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Create & cultivate a Facebook page for your local area. Post guidebook updates and other area news here. Use it as a platform to solicit input on your guide. A sustained strategy is more effective than a “one & done” post. rakkup can work with you to create a plan and pay to “boost” your posts when they’re made from our rakkup fb page.
- Write up a blog with great eye candy photos that we can use to post on the rakkup.com blog. This blog should get people excited about climbing/bouldering at your area. See https://rakkup.com/rock-climbing-index-washington-worlds-best-crag/ for a good example. Great images are key for getting people motivated. Please create your blog text with Word and put it in dropbox and we’ll work on editing and formatting it. We’ll also add links back to your rakkup product page. For the images that go with the blog make the file names of the images what the image caption should be. So for example one image might be called “RobPriceOnSweetPain@RedRocks(5.12a).jpg” For images captions we like to have the name of the climber/boulderer pictured, the name of the climb/problem and the grade.
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Talk or give a slideshow at your local gym or retail store.
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Put up posters at local gym and shops, and the crag parking area. rakkup will print and mail these to you. We have created posters that stay true to our branding and we will use your cover image on our poster design. Ask us to put a sample in dropbox if you’re curious what they look like.
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Post news and updates to relevant online climbing area forums and list your guidebook on the “guidebooks” pages for your crag if those are available. In the United States, SuperTopo and/or Mountain Project have good national forums, as well as forums for many climbing areas in the U.S.
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Post news and updates to other regional online forums e.g. www.cascadeclimbers.com if you’re in the U.S. Northwest http://www.redriverclimbing.com/ for Red River Gorge news.
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Identify influential climbers that we can give away free digital guides to – ask them to download rakkup and register, and send us their email they used to sign up, and we will deliver your guidebooks to their mobile device. Ask them in return for free guides to give us feedback and tell everyone they know about rakkup.
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If you had beta testers, let them know the guidebook is released and it’s OK to talk about it publicly — in fact, ask them to retweet or repost your communications or share their own opinions on their social networks.
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Record a video of yourself or local expert talking about how awesome your area is. We will post links on our site and facebook.
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Identify free trial guidebook opportunities. Is there a weekend event (like a clean up weekend) where we can make a time limited free guidebook offer in order to seed the market? A free trial is your full guidebook available for a limited amount of time, like a week, and has a limited duration, like a week. In other words, for one week only users can download a free trial to your area, and once downloaded they can access it on their device for a week. After the free trial expires, they’ll see a “Buy Button.” We call the time that your free trial is available it’s “availability” period and the time that once downloaded a user can access your guidebook, it’s “duration.” Availability and duration range can be 1 day to whatever we decide. The key to a successful free trial is to get the word out that it’s available, so coordinating marketing behind the free trial is crucial.
- We have free rakkup stickers that we can send you that you can put on cars at the crag, or give away for free at your local climbing shop or climbing gym.
- We have designed a 3’x6′ rakkup banner that we can send you. What we’ve done in Seattle is make quid pro quo arrangements with local climbing gyms, whereby we offer to comp all of the climbing gym’s employees two free rakkup guidebooks in exchange for hanging one of our banners and giving away stickers at the front desk. These deals have worked well in Seattle and we would support you making similar deals with climbing gyms in your local area. We would send you the banners and the stickers and handle comp’ing employees. You just need to pitch the idea and make the deal with your local climbing gym. We’ve found that the best way to execute on comp’ing gym employees is to have them give us a list of their employees names and email addresses and then we can handle it from there. If they don’t want to give us a list we can also give them an email template explaining the two free guidebook benefit and how to obtain their free guidebooks.