Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Giving Away the Farm
I recently inventoried my site and all the content I have created over the past seven years and found a surprising wealth of content I could use for both free giveaways and paid products.

I've given away plenty of free giveaways. Where I could have done better is in thinking through how I was going to leverage them.

Any time you create a free giveaway, you should have in mind specifically how to leverage it. More and more as I create content nowadays, I look beyond the specific content I am creating to see how I can later repurpose it either for free giveaways or paid content of a larger scope.

I strive to keep in mind how to make things both benefit the recipient and reimburse me for my efforts -- an exchange of value.

When I first ventured online with my business nearly five years ago, I did so with determination to give away more things for free than anyone else did. I would offer businesses free hosting, free domain names, free website assessments, free this, free that, free everything.

I planned to offer everything for free with the hope that somewhere down the line, somehow, someone would pay me to do something for them. But I didn't really know what that something would be.

I figured, "Well, I have a well-rounded background in Internet marketing. I can do just about anything they need done." Aside from a huge flaw in trying to market too broadly, I still had no plan about how I would make my living off of giving away everything I had for free.

As it stands right now, I get plenty of comments from people who visit my site about how much valuable information I give away for free. That's fine. I'm glad to have that reputation.

Reputation, however, doesn't buy groceries. To stay in business, you need more than just having people think well of you.

It's better to have them think well of you because you provide them with something better than they can get for free. It's better even if they have to exchange some money at a rate that they still feel is a bargain for what they got in return.

It's easy to give things away and hope for the best. The true value of free giveaways is in planning out how you will leverage them.
Jeff

Labels: online business, successful business