Offering a free product WORKS

Hey good work! Free stuff always get me lots of opt-ins.

How many email opt-ins is your rent?

How many Facebook likes do you spend on groceries every week?

We have all these people coming in here every week saying "I have a big list and I make no money" or "I have a lot of fans and I make no money," because you can't run a business on opt-ins and likes.

Now, that said: opt-ins and likes are indications that people are listening to you, and that they like what they hear. But you have to be saying more than "here's some free stuff." Everybody likes "here's some free stuff." Saying you like it and volunteering to get more of it isn't worth squat.

Find something to say. Something you believe in. Something that leads in a direction that you can, I don't know, maybe sell stuff.

The people who leave your list - and they will, once they realise this isn't the "free stuff forever" club - didn't belong there in the first place and you didn't really want them anyway, even if they say nasty things on their way out the door.

The people who stay are your real audience. Appreciate them.

Congratulations! Wanna increase your optins? Stop calling your creation an ebook and start calling it a guide or special report. People perceive ebooks as cheap, a dime a dozen. But a guide or course or tutorial, now that's something special. Try it and see.

Freebies certainly work. But the challenge is to convert the freebie seekers to buyers...so perhaps you want to offer a low-cost upsell that relates to the freebie, in such a way that their freebie feels incomplete without the upsell to complete it.

Of course, everyone wants something for nothing!

But yes, it' using that ploy to actually make money.

For sure you should always use an opt in gift to entice your prospects, people are reluctant to sign up for newsletters alone.

Secondly if you are in the IM, MM niche you can easily add subscribers to your list in the hundreds just by participating in JV Giveaways.

The fact you have gone to the effort to create your own gift is always a good advantage, most JV Contributors just use rehashed PLR, which people are accustomed to, you will have a much better sign up rate just by hosting your own gift with them.

The leads from Giveaways aren't great but, you can use those leads to start doing adswaps with JV partners and really explode your list size.

I really like this idea as well as the tips as well. I did an e-story (in parts) on my website just to see if my visitors were interested in it. I got a decent amount of downloads so I think I'll move on to part 2 and see what happens before I create a free book to create lists.

If free is relevant then it can help build a list that could have the ability to convert. Say for example you have a men's entertainment site focusing on all things Bro (sports, viral videos, music, movies, etc).

You would want to give away your free newsletter or free updates that relate to the topics you write about on your site.

You could have that optin on your sidebar in your blog.

Now if you introduce something unrelated to our core topics, say like your make money e-book. You'd have that connecting to a post or article about how to make money and you would collect optins to your list of those interested in that topic.

I noticed on your men's site your ask for a newsletter and e-book sign-up. People who want your newsletter are genuinely interested in your info, but probably not interested in your how-to make money e-book.

You don't know because their e-mail goes to the same list. If you segment your lists then you can target info and products to each list.

Like CDarklock mentions the size of a list just doesn't matter if you can't convert at some point.

An example of how the process would work is that you write a post introducing the e-book, then link to a landing page, where you would collect the e-mail for your e-book product.

Or you could just have a landing page and place a link to it in your menu or from your sidebar.

The idea is to funnel your traffic to what exactly interests them and give them only one option to move forward, that's to optin. If they don't want to optin that have to hit the back button.

If you segment your lists and capture folks who are genuinely interested in particular product, free or paid, you'll convert like crazy over the long haul.

It's a good idea to have an upsell ready at the get go, because you can lay a link in the first responder sent at signup. That's the e-mail that gets a 100% open rate if prospects are serious about your stuff.

Testing is the key to find out if free is good for your objective or not.

Hi Iam pretty new to this too I have a list of about 500 built from a free IM ebook libraryall about SEO,CPA, FB etc would you be interested in an adswap?

I read all the posts it's great advice but we have all got to start out some way, accelerated learning curve.

Excellent idea. That's what I do for most of my clients, as well. Offer a free consultation and more often than not they end up retaining me.

The only list that is worth anything is your buyer's list.

A list of your best friends, people you gave something for free, people who put their card in a fishbowl, people who clicked a "like this" button or people who ask you questions are relatively worthless.

I down loaded your free e-book from e-junkie and read it just now. Please make it longer than five pages. Yeah, like maybe nine. Also, add some crazy pics. Helps to spice it up. Text is a bit dry for me. All in all, great job bro, and keep the hits coming yo!