In this Ask Evan episode, host Evan Carmichael responds to a viewer, Egypt, who is struggling to raise funds for a healing‑cap medical wig on Indiegogo. The campaign has only $171 of a $150,000 goal with seven days left despite high social activity. Evan diagnoses likely issues: weak product‑market fit or messaging, and attracting the wrong or fake audience (e.g., purchased likes, views, and thumbs‑ups). He warns that fake social metrics can erode credibility. He explains that most crowdfunding projects only succeed after gaining early momentum that earns platform promotion. To generate qualified traffic and early sales, Evan outlines three core strategies: (1) build a targeted email/list and use guest blogging on niche blogs related to wigs, chemo, burns, or alopecia; (2) conduct PR and media outreach, including press releases and pitches to smaller outlets; (3) engage connectors and influencers on platforms like Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and YouTube. He emphasizes the need to sell $5‑$20k independently before the platform will feature the campaign. The video concludes with a call for viewers to like, comment, and submit their own campaign questions.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm answering a question from one of my readers, Egypt, who wrote in saying, "Thank you for all the informative videos. I have a question. We have a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for a new invention on Ideagogo. Although we have great response and sharing, people are not donating. Can you give us some advice?" This is our first campaign, and maybe we're doing something wrong. Did an email blast before and after the campaign launched. Post on various blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. Contact friends and family to take part in the campaign. Thanks in advance. So let's see what we can do. So I'm loading up the page here, Egypt. Typically with these things, you're going to have a couple of issues. It's either your product or your messaging is not great. And so this is a healing cap medical wig. I don't know too much about the conditions here, chemo, burns, alopecia, to know I don't know if that's in huge demand or not, but either your messaging, your product isn't great, or you have the wrong people coming to your page, or not enough people are coming to your page, or some kind of combination of it. So you've got $171 raised out of a $150,000 goal with only 7 days left. So it's going to be tight to get that finished. Looking through, let's see what we got. Now you have a lot of Facebook likes, a lot of tweets happening here. Interesting that there's so many with only $171 contributed. I'd start to think that maybe some of these were bought, you know, Fiverr or something like that. You don't want to fake your social media too much because it can cause a lot of skepticism. Looking at the video here, we can also check it out if we go watch on YouTube. So we've got 55,000 people who viewed it. 621 thumbs ups, no thumbs down, and no comments. So again, that's screaming that these are probably purchased views or purchased thumbs ups, because usually with a video with that many views and thumbs ups, you'd have somebody leaving a comment at least on it. So again, you know, just people who are faking their social media to boost their numbers can sometimes cause a lot of people to question whether they should I want to be a part of this company or not. So just something to think about. In terms of building awareness for this, really most of the projects that go up on Ideagogo or Kickstarter don't end up getting funded, and it's the ones that start doing well that then make it to the home page and get the exposure. And so before Ideagogo is going to give you any kind of traction on this and give you the exposure, you have to do a lot of the groundwork yourself. Just putting it up isn't going to do it. And I know you said you've done a lot of different types of work that may have driven traffic, but it's probably not the right people who are coming. You know, you don't just want numbers, you want qualified people who are interested in this. So what I would do is try to build up my own list prior to it and think about 3 strategies. One, guest blogging. So you could guest blog either about the process of starting something up on Indiegogo, but more promising would be target anybody who has a popular blog in this kind of field. So somebody who writes about wigs or, you know, any of those conditions. If you could have a guest post on there that then also promotes your Ideagogo campaign, you're going to be driving fewer people but much more targeted people to the page. That's number 1, guest blogging. Number 2, PR and media. Reach out to You could look at, you know, national media campaigns, but more likely you get some traction with the smaller media outlets. People who do talk about these kinds of issues and let them know you exist. Let them know the campaign is here. Be a resource for them. Write a press release. Offer to write stories for them. As much as you can to get some media to drive traffic to this page and get some orders would be a fantastic idea. And the third is reach out to connectors and influencers. So people who may not have a blog but tweet a lot about it or are very active on Google+ or Facebook or YouTube. YouTube, get them to know about it, get them to partner up and help expose it to their audience as well. Because to have only $171 here, again, one of the problems is either you have tons of people coming to this page, but the product and the messaging are just not great. People don't want what you have. Now, that's probably not what's happening. It's probably more you have the wrong people coming and not enough people coming. So the people who are coming are either bought from places like Fiverr or, you know, spammed out and they hit the webpage, but they're not qualified people who are your potential buyers. So to make any of these campaigns go, sometimes it's just lucky and they hit, but usually you have to do a lot of groundwork on your own to get up to a certain dollar amount, and then the website like Ideagogo will help promote you and get you on the homepage and give you even more exposure. So You need to think about ways that you can already sell $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 of this stuff on your own through your own connections and through your own exposure of guest blogging, PR, media, reaching out to connectors and influencers. Because Ideagogo is not going to want to put on their homepage something that only has raised $171. They see that there's already been some momentum, then they're going to help you take that to the next level. So hopefully that helped. For those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. And if you have a question about your own campaign or your own website, I'd love to be able to try to help you. If you want to leave it in the comments section, I always read those and try to respond to everybody. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode.
