03/10: Internet Marketing & Promoting "Free"

Us humans are strange creatures when it comes to our spending habits. It is generally acknowledged that nobody gives you anything for free and yet we still clamour after free offers, often reluctant to avoid spending our money if we possibly can.

You would think that this would make giving things away a great strategy in business. Indeed it is claimed time and time again that tempting customers with free products or services is a great tactic for growing your audience and customer base.

There is however a problem with this, and it's quite a significant one. The internet is full of people promising us free things - things that will make our lives better in some small or large way and sure enough people snatch them up every single day. It is fair to assume that if you start giving things away, things that people want, you will make some sort of an impact, see some results as a consequence.

This is not neccessarily so however, so let's take a look at why. If, for example, someone gives you a second hand television, you might be very grateful, you might even feel a rush of initial excitement that you got something for no financial outlay, and yet each time you wander into Walmart or Target, you find yourself ogling the latest flat wide screen hi definition offerings costing upwards of a thousand dollars. You have a television, but it cost you nothing and its perceived value is significantly lower than all those shiny new toys on the shelves in the store.

If you had just spent your own money to acquire your heart's desire, its value, in your mind, is equivalent to what you had to give to gain it. Your second hand television, that works perfectly well, seems diminished by comparison - you wanted it because it was free, but you don't value it, don't really care if it lasts a week or a year, or ten years. Hey, it was free, you are conditioned not to expect too much from it. You have nothing to lose, ergo you don't much care if it blows up tomorrow and you don't look after it particularly well, or get upset when it gets knocked off the stand or your visitors spill coffee all over it.

This facet of our nature becomes very apparent when working online. There are some truly valuable and useful things available on the internet that you can get without spending money, and yet you will often find that promoting them does not deliver the results you think are almost certain.

A good example would be web hosting. Normally this is going to cost something, but when someone offers the service for free and then offers to pay you to give it away, you're onto a sure fire winner right? I mean, who can't give away free web hosting? The problem however, is the perceived value...many people will dismiss such an offer because they believe it's too good to be true. Sometimes they are right and it is fair to say that when it comes to hosting most free services will fall far short of what you can expect from a paid one.

There will always be those who will snap up free offers though, and as an affiliate this should ensure that you make some money. Again however, we run up against the perceived value problem....the customer for the free service stands to lose nothing by signing up, but, because they were given the service they do not feel any real pressure to use it. If they were paying $10 a month it would be a different story - they would certainly use it or cancel to avoid paying any more. For the affiliate who gives away the hosting, the flurry of signups and promised payments results in many dormant/cancelled accounts and commissions that disappear. Not so good.

Unfortunately there are plenty of free services and products that show the same end result for those who promote them, so is it worth your time as an internet marketer to push anything that's free? Well, there are always exceptions to the rule, but sometimes you have to expect to be disappointed with the results. It's no reason not to try if you think the idea is a good one.

Giving away free reports and ebooks/software can be a great strategy but sometimes they will fall flat because of the apathy of the majority of people.

Sometimes when launching a product of your own, it is a tough decision to make - paid or free? Think about your aim when deciding which way to jump. If you are trying to get something to go viral for example, charging for it could hamper the spread of your effort but by the same token, giving it away could result in it being downloaded and ignored. Half a million downloads mean little if all the majority of them end up doing is gathering dust on hard drives around the world. A better bet is software that has a viral component - unlike ebooks, and if the software is useful, people will give it away for you and each time someone downloads it or uses it, you have a chance to make money from the ads or links within the program. 

If you are going to give something away, I would recommend at least getting people to opt-in to a list in order to secure whatever it is. At least that way you have given yourself a chance to build up a relationship with a person and perhaps convert them to a customer on other things in the future. Remember though that a lot of contacts gathered in this way will never become buyers, that's a cold hard fact and one of the few guarantees you will get.

Often, free is used as bait, a way of enticing someone in and showing them just how good a product can be, leading them towards a purchase. This is a good tactic, it does work but whether it works on the majority of those who take the initial free offer is debatable. I can think of one great product in particular that uses this strategy but the downloads to conversion ratio are not as high as I feel they should be. It's just too easy for a lot of us to disregard something that was free and not take the required action, even when we can clearly see that the information we got for free could lead us to really good things. That's fine, but it leaves a lot of people sometimes feeling unjustifiably (to my mind) peeved or let down. 

In my own experience of giving away free things I would say that probably more have bombed than gone on to achieve worthwhile results. However, always on the look out for new ideas, promoting "free" isn't something I'd abandon altogether because now and then you can find some gems. All you have to do is convince others that that is exactly what they are, and that, is often the hardest aspect of marketing "free".

If you have your own views or experiences to share I'd love to hear them so leave me a comment below and get some link love in the process.