Freebies have long been used by marketing agencies and businesses as a way to draw attention to a product. If you’ve ever been handed a sample in a grocery store or at a shopping mall, you should understand this concept quite well.
It’s common for smaller local restaurants to hand out free samples of their food at malls in order to compete with some of the widely-known chain restaurants, for example. You might see someone from the Chinese restaurant handing out pieces of sesame chicken on toothpicks in order to encourage shoppers to stop and eat there instead of the McDonalds or Burger King in the next stall.
You can do the same thing for your business. Handing out samples is quite simple, and think of the viral potential. Have you ever seen someone taste one of those samples and then turn to a friend and say, “Hey, Amy – you have to try this. It’s so good.”
Maybe you’ve done this yourself. This is a great example of viral marketing, because word can travel quickly. If you tell your friend how good that sesame chicken was, she might tell her husband. Then he might take their kids to eat there. Then their kids might tell all of their friends who then ask their parents to get them food there. Pretty soon it’s spread all over the mall. If that free sample is good enough, it can spread very quickly.
Viral marketing with content can work the same way online. Developing a good viral marketing plan can be relatively easy. You just need to think of a very good freebie to give away that people would be excited to tell their friends about.
Let’s say you’re selling an eBook about how to catch more bass fish. You could create a short report about the top ten mistakes bass fishers make that cause their catch to get away. If this freebie was good enough, people would start to share it with their fishing buddies and it would travel around quickly. Pretty soon, people might even be posting about it on fishing blogs and forums.
That’s the key, though. The information you give away has to be really, really good. It should be information that many people would be willing to pay for. Sure, you might be able to sell that information if it’s that good. But if you give away really excellent information for free, people will wonder how good your paid products must be.
Using the example of the Chinese restaurant, think about what you’d do if you heard about a restaurant that was offering a free egg roll just for stopping in. So you go in and get your free egg roll and it’s absolutely the best egg roll you’ve ever tasted in your entire life.
This has accomplished two things. First, it’s made you feel a little goodwill toward the restaurant because they’ve just given you something great for free. Second, they’ve established themselves in your mind as “that restaurant with the best egg rolls in the world.” Now that you know how great their egg rolls are, you want to know how good the rest of their food tastes.
You can do the same thing as a writer. By offering a really exceptional freebie, you’ll establish yourself as someone who really knows what they’re talking about. People will want to buy your products, because they already know how great they are. This is viral marketing at its best.
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