It is well known and well established marketing lore that before you can expect to receive you better give first! In other words if you wish for visitors to your blog to happily open up their wallets to you and purchase that which you are peddling (or promoting) then you need to give them a reason to over the next guy…who by the way just in case you have forgotten is a mere mouse click away. The whole point of this free giveaway is to establish you as a benevolent expert in the eyes of your prospective purchasers. You see by doing that you are basically killing two birds with one stone (hey its not my saying, blame the English language for the deaths of those two birds).

Make Them Feel Indebted To You!

Firstly, by giving away your excellent free report or free ebook (we are assuming that it is indeed excellent and chock full of useful information and not some filler-fluff package designed to build you subscriber list) you will make them feel obligated to you in some way. This is the foundation of what is known as The Law of Reciprocation; the good ole give and take. When you give away a free report or free ebook you are actually employing The Law of Reciprocation knowingly or unknowingly as the case may be.

Show Them The Expert That You Are!

Secondly, the whole point of that free report or free ebook is to show them that you truly are an expert. After all, the next guy peddling or promoting exactly the same products that you are is just a mouse click away so you have to give visitors to your blog good reason to actually buy from you. And that’s the second point of your free report, to establish your credentials as an expert. That’s the beauty of the internet; with a little careful packaging you can pawn yourself off as a real live expert. Obviously to pull off the whole expert thing your free report (as mentioned previously) better have useful information to the people who have actually gone to the trouble to supply you with their email addresses so that they can get access to downloading it.

Don’t Forget To Get Something In Return For Your Free Report!

Always bear in mind that you are giving away that free report not just because you are a nice guy and love giving things away to total strangers, but because you wish to establish yourself as an expert as well as to get future access to your visitors. Why do you need future access to visitors who land on your blog? Well I’m guessing you don’t want visitors to your blog to bounce right off it like most meteorites bounce harmlessly off into space once they encounter the earth’s atmosphere (luckily for us eartlings).

Well that’s precisely what would happen to most visitors to your blog, because it is the very rare individual who purchases a product on the first exposure! Most people need multiple occurrences of exposure to a product before they actually purchase it. And let’s be real how often have we gotten to a blog that we loved, filed away a mental note or promise to ourselves to remember that blog’s address before clicking off to the next beckoning online distraction. And what usually happens when we try to remember the URL of that blog…yup you guessed it, a big fat zero! It is just so easy to get distracted and to forget online, and bear in mind if it can happen to you-a sharp savvy marketer with your wits about you-how much easier and often it must happen to the average and clueless web surfer!

Put simply, make sure that before you give people access to your free report they give you their email address. This is a simple quid pro quo or you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-your back transaction. And before you start over-thinking the issue by convincing yourself you will get more people to download your ebook if they don’t have to give you their email addresses stop that train of thinking right now! A freeloader offline is a freeloader online and is a complete waste of your time and effort in both scenarios!

EBook Is Now A Dirty Word !

Have you noticed how most people don’t entitle their free downloads anymore as free ebooks? These days what used to be commonly referred to as a free ebook is now called:  a free report, a free manual, a free blueprint or free tutorial. In fact even the term free report is in rapid decline. Okay let me cut the suspense and tell you why savvy marketers no longer entitle their giveaway reports as free ebooks. It’s because-drumroll please-the word ebook has become associated with inferior, useless, throwaway products as opposed to useful giveaways.

You see as more and more people gravitated online to make their fortunes from the internet marketing theater, so did the number of free ebook reports increase exponentially. A huge number of those free ebooks were nothing more than a string of grammatically incorrect and badly written sentences slapped together into a cohesive whole designed to house and furnish a long list of affiliate links.

Naturally before long the so-called free ebook report had pretty much lost any reciprocal value it once possessed. People began to understand that the free ebook was designed for one thing and that was to enable the author to get access to their email address and also to enrich that very same author through the slew of liberally sprinkled affiliate links embedded throughout the pages of that free ebook.

The Rise Of Spamscriber Mail!

