(How to Make Money Giving Stuff Away)
If you click the link at the bottom of this article, you’ll find free courses you can take from Entrepreneur magazine.
For example, as I write this there are free courses in…
- Learn the basics of video editing
- How to get unstuck
- Learning the basics of artificial intelligence
- Get crystal clear on your goals
- Learning the basics of SEO
- The social media marketing two course bundle
- And a whole lot more
There are also free 14-day trials of other courses, too.
Why are they offering these courses for free?
Because one of the best ways to get new customers is to let them sample the goods for free. You get them hooked and then they become paying customers.
This is why free trials and $1 trials work so well. When the entry fee is little to zero, people are far more likely to jump in because the perceived risk is nil. Then once they fall in love with the product, they become paying customers, sometimes for many years.
Think of drugs… your friendly neighborhood drug dealer will offer a free sample to get you hooked (or at least that’s how it works on TV).
My question to you is are you using this method in your business? Are you offering free and $1 trials to get new customers hooked on your products and services?
Or if you are strictly an affiliate marketer, do you promote products with a low entry fee and high payouts for as long as they remain a customer? Because in my opinion this technique is too simple, too powerful and too profitable not to use.
And here’s something else worth noticing about the free offers from Entrepreneur: To access some of these free courses, Entrepreneur is going to ask you share the page with your friends on social media, thereby creating more traffic to their page for free.
This alone could drive enough traffic to sustain the page. Give away courses, people share your pages on social media bringing in new customers to sign up for free courses and share them on social media, who then sign up… you see how this can self-perpetuate your traffic.
Of course, Entrepreneur uses other methods to drive traffic to its free page, such as advertising and social media.
WAIT! THERE’S MORE!
If you don’t take a marketing lesson from this Entrepreneur page then check your pulse because I think you’re dead.
Scrolling further down the page, what do I see?
Free trials to software, free content from other channels, free this and that and WOW! I’m guessing that nearly ALL of this is free trials to PAID products and services.
Again, get your customers to TRY something, get them hooked and then charge them – preferably on a recurring basis.
Do you have a “Free” page on your site? If not, you might want to start building one NOW.
You can offer your own freebies to entice people to join your various segmented lists, as well as offering free trials and samples of paid products.
Offer the first chapter of your book for free, the first three lessons from your course for free and so forth. Set up deals with other product owners to offer samples of their products, as well as offering free trials to software and so forth.
In fact (Talk about burying the lead!) you could build an ENTIRE business around giving stuff away for free to turn traffic into buying customers.
Think about this… how hard would it be for you to advertise free stuff? Who doesn’t want free? A certain percentage will come to your free stuff page and join one or more of your lists. Another percentage will try something and end up buying the full version. Either way, as long as you’ve got sustainable traffic, you’ve got a business where you GIVE STUFF AWAY and make money.
Not bad!