We hear a lot about ‘giving’ and sharing openly and freely but so often we bend the rules. More often than not, in fact, the rules of openly giving – especially online – are greyed-out in favour of building the list.
Please, take my free information… Seriously, take it, it’s free. Completely free. I don’t want anything from you. It’s yours… No, seriously, put your credit card away… I want something far more valuable than a few dollars; I want your email address!
But I thought it was free?
Challenge to all the “list builders” out there: Try freely giving. If you’re going to give, then give. If you’re going to sell; then sell. But think about it; for every 10 people who give you their email address, a hundred more say “no” and go find your ‘free’ information elsewhere – for free.
Wouldn’t you rather them associate that high quality brilliant and useful information with you and come back to you on the back of finding immense value in the ‘free giveaway’ than because you hounded them for 17 years with email after email and the only time they return to your website is to finally unsubscribe from your annoying newsletter that they’ve been putting up with out of a deep down obligation that they should be receiving it because you ‘gave’ them a free bit of info way back when…
If you say you want people to have your free info, then give it.
Giving is a one-way transaction. The ‘giver’ gives – freely.
Exchanging your freebie for access to my email box is not giving; that’s an exchange, a trade… I came looking for some free info, not to collect newsletter subscriptions.
Why not try it for a week or two? See how many people download your free report if you remove the ‘subscribe’ box.
We’ve all done it; looked at a subscribe form and thought about it… and decided “no”… then moved on to find the information elsewhere without trading your email address for yet another press of the delete button every morning.
Put a subscribe option inside the free giveaway. If your content is of such brilliant high standard and value, the people genuinely interested will want more and will come back and subscribe. You’ll end up with a higher calibre of readership and, most likely, more responsive to your future “giveaways”.
If the information you’re ‘giving’ is, in fact, as good and as valuable as you say it is, people will want more of it and will come back for more; they will follow you on Twitter, they will hook up with you on Facebook and they will happily subscribe to your weekly or monthly newsletters and, all being well, will eventually become a customer or recommend someone else who will become a customer.
Think about it; are you giving, or trading? Compare that with what you say you’re doing.
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