Never Underestimate The Power Of Free

by Robb Sutton

As a blogger, you slave away delivering high quality content for your readers that they get to digest on a regular basis for free. After all of the late nights, time away from family and countless hours churning out that content, what do you get in return? You get the request for more free stuff! Everything from free forum sites to free ebooks. Your readers are not only asking…they are expecting you to continue the gravy train by delivering high quality, free content and resources on your blog. When do you catch a break? When you do you get to ride the gravy train for awhile?

Never Underestimate The Power Of Free

There is a very specific reason you are giving away the farm. Free is a very powerful asset to your blogging. As you look at other blogs in your niche and around the web, take a serious look at how they leverage the power of free to increase their business substantially.

You Are Gaining Trust

By giving away products, services and articles for free, you are gaining the trust of your readers. They come to expect high quality content out of your blog over time and that consistency will play in your favor as you continue to grow. They will trust you enough to recommend you to others, they will trust you enough to sign up for email newsletters and they will trust you enough to purchase paid products in the future. Why are they going to do this? Because of your solid track history in delivering quality.

You Are Positioning Yourself As The Expert

You are the resource that people are going to flock to in your niche for information and resources. Since everything is free, you are attracting a larger audience to your content. Larger audiences and more public content positions yourself and and your blog as the expert due to the increased amount of content and resources. Do you trust people or companies with your credit card number that were not recommend or you do not know anything about? Probably not and the same holds true with blogging. When you position yourself as the expert in your field through free content and services, you are gaining an immeasurable asset.

You Are Gaining Assets For Future Income

By giving away your content and products for free, you are gaining future assets that will be leveraged in the future for monetary gain. You are gaining rss subscribers, newsletter subscribers, forum members and essential links for organic search engine results. This will gain you more affiliate sales, direct advertising revenue and sponsorships by having an even larger following.

You Are Making Money Now

Yes…your ebook and your articles are free, but that does not mean they can not contain affiliate links where applicable. How do you think most internet marketers, bloggers and site owners make money with nothing but free product? The are allowing their affiliate links (for companies and products they trust) to reach a wider audience through the use of free products where they would not see as many eyes through a paid product. The trick…only promote/link products that you 100% believe in and support to keep the trust building around your brand.

The Power Of Free

The power of free is a huge money making resource for bloggers as it continues to increase trust and income. For many bloggers, it is still a hard concept to grasp as there is a lot of time and effort that goes into free products. As you look for ways to leverage your blog and increase revenues, trust in the power of free to grow your blog past the clouds. You and your readers will receive much more benefit through the process than you lose out on by creating a paid product right off the bat. Successful blogging is about finding those equations that work by balancing free products and services along with your paid options.

Be on the lookout: At the beginning of next week, I am launching a new free eBook. This eBook will require no opt-in…no money…and will be license under the creative commons license so you can email and link to it however you want to (as long as you don’t alter it or claim it as your own!).

Image by Sanandreas

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11 comments

Aaron Mielke January 28, 2010 - 10:36 am

Great stuff to think about. I am currently putting together my first *free* ebook for my blog and working on forming relationships for affiliate promotion.

You’re right…to gain readers and subscribers, as well as their trust, we have to provide them enough *value* to continue to read what we have to say.

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Robb Sutton January 29, 2010 - 9:55 am

It is all about the value…and putting out as much of it as humanly possible!

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Roseli A. Bakar January 28, 2010 - 11:29 am

Looking forward to your new ebook next week Robb 🙂

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Robb Sutton January 29, 2010 - 9:55 am

Me too actually! I enjoyed making this one.

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TheInfoPreneur January 30, 2010 - 5:53 pm

yeah everyone these days wants something for free and why not, so do I!

I relate this to google, just look at the amount of products they give away totally free, it’s astonishing.

Good post this Robb

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Robb Sutton January 31, 2010 - 5:17 pm

It is really amazing what you can accomplish through free products and services. It opens up another world for income generation and growth by providing real value without expecting anything in return.

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Tom | Build That List February 1, 2010 - 12:19 am

I can’t wait to see what your new ebook is about. Care you give us a preview – even just the title?

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Robb Sutton February 1, 2010 - 9:02 am Reply
Ian February 2, 2010 - 11:37 pm

Your ebooks are great! Also, this is one big reason why Wordpress is so successful. It’s FREE compared to paid solutions!

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Paul Cunningham February 14, 2010 - 5:25 am

Free is killer. I’ve been using free to build a following in a niche where authority is hard won.

If you’re struggling I highly recommend putting something amazing out there for free. The pay off is worth it.

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Give it away for free March 6, 2010 - 9:59 am

[…] like you used to do? But most will understand, and you keep the trust you’ve built through power of free, and some will […]

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