What do you giveaway to your prospects?
The era of using anything like a giveaway online is over.
Most marketers are still offering substandard, poor quality reports…
Are you doing this?
Believe it or not, about 95% of all content being offered isn’t worth the digital ink used to print it.
How do you make sure you are in the 5%?
Before we get into it, I want to share a little bit about me.
I’m not crazy about shopping, but often I will do the grocery shopping. It never fails when I’m in the store there are a couple of booths set up offering samples.
I don’t know about you, but I like free samples. Let me taste a bit of that or a bit of this and who knows maybe I’ll buy some if it delights my pallet.
This is especially true when I’m hungry. Never go grocery shopping when hungry…
you’ll come home more food than you went for and in my case, things I wouldn’t have bought otherwise.
Why just the other day I made the mistake of sampling some potstickers. You know,
the little half-moon shaped appetizers. I was hungry and they looked so good. Try the one I did, and then another. Without a thought, 2 bags of those buggers went to my cart.
Now they sit in the freezer waiting to be eaten. It’ll probably take a couple of months before they are all gone.
You may wonder what this has to do with creating content for your business.
Think about this, heading into the grocery, I had a list of things that I needed to pick up.
The potstickers were not on that list.
Why did I buy them you might ask?
The store had set up the station to attract people to sample the goods. The idea was if a person sampled the product and enjoyed the taste, there was a good chance they would buy some.
And…. It worked.
Creating Content that Converts Readers to Customers
Now, let’s talk about how this fits into creating content that will help convert freebie seekers into customers for your business.
How do you look at the free giveaway content you provide?
Is it just something you just slap together or some PLR that you pulled out of the storage bin?
Content is information and should offer value to the reader…
either conveying knowledge or experience that you have that pertains to your prospects.
When you look at the giveaway, it is an ethical bribe with one purpose.
Now, that purpose may be different for each type of giveaway, but…
the bottom line is that it is to have the person complete an action in response to receiving the giveaway.
Rather than just creating some free content to giveaway, you want to craft your content to give value and to warm the person, so they know, like and trust you.
Provide good valuable advice so that the next logical action for the person to take is to purchase the product you are promoting.
Your free content should presell and must have a clear “Call to Action”.
What content should be used for your ethical bribe?
No one wants to read a long-winded novel that rambles on and on.
Maybe you’ve got one of the free giveaways that were like a hundred 140 pages long.
The ones that I’ve gotten like that hit the digital garbage pile never to be opened.
There may be great stuff in it, but really, who cares. There’s not enough time in the day to read something like that.
What about the hour and forever videos that some marketers use.
They are supposed to get you excited about some product that will probably only be around for a short time.
Again, most of them are snoozers. 10 minutes into them you are off thinking about something else and not even paying attention to what’s being said.
Ok, your free content should be focused on a single issue or pain point that your reader is dealing with.
It should be useful, but it shouldn’t provide all the answers.
What Process Should You Use?
Following in the footsteps of great marketers, there is a 3 step process that should get the job done.
All you are trying to do is move people from “Freebee seeker to the customer”. Take them from a browser, consumer of free stuff, to a card-carrying paid member of your tribe.
Rather than trying to close the deal immediately, you want to move them towards the end game, one step at a time.
Here’s how easy it should be:
Plan out Your Objective
What’s your purpose for the content you are going to be giving away?
Where are you leading your prospect with the content?
Choose a Product to Promote
This should be pretty easy, especially if it’s one of your products. If you are working on an affiliate offer, then know which one you are promoting.
Decide on Your Method
Choose the approach that you want to use for this campaign?
Here are a few to think about:
Give away the first part and sell the rest. This will work if it is your product.
Offer the first chapter or two – this is something you see done on Amazon all the time. The little sign at the top of a book that says “Take a Look Inside”
Talk about what needs to be done in your free content and then sell a product that shows how to do it. This approach can be very useful when promoting an affiliate product or your product.
There are other approaches you can take, but this will give you something to think about.
What format Should be Used to Deliver Your Free Content?
As you are probably aware there are many different ways to deliver your free content.
Because people like to consume content in divergent manners, when possible, you want to offer it in more than one format.
You may have an eBook that you are working with. You can take the eBook and turn into an audio or a video to provide variety.
If you are working with software, maybe a lite version that only offers a very basic version of the product.
You get the idea.
Finally, let me sum this up…
You want to create content that is valuable but doesn’t provide everything. The content must have a specific goal in mind.
The content should be relevant to your niche and addresses a key point.
There MUST be a “Call to Action” that will lead the prospect to the product you are promoting.
To learn more about creating content that will help you convert more people into customers, click here and check out “Free to Fee”.
I hope you found this informative and helpful.
If you found this helpful, please share it. Be sure to leave a comment below and let me know what you think.
