Another big part of your online marketing strategies needs to include giving stuff away. The Internet provides an amazing marketing opportunity that is quite different from traditional marketing. This is clearly demonstrated in the idea of giving stuff away free. For example, walk through most mall food courts and you can probably score a few free samples of “orange chicken” on a toothpick. The restaurant is offering you a small sample with the hopes that you will buy a meal. By percentage, perhaps they are giving away 1 or 2 percent of their product to increase sales. On the Internet, it is often necessary to give away a large percentage of what you offer, in order to sell your services.

Let me use this Online Marketing Strategies site as an example. My ultimate goal with this site, is to use it as a vehicle to attract clients that I can sell my website development and online consulting services to. In an effort to do this, I will write articles that tell people how to do just about everything I know how to do. This information that I pass on, which took me a long time and a lot of money and effort to develop and refine, is my product. I will give away 95 % of it in the hopes of converting that last five percent into new clients. So, my first freebie on this site is information on how to start blogs and how SEO works etc.

I have already started my second freebie, which is the free ten minute skype consultation that I offer to anyone who wants to ask about online marketing strategies or get help with a blog or SEO issue. I have found that I can answer a lot of questions in that ten minute conversation. My ultimate hope, however, is that some of these people will eventually hire me at my regular consulting rate. As this site develops and grows I will keep offering good freebies along the way to help people who come regularly to the site. You need to consider what you can begin to offer to the readers of your blog or website if you aren’t already doing so.

Until next time….

Steve