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I is for (free) Information

Guest post by: Helen Dowling

Article Overview: This week, I wanted to address a question that I get asked by many small businesses. How much information is appropriate to give away for free? Most of us get asked to give away a fair amount of information – from information that we choose to provide (like this article) to people contacting us and asking us to answer questions for them to people blatantly meeting us and picking our brains.

I is for (free) Information

This week, I wanted to address a question that I get asked by many small businesses. How much information is appropriate to give away for free? Most of us get asked to give away a fair amount of information - from information that we choose to provide (like this article) to people contacting us and asking us to answer questions for them to people blatantly meeting us and picking our brains.

So, what's ok to give away for free and what's not?

Well, the answer is that it's very much up to you and your business. What's ok to give away in my business isn't necessarily right for your business and vice versa.

I have tried both extremes - giving away lots of free information and then not giving anything away at all. What I can tell you is that not giving anything away at all definitely doesn't work for me and neither does giving away too much.

What's important for me is that I create boundaries which I'm happy with, but if people go beyond these, then I will crack down on them pretty hard.

My boundaries are that I will write articles and make these available on my website and on other resources; I will happily produce a free newsletter for people and then I will create free resources for people to download off of my site. I will also answer questions for people as long as they don't take me very long and provide free consultations.

But, these ‘free' things do provide me with a benefit - articles get people visiting the site and hopefully downloading free information; newsletters result in people booking onto the workshops and so on.

That's quite enough for me - thank you very much. Anything else I do expect people to pay for and I think that's fair enough.

However, I do not like people abusing these boundaries. I've had a couple of people recently asking me more than their fair share of questions and I've quickly stopped this by saying that this is their last free question and if they want any more it will be charged at £x per question. Strangely enough, they haven't been back since.

I also now refuse to meet people on a face to face basis unless we've firstly had a chat on the phone to determine whether there is any benefit to us meeting each other. I've wasted many, many hours finding out there is no benefit at all.

As long as you put in place boundaries for yourself where you know what's ok to give away for free and what's not...and...you have a clear strategy where your free information leads to ultimately getting business, you should be fine.

But if you feel that your free information is being abused or that you're being asked to provide more than your fair share, crack down on this instantly and put in place some rules so that your time doesn't get abused.

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Article Tags: free information, people taking advantage, people wanting free advice



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Re: What Sells Online? - I agree with topeyinka, Information products(how to's) are whats selling right now.
Re: Quick Ways To Utilize SEO Effectively - There are many different types of content: blog content, website content, newsletter content, audio & video content, the list can be endless. I'll just list 10 types of website content here: * Index/Introduction * Product Descriptions * Testimonials * Reviews * Resources * How-to Information * Downloads * Contact Information * Navigation/Site Map About/Company Info Anchor text as the others have said is the hyperlinked words on a web page - the words you click on when you click a link. Anchor text is important because it tells the search engines what the page is about. Used wisely, it boosts your rankings in search engines, especially in Google.If you use "click here" as the words people are going to click on, you're telling people the page is about the subject "click here", which is not the phrase you want to rank highly for, the text you need to use is a keyword that you have chosen for your website, blog or article. Take care, Carol
Re: How Much Of Ourselves Should We Give Away...? - People love free stuffs a lot and sometimes most of the free loafers are not always buyer,but this should not stop you from giving away free stuff. Give as much as possible and some of them one day will buy from you and you should be abler to monetize the free stuff by loading them with links and advertising your product inside
Re: Get Improved Sales Optimization - Great Information Jason! As per the online business perspective, every user looking for relevant information and user friendly website structure. You can also provide 24hr customer support to make your customer reliable and easy.
New topics - Thanks Evan. A Human Resources section would be great. Information and templates for hiring the right people, training, retention ( always an interesting an useful topic), conducting performance appraisals, information on discipline and documentation, conflict resolution, exit interview information, etc. This would be really useful because most small companies don't have set HR guidelines/policies. Thanks!


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