It's a Free e-World
By Richard Wall   ©2004 All Rights Reserved

Read this article and I'll give you 109 Killer Reports on Internet marketing! Yes 109 FREE bonus reports just for reading this article! Does that sound familiar? Internet marketing seems to have gone 'free mad'. Freebies have their rightful place in the online marketing bag of tricks: 'subscribe to my Ezine and I'll give you a free eBook' and 'join this opportunity today and I'll give you a bonus course' are often effective. However, many Internet marketers seem to have lost the plot. If you have a sensibly priced product or service, with a money-back guarantee, do you really need to bundle in 10 'bonus products' to sell it? I nearly added another eBook to my library last week. My cursor was hovering on the 'Order Now' button but I decided not to click. Guess what put me off? Too expensive? No, the price was fine. Not enough freebies? No. There were too MANY freebies and by the time I got to reading about how 'Bonus #9' would change my life, I'd lost interest in the eBook I was about to buy. My state of mind had shifted from enthusiastic to suspicious. The perceived value of the eBook I was about to buy got lower as more and more bonus products were added to the deal. Imagine an offline retailer, who normally sells a chocolate bar for 50 cents, with a special offer: '3 bars for the price of 2.' Or a travel agent with an offer on a vacation: 'book today and get 20% discount.' The offline marketing world is full of deals and offers - because they work. And of course, they work online too. But what would you think if the retailer had said: 'buy this chocolate bar today for 50 cents and I'll give you 5 bonus products: a cigarette, some gum, 2 paper clips, last month's free ads newspaper and a comb'? You'd think he was out of his mind - all you wanted was a chocolate bar. On the Internet - at least at the home-based business end of the market - an unwritten law seems to have crept in which says that to get the sale you need to bundle in lots of free products. It's a fine line between adding value to your products and DEVALUING them. I'm selling my own eBook for $15 and yes I throw in a free eBook as a bonus. But there's only one AND it's complementary to the eBook I'm selling, not just complimentary. The free eBook is a useful and relevant bonus. If I were to load up the offer with 5 other bonus products, it would make it cluttered and unnecessarily 'generous'. I would get fewer sales. Until very recently I also included the sales pitch 'buy my eBook for $15 TODAY and I'll throw in a free eBook.' I've taken out the word 'TODAY' because I don't have any plans to withdraw the free bonus tomorrow (or the day after for that matter.) If you DO have a real price rise around the corner or a genuine limited period offer, that's fine. However, many of the Internet marketing offers I see include something like 'order by this Friday, 16 February' and when I see the same ad the following month it says 'order by this Friday, 9 March.' JAVA scripts and suchlike have allowed Internet marketers to invent a new concept: a rolling 'this Friday.' Oh, and have you seen this type of offer: 'buy this eBook for $29.95 TODAY and I'll give you a marketing course worth $1,495 absolutely FREE'? Does the prospective customer really perceive the free marketing course to be worth $1,495? I don't think so. The word 'credibility' springs to mind! Finally, if you really want the 109 bonuses I promised, I'll try and find some of the free 'Killer Reports' I've acquired over the past few months. Now, let me see, which folder did I save them in...?

left the rat race in 1994 and is the founder of Squillionaires.com. Richard specializes in helping people clear a path through the get-rich-quick hype on the Internet.
http://www.squillionaires.com
richard@wallpotential.com.

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