Giving things away for free on the internet almost seems like a way of life. But have you ever stopped to ask yourself why or even if you should join the crowd?
There is a school of thought that following the crowd is a recipe for disaster and that giving things away free only conditions people to expect everything to be offered at zero cost.
Others will counsel you to give things away in order to build up your business.
There’s logic in both arguments but you need to take a step back and decide which option – or a mixture of both – is the best for your business.
If all you’re doing by following the crowd is a good impersonation of a lemming then that’s definitely the wrong approach.
1. Because everyone else is doing it
Let’s face it, this is probably the real reason that most people give away things on the web.
It may not be the first answer they give but it’s normally scarily close to the truth.
The problem with this approach is exactly the same as the reason – if everyone else is doing it, there’s no way you can stand out from the crowd unless you up the ante and give even more things away for free than your competitors are doing.
And then it becomes a downhill race until no-one in your industry is making any money because no-one is paying anything to anyone.
You need a point of difference – often called a unique selling point – for whatever it is you’re giving away if you are to stand a chance of monetising your website at a later stage.
2. Because customers expect it
Again, not much of a reason.
Most of us would like a free iPhone or other nice gadget and some of society probably expect Apple to offer that or would at least say it in a survey. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good business model.
The biggest problem with the expectation of free things is that is also how they’re valued.
It’s often said in copywriting circles that the hardest thing to sell is a free offer.
People are wondering what the catch is, whether the offer is even worth the time it takes to enter their email address (or whatever else they need to do to get the freebie) and then, once they do get it, they haven’t paid for it so it goes to the back of the queue of things that need to be read or listened to or watched.
Think how many free offers you’ve signed up for versus how many of those same reports you’ve read or turned up to the webinar or whatever.
If you’re like most people, the ratio isn’t good.
3. Because you’re offering a taster option
This is probably the only valid reason out of the ones I’m discussing today.
A taster option can be an excellent way to offer something for free without setting the expectation that the price will forever be zero.
Supermarkets do this all the time – there are regularly tasters being given out. But they are just that – a taster – one or two bites. Enough to literally whet people’s appetite and cause a good proportion of them to buy the product they’ve just tasted.
How you do this depends greatly on the product or service you’re offering. Not everything lends itself to a free taster and if that’s the case for you, you’ll need to get more creative.
But a very large proportion of products and services can be turned round or looked at from a different angle that will allow you to offer a taster.
This has a number of advantages:
- You can put a real, believable, money value on it. This alone is unusual in the often hype-laden world of the internet
- You can give good information but leave the person hungry for more – much the same as those tasters in the supermarket
- You can limit the quantity available – it’s difficult to put scarcity into a download on the internet or even a webinar (think how many you’ve signed up for where there are “only” 1,000 places available and those are “bound” to be filled by the thousands of people on the same email list as you. Honest.) By offering a cut-down or trial or introductory offer, you can weave in scarcity. This works really well for service industries as there’s a built-in limit on the number of hours you can give away for free but you can adapt it for other offers.
The biggest thing to realise is that free isn’t the only way to go on the internet and it may well be that after some real thinking time it’s not the direction you want to follow. Or it could be that you’re sufficiently inventive to be able to stand head and shoulders above the competition and use free things to really build a hungry crowd of followers who are desperate to spend money with you.
Your choice!
And if you’d like to know how to create good quality giveaway products, click here.