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When Free Is Just Too Expensive

Written by: John Jantsch

Article Overview: Offering free stuff as a marketing tactic is an accepted practice in most industries.

When Free Is Just Too Expensive

Offering free stuff as a marketing tactic is an accepted practice in most industries.



However, in most cases, the party offering the free information or bait is actually interested in charging for it. Even if that charge is the exchange of a name and email address. So, for some, free isn't free and may be too expensive. Take the "free" evaluation. Free in this case might mean that the recipient must take time, accept an appointment and sit through veiled sales presentation.



Free is one of the most powerful marketing words on the planet but, what makes free really free is trust. In order to use this tactic effectively the recipient must trust that you won't abuse their permission. If you have no previous relationship with a prospect you cannot go overboard assuring them that you won't misuse their information. You must actively sell your free information by communicating just how valuable it really is.



Taking steps to build trust with testimonials and referrals, providing great free information with no strings attached and being consistent is how you lower the barrier to free. Once this is done effectively, and you haven't abused the trust you've earned, you can move to steps that provide greater education and demand greater involvement.



In fact, now your free information might actually be something they would pay for.

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  2011 Free Sample Marketing Trends
  “It is too expensive”
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Article Tags: appointment, education, free evaluation, free stuff, marketing, powerful marketing words, recipient, referrals, relationship, sales presentation, tactic, taking steps, testimonials



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Library to Meet - Has anyone ever tried the Public Library? they have meeting rooms there too and Toronto has over 30 locations with Free Wireless Internet.
Re: Internet Marketing is the best business in the world - [quote="WhyNot":ms4wci6i]You stated that you can get your product in front of millions of people within 5 minutes using PPC. What is PPC? I am considering writing an e-book, how can I best market it? [/quote:ms4wci6i] It is Pay per click advertising. You have google, yahoo, MSN and other sites that offer it. Your ad shows up along site of the search results for the key words you specify and on other sites as "sponsered results". You could test the market with PPC (track where you get your hits from;keywords and so forth and use SEO to get FREE traffic), or Free methods like article marketing.. Either way you have to [u:ms4wci6i]know what your doing [/u:ms4wci6i](supply,demand, niche, [u:ms4wci6i]Highly[/u:ms4wci6i] targeted prospects, Location specifics [country, state,city,zip code,] etc.). Oh yeah and you have to have money. Because you are going to lose money if you are a beginner. Man I need to include this post on my blog...LOL Been a while since I been here. Just got this notification in my email and figured I'd help you out. Been working on my SEO. To answer your other question there are LOTs of other Free ways to advertise/market. For example Forum marketing Yahoo Answers (great for SEO to) But be careful not to bet banned. SEO of course Search Engine Optimization US Free Leads Article Marketing YouTube Twitter Yahoo blogs Blogging (blogger,squidoo, hub pages) Myspace Facebook Newspaper ads Craigslist etc. The list goes on. These are just a few I though of off the top of my head. Now that I think of it I need to start doing more myself. ideasuniversity had wrote quit a few good post on marketing/promotion, viral effects and such. You should check them out. Just a word of advice, make sure you have the write niche first. Anyway, hope this helps.


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