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Who doesn't love something for
free? On the Web, free tools, articles,
downloads, and whitepapers are a great way
to attract people who are searching for
information, as well as position your organization
as the expert in the field.
I've included four examples below to help
get the ideas flowing:
Example
#1: Free Topical Whitepaper:
One example of giving away something valuable
for free occurred
after the Can-Spam Act of 2003 was published.
For anyone
wishing to avoid a criminal offense if they
messed up an email campaign, they either
needed to read the entire 20-page, dense
Federal Law. Or, they could search for a
summary to tell them the bullet points in
language they could understand.
So we took the contents of the act, and
summarized it in a six page document that
was designed to be easily read by someone
in the email marketing field.
We posted it to our site, and we've had
well over twenty
thousand people download the summary.
Entrepreneur Magazine featured in their
magazine and on their website as an easy-to-read
summary. As a result, we've had thousands
of additional visitors to the site since
2003 that we wouldn't have had otherwise.
Plus,
we were able to collect their email address
so that we could follow up with them in
the future about products and services related
to email marketing. We lost about 40% of
the people who came to the site because
we asked them to enter in an email address.
Example
#2: Free Chapter of a Book:
If
you're like me, you like to flip through
the pages of a book before you purchase
it. At a bookstore it's pretty
easy. For many
books on Amazon, there's a way to preview
a few pages at a time. However, the publisher
of my wife's book (Random House) doesn't
give the electronic copy to Amazon, due
to copyright enforcement issues.
So
for her book,
we gave away a free sample chapter
(Chapter 1), that allows people
to visit the site, enter in their email
address, and then receive the sample chapter
in their email inbox.
The
signup page
assures people that their
email address will be safe, and
that it won't be used for evil purposes.
The site uses a little bit of humor as well,
saying, "If you can't trust
a rabbi with your email address, who can
you trust these days?"
At the top and bottom of the free sample
chapter is a link to purchase the book.
Giving away a free chapter didn't
hurt book sales... in fact it helped increase
them (the book is now in it's second printing).
Example #3: Free eBook:
If
you've ever tried to get a book published,
it's not an easy process. Publishers
look for very specific things in a book
proposal, and if you don't nail it, they'll
likely move on to one that does.
One of our clients, Carol Susan Roth, is
a literary agent, and receives dozens of
book proposals each week. Tired of getting
a lot of proposals that would require a
lot of work, she put together a free eBook,
50 Tips for Writing Your Best Selling
Book Proposal, and offered it for free
on her website,
AuthorsBest.com.
Because she put this up on the site, she's
been able to position herself as an expert,
and increase the quality of proposals that
come in to her.
Example
#4: Sample Product
About five years ago, we helped
OxiClean set up a system that would allow
people to come to the OxiClean.com website
and get a free sample product via mail.
It helped the makers of OxiClean (ownership
has since changed hands) satisfy four marketing
needs:
-
It got a sample product into people's
hands.
- It
helped them increase their direct
marketing database (by about 150,000 people).
-
They were able to find out if
the recipients had kids and pets (very
important if you're in the cleaning business).
-
We included a viral component,
which gave people an incentive to forward
it to their friends (and 52%
of the audience did).
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