You may be wondering if you’ve read that title right. Make money by openly sharing your hard-earned knowledge and giving away products for free?
Yep, you read it right. And no, I’m not crazy. Let me explain.
Creating Authority In Your Niche
This is one of the most important building blocks of a stable and long term online business. You must be perceived as an authority on your subject matter in order to gain regular traffic from subscribers, social media sites, and search engines. The best way to position yourself as an authority in your niche is to share your knowledge, all of it. Everything you’ve learned up to this point and everything else you learn as time goes on.
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about faking it and trying to pretend you’re an expert. No one is an expert. There’s always something new to learn, and if you think there isn’t, well, good luck to you. If you are sharing your knowledge with your readers, you will start to create trust and show that you’re not just a salesman trying to make a quick buck.
Digital Products As a Marketing Strategy
The second building block of a long term online business strategy is to promote your website/business in multiple ways. One relatively easy way to promote yourself is to provide digital products and make them freely available for download. These products could come in the form of an eBook, an audio file, a downloadable video, or even access to online content for members only.
Again, your digital product offerings should follow the same guidelines as you use for creating authority. Share your knowledge and truly try to help those that are reading, listening, or watching. Trust will lead you to success
Providing REAL Value
Just as you create trust, you must provide REAL value to those who choose to spend time on your site and download your products. Have you ever been suckered by a flashy hard sell sales page for a product (even a free one), then been disappointed when you finally received it and it was just a re-hash of the same old material you already knew? I have, and it’s not only frustrating to have wasted time in obtaining it, but in my mind I immediately label the source as a “scammer”.
Sharing Knowledge To Leverage Business
Will I ever go back to that site? Will I share it on Facebook, Twitter, EmpireAvenue, and other social sites? Will I blog about it and tell my thousands of readers that they should pay attention to what you have to say? Absolutely not.
How Do These Guidelines Help Me Generate Revenue?
Making money online is not about the quick one time sale. It’s about creating a loyal and trusting readership. Your readers are your customers and if you are providing valuable information and quality products, they will become your advocate and promote your site, which of course brings more visitors. You get the idea.
So how to turn this loyal readership into revenue? Here are just a few ways:
- Advertisements : This one is kind of obvious, but as your traffic increases so does your opportunity for income from advertisements on your site.
- Offer Services : Whatever your specialty, it’s likely that a good percentage of your readers would rather “pay to have it done” rather than take the time to learn to do themselves.
- When offering a digital product, ask you visitor to join your newsletter list in exchange. You can then set up automatic email campaigns that offer reviews to products that you recommend. These products could be your own, or affiliate products.
- NOTE: Do not ruin the trust you’ve built by sending too many campaigns or recommending products that you haven’t tried yourself.
- Membership Options : You can offer memberships that give users access to your premium online content. These memberships can be a one time price, or be reoccurring on a monthly or yearly basis.
Our team of writers and reviewers follow these same guidelines on all of our web properties. We do this not only because it works, but it just makes us feel good to offer REAL value and to help others as we’ve been helped through the years and that is what explains why some blogs make money and others don’t .
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{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
Nowaday I can see every blogging related blog offers something for free, like eBook or eCource. But yest it’s a best strategy for list building as well as getting trust.
You shared really nice ideas for generating revenue, specially I love providing services and affiliates.
Hi Suraj,
I agree that many blogs nowadays offer freebies. The question is…are these freebies providing real value for those that get them. This is a somewhat subjective question as a free ebook may hold different value to different people depending on the subject matter and their personal experience with it.
Personally, I’ve received hundreds if not thousands of free ebooks and other downloads through the years and some were very helpful to me. In fact, I wouldn’t be doing what I do without them. On the other hand, some were just junk…rehashed from other material, and of course those did nothing for me but waste my time…or did they?
Downloading the junk also helped me learn. It taught me what NOT to do when I offer free downloads. There is always a lesson to be learned:)
Thanks for the nice comments. I appreciate the time you took to post here:)
That’s right !
Most of them have got the idea of giving away rehashed content or something which they themselves got as a freebie in a bid to look for greener pastures in online marketing with less efforts , but that not only fails big time since people will unsubscribe from a newsletter or service if their first impression is of a scamster but it will also kill brand credibility !
No doubt , there are so many people who speak of email marketing and making money from information products but very few who actually benefit from it because they are doing it the wrong way. Your post clears all the glitches and would surely aid those who are beginning with product marketing or those who have been doing it wrong ….
Rehashed products are a real turn off for me too and I always make sure that whatever I offer to my subscribers is truly worth their time.
I like the tip, “Do not ruin the trust you’ve built by sending too many campaigns.” I have dropped many mailing lists because I would get them selling to me once a day. I have found once a month I can handle. What do other people think? Can you offer products more then once a month?
Most of the popular newsletters I have signed up for have turned to be salesmen , no better word to describe them . Self promotions can be handled if it is in the ratio 20 (promotion) : 80 (Useful Information) , otherwise no one would be interested in being a part of a newsletter which is nothing but a sales pitch , atleast I won’t … Needless to say , I have signed off from many mailing lists and I am very happy about it since it saves me much time from clearing that spam from the inbox !
Yeah, it’s crazy isn’t it? I’ve gotten those one-a-day pitches too…on several different sites…insane.
p.s. If you want to sign up for my newsletter, feel free: http://eepurl.com/dOPBM
I promise I won’t send daily emails…or will I?
Yeah, same here.. I get these emails like once every few days, they started to annoy me
There you are
nice to finally put a face to the name! I will pass this post along. Thanks and enjoy your weekend!
Exactly, most of the sites/blogs I’ve registered turned up to be mere salesmen. People try to promote digital products without even building their authority which is a wrong step. Soon I’ve un-subscribed from those newsletters.
Thanks
Gone are the days of hiding away all of your “secrets”. Marketing is now about sharing, being open, and engaging with a target audience. A prospect will be that much more likely to work with you if you have proven over time that you are a valuable and trusted resource.
I second that !
Secrets don’t sell anymore and a product is evaluated by the trust that its mentor built over time by giving useful information . A large part of that trust stems from ‘WHO’ is promoting a product or service as far as business is concerned and that is not possible without proactive social engagement with prospects ….
Nice post. Can’t agree more! Freemium is the way to go…
Thanks for the sharing.
Cheers!
Great post, so insightful as usual, so love this site!!!
It is great to have you as a regular reader daphne !
Sigh, I’m still trying to find out about what products I’m going to sell on my blog.. so far I don’t think eBook is one of them
But your sentence did poke me a little bit on the “Offer Services” bit.. I guess I should have opened up a blog set-up kind of thing as someone might want to blog but don’t want to be bothered setting it up (even though it’s as easy as 1-2-3!)