Are You The Product?
I am so sick of free offers!
It’s like a magic word that’s supposed to make you feel so grateful that you’ll click when prompted and blindly do whatever you’re asked…
And more and more often, what you’re being asked to do is not going to benefit you at all!
Traffic Exchanges and Safelist Mailers are a classic example…
They’re promoted as a great source of free traffic.
Sign up for free, click or surf for a while and you can get all this wonderful traffic to your offers and start making money.
What they forget to tell you is, everyone there is doing the exact same thing… trying to get traffic to their own offers…
So anyone you get to your offer will be a seller, not a buyer.
So you can ‘work’ for hours to get thousands of credits that are more or less worthless.
So why are these sites so popular?
Simple… they are a fantastic list builder for the site owner.
They were never intended to generate any useful traffic for anyone. Let alone signups or sales. It might happen by sheer volume and persistence, but that’s a happy coincidence, not an intentional outcome.
These sites are free because YOU are the product!
You can guard against this though and save yourself a lot of time.
Before you sign up for anything free, see if you can work out how the site owner is making their money? If there’s no upsells, upgrades or add-ons, then chances are you’re the product and you’ll be getting sold too constantly.
These days I also tend to use a temporary email address to sign up for anything at all dubious. If it all checks out and I decide I’ll keep using it, I’ll swap the email over to one I check more often.
It only take one idiot selling your address to unleash a flood of spam, so that is definitely worth the effort.
Free is Good Done Right!
All that said I won’t pretend I don’t use the Free word myself. A lot.
But I any time I do, I stop and make sure my Free Offer is actually providing real value to the recipient.
It’s worth your while to do that too… because free has been so over done.
People value their time and they’re smart enough to know when free is not worth the effort.
So if you use free to get someone to act and don’t deliver, they will remember.
The good news is, they ‘ll also remember when you do deliver…
I send out a LOT of emails each week. One of my main campaigns gives away a lot of free stuff…
One thing I’m particularly proud of is the fact that the links to the freebies get more and more clicks as the campaign goes on.
People eventually see an offer that interests them so they click…
And once they do, they tend to click everything!
That’s my goal anyway, and I’d encourage you to try it too!
