Free = A Bigger Audience? Not Necessarily…
It’s easier to give something away than it is to sell it right? That was the thinking behind the distribution of my ebook that I summarised yesterday but today I read something that made me think that I might have got it all wrong. Is is possible that I could have got more downloads by selling the book instead of giving it away?
It’s Not Just About Me (or You)
In my summary of the marketing of my ebook I concluded that my own contribution only accounted for perhaps 10% of the results achieved. The other 90% was all down to other people. The vast majority of the traffic that I received promoting the ebook came from other bloggers promoting it on my behalf. They did not have to do this as there was nothing in it for them - and that is where I might have got it all wrong!
My initial thinking was that if I charged for the book that nobody would promote it for me. In fact there were a couple of people who didn’t realise it was a free book at first and told me they would only mention it on their blog if I paid their advertising rates. However, they quickly changed their minds when they realised it was free so this enforced my belief that it would be easier to promote a free book than a paid one.
Money Can Be Shared
Today I have been catching up on one of the membership sites that I belong to called Teaching Sells. This is about creating interactive learning environments and I have been reading about business models. One of the models suggested was to make the paid course very cheap and then make the majority of the money off back-end affiliate sales.
One of the questions that was posed, was if the real revenue was to be generated from affiliate sales, why not make the initial course (that promotes the affiliate) free instead of charging for it? Surely it would be much easier to get more prospects if you gave the course away for free? This is the exact mindset that I had when it came to my ebook.
I hope Brian and Tony don’t mind if I quote a line from their course….
By creating a course worth paying for, you give yourself an advantage that other affiliate marketers don’t have. People and organizations that already have traffic are highly motivated to promote your paid course when you give them 75% to 100% of the course fee.
And there it is! By allowing other people to become affiliates for your product, suddenly there is something in it for them to promote you. I was very lucky that ShoeMoney mentioned my ebook as he is a very busy guy and doesn’t talk about ebooks very much on his blog. I also wrote to some other big names who didn’t get back to me. I wonder if the situation would have been different if my ebook had a cover price which they stood to gain a large percentage of the commission from?
It’s All About Leverage
I have heard people talking about leverage so many times and yet for some reason it just didn’t sink in until today when I read that paragraph in the Teaching Sells course. The idea behind using leverage to sell products is that you don’t try and go it alone - you leverage the audiences that other people have access to.
For instance, there is another UK marketer called Lee McIntyre who gained quite a lot of publicity when he burst onto the scene with an ebook about eBay. It wasn’t so much that book that got him the publicity, it was the fact that he was able to make over $7k in profits in 30 days starting from nothing - no RSS readers, no mailing list, nothing. How did he do it? He leveraged the power of other people’s audiences. They promoted his ebook for him (getting a nice commission) and thus it got promoted to a massive audience that he did not have access to on his own. Lee has now started a membership site called Standing Start Profits which shows other people how to do the same thing!
I think one of the problems that many newcomers (including myself) make is that they try to go it alone. The thinking is that you need to build a website and get readers and get traffic etc so you can sell something from it. This is limited thinking, especially when there are already many people working in your niche with well established blog audiences and mailing lists full of people who just might be interested in your product.
Paid Content Has a Higher Perceived Value
Here is something else that I didn’t really consider at first. In the eyes of many people “free = crap” so when you charge money for something the perceived value goes up. Of course this is not always true as many free products are very good and many paid products are total rubbish!
There is another subtle advantage for charging for content also. If somebody has paid for an info product, they are far more inclined to actually work through it to get their money’s worth from it. For example, many people have seen my list of free Internet marketing related ebooks and yet I wonder how many people have actually read them all? Well, I published it and I haven’t even read all the books on that list!
When something is free people often ask the question, “what’s the catch?” and they assume that their an ulterior motive to the content - usually there is! My ebook was no exception as of course I wanted people to read it and then sign up to BlueHost via my affiliate link. The trouble is that I suspect many people just skimmed the book and didn’t take much real notice of it simply because it was free.
I said in my summary post that I had an estimated overall conversion rate of just 0.2%. This is the ratio of people who signed up to my chosen affiliate out of those who downloaded the book. I wonder if I had charged for it and then asked affiliates to promote it for me if I would have seen a higher conversion rate? I’ll never know.
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Hunter Nuttall
March 11, 2008
I just happened to be thinking about some of these points recently. It occurred to me that a $100/hr lawyer is often seen as either too cheap or too expensive, depending on your point of view. But a $500/hr lawyer? They sound amazing! Throw in some actual credentials and an affiliate program, and they’ll sound even more amazing.
Hunter Nuttall’s last blog post..Learn More, Study Less: Expand Your Mind With Holistic Learning