One of the things that’s almost always suggested in internet marketing is give stuff away for free.

An ebook or special report or a video or even some software (maybe a WordPress plugin) in exchange for an email address.

Once this happens, you’ve got another subscriber and you’ve read that each subscriber is worth $1 a month, so that must be good news?

If you’ve ever been tempted by solo ads, that’s definitely the pitch.

A lot of solo ad sellers won’t sell you an advert if you’re not offering something for free.

The model is that you then sell the occasional upsell once people have clicked to get the free download and, after that, you sell them things via your autoresponder.

That may have worked years ago when email boxes were less cluttered.

And it may still work – I certainly get people responding to my emails, so do the people selling you solo ads, so do other list builders.

But – equally – it may not work.

Some of my lists have lots of subscribers but no-one buying.

They seemed a good idea at the time.

People are signing up to get the freebie but they’re either in “free” mode or they aren’t opening and reading the messages in the autoresponder series.

In theory, I should go back and re-examine those lists, re-work the messages being sent out and generally liven them up.

In practice, with some of those lists, I should just kill them off completely because I’ve moved on.

And if you’re in the same situation, that’s OK to do.

Sure, you spent time and/or money creating the free gift.

And you spent time creating the follow up messages (you have got some follow up messages, haven’t you?)

But if you’re not getting sales, you need to decide whether to spend some time fixing whatever it is that’s wrong or whether to write it off to experience.

So, let’s get back to the initial question of whether or not giving stuff away free still works?

As ever, the answer depends.

• Free will likely get you a larger list, faster. Because there’s a low barrier for people to join you, a reasonable number will.
• Making people jump through one or more hoops before they can join you will reduce the number of sign-ups but should make them more engaged once they get through to your list. That’s one of the reasons a lot of squeeze pages and product pages don’t show the sign up or purchase box until you’ve watched or listened to a reasonable amount of the presentation. It works – the tyre kickers click the back button or close the tab, the more enthusiastic visitors sign up.
• Another way is to split the presentation – Dan Kennedy does this for certain products – so that the first half of a webinar is free, the second half is still free (that’s the freebie you’re offering) but is only accessible once you’ve entered your email address.
• Yet another way is to split your initial information into several pages and then – 3, 4, 5, however many pages you decide – later you say that the remainder of the information is available in exchange for an email address. I’ve seen this done and it works well.

There’s a cost involved with having subscribers – the autoresponder companies charge a monthly fee based on the number of subscribers – so it may be that simply focusing on the quality of your subscribers rather than the quantity is the tipping point between making a free giveaway profitable or not.

It’s certainly worth testing.

Personally, I’d rather have 100 subscribers who read nearly every email I sent out and spent money regularly than 1,000 subscribers who never did anything and never spent anything.

So examine any lists you’ve got and make a decision about whether or not to keep them.

Once you’ve got subscribers on your list, you need to keep them engaged.

Subscribers are “hottest” during the first month after they’ve signed up.

After that, they’ve probably moved on in life or signed up to so many other lists your email is just another one in their “unread” folder.

Unsubscribing takes more effort than ignoring or deleting.

And the stats from your autoresponder company about whether or not your emails have been opened are based on an image being loaded, which isn’t the default case with most email programs. So the open rate stats are wrong.

The kind of content you send to your list will depend on your personality and whether you pre-write your emails or send them as broadcasts.

Pre-written emails are usually easier – you can sit down and write a bunch of them in one sitting.

Broadcast emails can be more topical but you need to get in a routing of writing them otherwise the habit won’t stick.

Broadcast emails are also scarier for most people – you need to come up with a topic every day (or however often you send out emails) and you need to write the content.

You can compromise on this by jotting down a list of topics you’ll cover in the coming days and weeks plus maybe some evergreen topics that act as a back stop.

Personally, I’m moving away from a pre-written funnel and sending more broadcast emails. It’s taken a while to pluck up the courage to do this and I’m not 100% there yet, so there are days when the emails don’t get sent, but I’m getting better response to the messages I send out.

Another plus point with broadcast emails is that you don’t get a lot of people who’ve reached the end of your pre-written series and then never hear from you again.

That happens a lot – think of the lists you’ve signed up to, got the first few messages and then silence. It’s dumb paying your autoresponder company for names that you’ll neevr mail again!

Again, test.

If you’re organised and happy to write emails in advance, a message series will work.

If you prefer to be more spontaneous, broadcast emails are probably better.

Or a mix of both.

If you’d like to know more about building a list, you can check this out.

And if you’d like to know how to easily create a giveaway product that’s high value and unique to you, click here.