Netalot

The concept of a free society has been at the core of some heated discussions and a recent book by Chris Anderson, he of the long-tail theory fame. Why would the price tag of $0.00 be so powerful?

So should you offer something for free? If you are a new internet marketing business person the answer to that is a fairly resounding ‘yes’. You need to offer something for free. This could be a reward for people signing up to your opt-in list or just to create an awareness of your business.

What should you offer? Preferably something that hasn’t cost you more than just your time. Make sure that whatever it is has plenty of your branding on it so that everybody who gets hold of it knows who it is from.

Use it to not only build an opt-in list but also to spread your name and reputation. Pick and choose bits of your best stuff that you have written. Add some graphics and convert into a PDF for easy distribution.

A free guide or info book will get people to talk about you, admire you, check out your credibility and on the whole spread good vibes about you.

Why would the internet encourage a ‘free’ economy? The main reason for this is because you as an internet marketer have no street credibility. You have no history of delivering good products. You are an unknown quantity.

How are people going to know whether the content you produce is worth paying for if you are a totally unknown entity? They don’t. They have no yardstick against which they can judge you as they have seen absolutely nothing of yours besides a few articles on a blog or an online presence in social media.

How does the customer judge whether spending their money is the right move? With great difficulty.

Why would you require something to be given away for free? You would if there is other competing material available for free. This is what is happening to the online media. Newspapers are not able to sell subscriptions to their content because there is so much competing information available.

Why pay if there is all of it there for you to tap into at no cost to yourself? Wouldn’t make sense to anybody to pay for something that they can arrange to have delivered to their RSS reader for free.

What about other online marketers? Do they face the same situation? Only if they are a totally unknown entity. Then they need to offer their product for free. This is because they need to build credibility.

There are internet marketers who sell their books, courses, online content for a fortune. They sell it at close on a thousand dollars or for some quite substantial subscription per month. How do they manage this? Quite easily. They have built credibility and have become an authority in their field.

This takes a lot of time and effort to accomplish. It is the internet marketer who is dazzled by promises of instant wealth who thinks he is able to sell an eBook for much money without establishing his authority who finds the going tough.

You need to build your business. As in the real world, you have to earn your reputation and prove that your products are worth buying. Without this, you might as well give away your products for free. Nobody is going to buy them.