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Home::Viral Marketing
Give Your e-Book Away and Increase Your Sales
Author : Ted Lewis
If you've been trying to increase your sales, but you're stuck,
here's a new trick you might want to try: GIVE YOUR PRODUCT
AWAY! Yes, you heard that right, you can actually INCREASE your
sales if you give your product away!
It may seem counter-intuitive, but it really works. In the old
days (before the Information Explosion), people primarily bought
tangible products. Things that they could hold in their hand.
They could examine something before buying it. They could feel
the quality of the materials that had been used to make the
product. In those days you rarely had to plunk down your money
for something until you'd had a chance to assure yourself you
were getting what you wanted.
With the advent of the Internet and the proliferation of
information products, it has become increasingly difficult to
examine and try out products before you buy them. Vendors are
hesitant to let you try their products unless you pay up front
because they're afraid that you won't ever pay at all, but
you'll still be using the product anyway. This is an
understandable concern, but it has also helped to make people
wary of information products in general. After all, who wants to
shell out tons of money for a product only to be disappointed
with it? Sure, you might be able to return it, if you're lucky,
but honestly once a vendor has your money they have you a
definite disadvantage.
As an example of how this might work consider the phenomenal
success story of Id Software. You've probably heard of the PC
shooter game "Doom" that came out in the early 1990's. This game
was created by a few programmers who wrote it and then GAVE AWAY
a fully functioning copy of their game for free. Not just a
canned video demo of the game, this was a full-blown playable
game. Of course there was a caveat: it only contained the first
level. If you wanted to play more levels you had to buy it, but
if you were satisfied with the first level, or if you just
didn't like the game, then you weren't out any money at all. (As
an aside, I sure wish the purveyors of video game cartridges and
CD's for black-box game systems like PS2, Xbox, GameBoy, etc.
would learn this lesson. I'm pretty darn frustrated by the fact
that you usually can't try any of those games out before you buy
them, and then they are non-refundable to boot!)
I realize information marketing isn't exactly like video game
marketing, and you can't just give away your product and hope
your customers will be nice enough to pay you. But you can give
away little bits of your product, or small teasers to keep them
interested so that they'll want to come back and buy the full
package. Even better is to put your teaser info into an easily
shared document format, like Adobe's PDF format, and encourage
your customers to share your info with anyone and everyone. Be
sure to include links back to your website within your PDF
document so that people can find your products if they want to
make a purchase.
Even if you only include one or two percent of your total
product info in your teaser file, you should be able to generate
enough sales to make it worth your while. Be sure to include
some tantalizing language, too, that will make them want more.
Say things like, "Learn the top 5 things never to do", or "Find
out what how one single trick could (whatever)...". This is the
sort of stuff that will make people want to buy your products.
But a warning: Make sure you really deliver on the promises you
make in your teaser file! If you mislead your customer you will
pay for it dearly in the end!
Till next time...Success to you!
-Ted
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