A good friend and fellow mastermind team member of mine has just created a powerful tool for building trust, credibility and relationships with his audience.

Plus it might just result in a few affiliate dollars in his pocket!

It’s a holiday gift-giving guide, and I recommend that you creating one yourself!

Here’s how it works – Tim’s business is called AskTheBuilder.com and focuses on helping people repair and remodel (or get someone else to do the remodeling) their homes. He’s got tons of great how-to content, video and a killer newsletter on his site (which, if you’re at all handy, or need some work done on your home by someone else, I recommend signing up to read!)

A side effect of being handy is that people need tools. So, in a recent mastermind someone suggested that Tim create a Holiday Gift-Giving Guide, recommending great handy gifts, with affiliate links for each product to Amazon or another site.

Tim, being my kind of a “just go do this stuff” guy, went and did exactly that. He produced a well-designed, fun piece with will help many find the perfect gift for someone they love.

Even if you’re not handy, I suggest that you go grab a copy of The AskTheBuilder Holiday Gift Guide so you can see how it’s structured and get ideas for your own business.

One of the best things Tim did was to lead off with stocking stuffers – inexpensive gifts that almosts anyone can afford. That gets his readers interested and going right off the bat.

Another great thing – notice how Tim weaves mini stories into the copy. Powerful!

Best of all, a project like this takes only takes a few hours to complete, but it can result in great relationship building, trust and sales for your business.

My only suggestions for Tim – he needs to add an optin form and incentive into the guide so that those who get it passed along to them can easily join his list, a coupon for savings on some of his products and he should send people to a page to optin and download his guide rather than sending them directly to the pdf.

Application To Your Business

How can YOU use this idea to build your business?

And here’s another one that you may enjoy, ironically, from Tim’s very talented daughter, which is more of a generic gift-giving guide:
http://www.meghancarter.com/giftguide.html

I won’t belabor the obvious applications, let’s think a bit deeper.

Let’s say that you’re a Social Media Consultant, selling local and social media marketing to small businesses in your local area. Your holiday gift giving guide could include some books on social media and local marketing, the DVD for The Social Network (the Facebook movie) an iPod and Smart phone recommendations so that people can get involved themselves, a list of links to sign up for Twitter, Facebook and more, a gift certificate for a free consultation and a coupon for savings on a consulting package.

What if you sell information products? You could do something similar, with low cost books from Amazon on your topic, some affiliate links to clickbank products on the subject, your own information products and a free offer from you plus a coupon for your high-end coaching product.

The key is creative thinking – what will someone who is a potential user of yours want to own? Great, put it into a gift-giving guide!

What do you think? Are you going to create one of these yourself? How will you do so and what will you offer? Please let us know by leaving a comment below and don’t forget to Like and Tweet this post!