Giving out free information is something that Yaro Starak talked about in his recent post and preview video for the Become a Blogger Premium course. Yaro calls free information release, like giving out free report, one of the best ways to do Impact Marketing.
I’ve been gathering quite a library of free downloadable eBooks during the last couple of months. One example being the free downloadable eBook The Roadmap to Become a Blogger by Yaro and Gideon Shalwick. I’ve been getting these free downloadable eBooks in form of PDF-files from various blogs and websites and there’s a huge amount of information in them and the free eBooks are doing great things for the bloggers who give them out..
Impact Marketing Techniques
In addition to your great content in form of blog posts, Yaro recommends to create more powerful, valuable content in form of:
- Free downloadable eBooks
- Podcasting
- Videos
He calls these the Impact Marketing Techniques. Yaro himself has these used techniques to drive loads of new traffic to his own 6-figure income blog. So I guess there’s something in this for all of us. And it’s no rocket science.
But Yaro is right, the power of these techniques has been proven over and over again in the blogosphere and Internet marketing. If you go to any better than average blog, you’ll quickly notice they’re offering something for you for free, usually free eBook to download after opt-in for email list or a free eCourse delivered through email.
And that strategy is one of the main factors why those blogs and bloggers are doing as good as they are. Giving out stuff, downloadable eBooks, information, even hard goods, like mp3 players or printed books, is the modern way of marketing. You’ve seen it in TV too, just check Oprah or Ellen giving DVDs, CDs, or something as big as cars to their audience. It’s about marketing. But on the other hand it’s about sharing and making people happy. Everyone loves free stuff!
Why Giving Out Free eBooks is Worth It?
In general, people don’t like being sold to.. You don’t want anyone to sell you anything, instead, you want them to serve you what you need, right? When you go to cafe, you want the coffee you usually get, but you don’t necessary want hear about the specials of the week. When you go to the grocery store to buy the bananas you love (no monkey jokes!), you don’t need anyone to come in and try to convince you eat apples instead.
Most of the time you come to a blog or website for the first time, you’re looking for information. The free report draws attention if it answers the need you have, and increases the chances you’ll come back to the blog in question or maybe even buy something you need because of reading the free eBook.
For example, “Joe” runs into a blog about car he’s driving, spots a free “fix-it-yourself” eBook on the blog, downloads it, reads it, and starts considering to fix or polish his car a bit with the instructions he now have. If the eBook happens to show him where to get discounted parts for the car, Joe is very likely to check those parts, right? The Result: Joe gets cheap parts and most likely the person who created the eBook gets her commission from the store selling the parts.
Everybody wins. And that’s the power of free downloadable eBooks.
How much the free eBook costs per visitor?
Let’s say you write and produce an eBook and use $1000 dollars for it. And let’s assume that over time you give it out to 10000 visitors you get to your blog or website. The eBook has costs you 10 cents per visitor, not much, when you compare it to paid traffic from pay-per-click advertising for example.
If 1% visitors turn and choose to join/buy/order whatever you offer, the free downloadable eBook you created has probably more than paid itself back.
This is just one way to “calculate” the return of investment for the eBook, but the best thing about the free eBook you created is that after you’ve produced it once, it will continue to do good things for you, even after several years.
When you think about it, giving out free trials ain’t anything new (you know, the first time is free, shareware software, 14-day trials etc.), so it is no surprise that the most successful bloggers do it. Take John Chow dot com for example, and see John Chow’s an hour long presentation about the success he has had with his blog (and John gives out free eBook too!)
But now, go see the video I mentioned, which has been released on Yaro’s blog entrepreneurs-journey.com, How To Rapidly Grow Your Blog Traffic, as sneak-peak of the content you get from Yaro’s and Gideon’s Become a Blogger Premium course.
Consider all this and what you learn from the video when you’re thinking about ways to improve your business, blog or online success in general.
