How to Make Money with Giving Something Away For Free

Seth Godin is the author of the awesome book called 'Unleashing the Ideavirus'. To keep it short and simple, in that book he says that in order to rapidly circulate a message (virus), someone has to give away something of value, make it important enough that other people spread it on your behalf. If the message is 'virus-worthy' it will speedily spread through a group of people without a lot of work from you. So, how can you benefit from this? Read the book.

Unleashing the Ideavirus

". . . Unleashing the IdeaVirus informs, instructs, and entertains, offering the reader both roadmap and owner's manual for the car." -- Chris Meyer, director, Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation, and co-author of Blur

". . . whatever Seth is selling is catching -- and if you spend time with him, you'll come down with it." -- Alan M. Webber, founding editor, Fast Company

"Seth not only gets it, he gives it as well. Unleashing the Ideavirus is living, livid, vivid proof." -- Doc Searls, author, The Cluetrain Manifesto

"This is the only (idea)virus that will save you time and make you money." -- Guy Kawasaki, CEO, garage.com, and author, Rules for Revolutionaries

To exemplify his statement, Seth gave away the book free on his website, just asking for emails in return and he asked readers to send the book on to friends. Knowing the crowd he was looking to infect with his virus, he knew that if they liked what they read, they would want to tell people and brag about what they cleverly discovered for free.

He had approximately 400,000 downloads in the first few weeks. Before you think he might not have made any money from this: as he released the hardcover through amazon.com, it climbed up and reached #5 position in its sales charts. As a matter of fact people who had read the ebook version, went and bought the hardcover, they felt like they obliged to do.

First of all you need to know that what is free for your visitors will have some cost for you, probably it will cost you in your bandwidth or hosting costs, but it will unquestionably cost you time and effort to develop a website as well as the thing you are going to give away. But if you play the scheme right, it may compensate substantially. Find a good idea of what you are seeking to achieve, and find out what you can do or give away to help you grow.

• Get something useful to your audience
• Drive them to give you something reciprocally - their email or their friends email
• Give them permission as well as instructions on how they can share that free download.
• Encourage, or honor those who share that download
• With all the buzz and traffic you generate you need to find a way of benefitting from that.

Presumption:
We are going to offer an ebook, that discusses a problem our visitors might have and shows how our product can help with the solution.

The first example is a basic one, consisting of two pages, a squeeze page, also called landing page, and the download page for our free product. We are going to encourage our visitors to share this download with their family and friends, this can be achieved for instance with rewarding those who are doing so in giving them a share of our resulting sales. In our example, we can offer them a rebrandable version of the ebook, that can be branded with their own affiliate links.

The second example is a small enhancement of the first one. We are going to put a "Tell a Friend" script on the squeeze page, allowing the visitor to download our free product after sharing the link to our squeeze page with his friends or followers. This can be done for example either by email or by sending a message through a social network like twitter.

You might want to have a look at Viral Tweet Generator, how to implement this.

In the third example we are going to put a one time offer (OTO) in between the tell a friend script and the download page.

A one time offer is a smart written upsell page that offers a complemental product to the visitor at a discounted price that he, as the name of the page states, just will see one time and never again. This gives the visitor two choices, either to buy the product now at the discount price, or to reject the offer and to proceed to our download page.

To ensure that the visitor gets to see the OTO page really just one time, we are going to use a script, that remembers the visitor, rather than showing a static html page.

As you can see, this is not difficult at all, but its easy to get greedy and mess up this scheme. Let's face it, it takes some courageousness to follow this scheme as you are going to give away something you could earn money from. Seth Godin threw in 500,000 possible sales, instead he won 500,000 advertisers that spreaded the word in a clear market, resulting in sales of his book, and with this gained popularity he sold many others afterwards.