Recently I signed up for a list to get a freebie. This was an Internet marketing guy’s site and I joined because I’d read some good articles there. I didn’t sign up just for the freebies, but they were a nice bonus. The freebies consisted of 30 free e-books on marketing and SEO.

They looked basic, but there were 30! Who wouldn’t get excited about that? Talk about value.

I eagerly downloaded them and started in on the first. And it was absolute garbage. Written terribly, it had all of this vague stuff about how just thinking about wealth made you wealthy. The next one wasn’t much better. It was about online marketing but it jumped from topic to topic erratically and didn’t really tell you much about any one of them.

I quickly realized all of these freebies stank and then I started thinking twice about the marketer whose list I’d signed up for. I read the first few messages and they were alright, but I thought, ‘What kind of a guy would give away such a lousy freebie?’ He lost my trust and I ended up unsubscribing.

Free Shouldn’t Be Cheap…

I realize now that he missed one of the most important fundamentals of marketing – freebies work only if they’re good.

Everybody tells you that you should give away freebies as incentives to join your list. But if you give away worthless freebies, you could be doing more damage than good. Just imagine if you went into the supermarket and they had free samples of green mouldy bread that you’d throw away for health reasons if it were in your cabinets. I’ll be you’d head to another store.

Free samples have to be good, because:

– They give a taste of the quality you offer.

– They’re usually the first contact a prospect has with you.

– They’re supposed to build trust and authority.

– You’re going for the ‘wow’ factor.

– They’ll share and tell other people.

A freebie is a kind of ‘thank you’ for signing up. If it’s junk, that doesn’t say thanks at all.

…But Freebies Can Be Inexpensive!

Why would a marketer pass off such garbage on their visitors? Because they’re cheap and they don’t realize how easy it is to create value. Usually, the free stuff you give away is a digital product. We dress them up as ‘e-books’ but they’re actually PDF files, made at no cost to you. The only cost is the time you spend putting it together.

A great way to create a free e-book or report with minimal work (but still great value) is to repurpose content. Take a whole bunch of your blog posts, put them together with a table of contents, and hire a good writer to rewrite them. Take a few and mix them together (a paragraph from one, a paragraph from another). All you need to do is some copy and paste, and then have it rewritten. Just make sure that the end product is valuable.

Here’s another cool idea – identify five well-known movers and shakers in your niche and interview them. Find 5 top-name Internet marketers and ask for about 15 minutes of their time. Record an interview with them and put those interviews together into a download package. They get exposure and you get wonderful content. And your subscribers get something truly awesome (it also looks like you hob-knob with the big names, even if you never knew them before).

These are just two simple ideas that cost you minimal time and work. Get creative and think of your own, but whatever you do, don’t give away garbage. Your freebie should be a tour de force and impress the heck out of everybody who downloads it.

Tony