From experience the biggest problem I found associated with trying to glean new and useful information from free reports was the manner in which one’s inbox quickly became overwhelmed with a type of mail I named Spamscriber email. Spamscriber email is email that you actually subscribed to willingly and knowingly when you opted to get that free report promised you. It’s the traditional price one has to pay to get free info; you give me access to your email address and I’ll give you a piece of my wisdom and knowledge. Now what none of us bargained on was the fact that our email inbox was going to get bombarded on a daily basis with totally useless and downright annoying emails from the very same person(s) we thought were to be our marketing mentors.

Some of those emails are simply unbelievable!

I once got one where the marketer just couldn’t wait to tell me how that very weekend he had gotten on bended knee to propose to his wife and the manner in which she had cooed yes! Another email was titled “Ba I Still Have My Tan From Florida!” These are just a couple of examples of the many hundreds I have had to delist as spam and in my book both fall under the category of downright stupid…stupid…stupid! On the face of it sending such emails just doesn’t make sense does it? However I do believe I have a pretty good inkling what those clueless marketers were aiming at.

Another core principle of sound business practice (be it online or offline) is to foster some kind of relationship with your prospective purchasers. You see if people like you they are far more likely to buy from you than the next guy. Now developing any form of relationship with a completely stranger online has its definite challenges, perhaps the most pressing being the fact that one generally cannot meet face to face. Hence quite literally, when it comes to the internet your words really have to do the talking for you and are for all intents and purposes, your PR guy!

Now a growing number of far too many clueless online marketers seem to have reached the dubious conclusion that the more personal and intimate the details they give of their lives the closer and stronger the bond they will forge with their subscribers. I dunno about you but speaking for myself what I want to shout down those clueless marketers’ ears in response to their idiotic emails is: I DIDN’T SUBSCRIBE TO YOUR LIST TO GET A BLOW BY BLOW ACCOUNT OF YOUR VAPID LIFE BUT RATHER HOPED TO GET SOME USEFUL INFORMATION THAT WOULD ENHANCE MY INTERNET MARKETING BUSINESS!

Subscribers Fight Back!

I know I am not alone when it comes to the way I feel about my inbox being bombarded with a ton of spamscriber email. And if we are going to be truly honest, how many people actually do go ahead and purchase from offers shoved down their throats through those follow up subscriber emails. I’m guessing very few which would explain the number of of increasingly off topic and agonizingly desperate emails that haunt our email accounts these days. I for one have only ever purchased a single product as a result of subscribing to one of those lists and have seen pitiful few of my many list members purchase products I have promoted while contrastingly a good number of them are more than willing to lap up the free goodies I tell them about!

So how could your average innocent list subscriber defend themselves from a blitzkrieg of spamscriber email? Let’s put it this way the first line of defense when subscribing to any email list is NOT TO USE YOUR PRIMARY EMAIL ACCOUNT! Yah…you generally learn this through experience unless you are lucky enough to be forewarned by a more knowledgeable fellow marketer. Never use your primary email address unless you don’t mind your inbox ballooning to well over a few thousand emails in a very short period of time. The best course of action is to create at least one throwaway email(s) with which you would then use to subscribe to any list that you expect might be of some use to your online marketing endeavors.

The Increasing Trend Of The Sign Up, The Grab, Then The Terminator!

For many of the reasons already listed above we marketers really do have an uphill battle these days, at least when it comes to employing The Law Of Reciprocation otherwise known as The Good Ole Give And Take! That’s because most people are wary of what we have to give and in fact from what I have observed most online marketers just don’t give a damn about reciprocation. What they do give a damn about is getting their hands on those free goodies that you have to offer! For that reason alone they will give you their email address and once they have secured that free report that you promised them they will immediately unsubscribe from your list! This is an increasing practice that I have personally observed and heard my fellow marketers griping about.

So what to do…what to do huh?

That’s right! What can we poor marketers do about this disturbing trend? In the beginning, at least for a while, a lot of marketers including me gave away free ebooks that were quite literally worth much more than similar ebooks that were selling for $67 and beyond. Other than my Blogging Edge free ebook the best free ebook I ever downloaded was The Black Book by Jack Humphrey. That ebook as far as I am concerned was worth far more than ebooks that I had purchased in excess of $95!

Article on free report written by Ba Kiwanuka