

6. Write 5-10 articles regarding child safety that you could offer to place in PTA or daycare newsletters. Send emails to those PTAs and child care centers offering this free content for their parent newsletters.  At the end of your articles be sure and place an author bio box that leads them back to your site.

7. Begin a direct mail campaign with postcards where your call to action is to visit something on your site, like your affiliate program where they could sell your product as a fundraiser and make money.