Archive for October, 2008

On July 4th, I wrote about “The Perceived Value Of Free”.

I discussed how in recent months, there had been a notable increase in marketers talking about “moving the free line”, and generally instructing new marketers to give away valuable content to build their lists, in order to create customers in the future.

On the surface, there seemed to be some value in this advice. After all, there are giveaways popping up daily, free reports everywhere… all with the intention of obtaining that all-important email address on a double opt-in form.

I decided to test this theory. (This is the simplified version)

I created a product for a niche I have been active in for some time. (Sorry, I am not going to reveal the niche; suffice it to say that it’s as competitive as the IM niche). The product I developed contained useful software, a detailed info product on pdf, an audio version of the info product and a video showing how to use the software along with the info product.

I created 1 other product of similar value and structure, and two reports with additional, related advice and tips.

I purchased two very similar domain names. I created two websites. One website gave away the product for free, just for opting in to my list.

The other was a basic sales page using similar language, but charged $67 for the product. Upon successful payment, the customer was directed to the download page which included an optin form for the same newsletter.

I employed the exact same marketing strategies to each site. I drove traffic, used PPC, posted in related forums, created articles – all the usual things.

Can you guess my results?

Both websites recieved approximately the same amount of traffic from my marketing efforts.

The website with the free product had an optin rate of around 40%.
The website selling the product had conversions of about 3%.

Of those who downloaded the free product, 20% unsubscribed immediately after recieving their download.
Of those who purchased the product, 80% opted in to the list.

The autoresponder series was loaded with 7 emails.

The first email (immediate) was a thank you for downloading the product, along with their download link in case they weren’t redirected after payment/signup. Almost no unsubscribes from either list.

The second email (two days later) was a repeat of the benefits of the product, and encouragement to take action with it. I also included a link to download one of the two reports I created as an additional bonus.
Again, there were no unsubscribes from either list.

The third email (three days later) was pure content, highly related to the product and included several valuable resources for more information. Oddly, this email triggered a further 20% unsubscribe rate from the “free” list, but zero from the “paid” list.

The fourth email (three days later) was again, pure, actionable content. And again, I lost about 10% of my “free” list.

The fifth email (three days later) gave away the second bonus report. This bonus report was a lead-in to the second product, and in fact had links inside taking them to the product sales page. I didn’t have any unsubscribes from this email, but I did receive traffic from the link in the report – a 20% click through from the “paid” list, which had a 5% conversion! There were zero clicks from the “free” list. (Those who purchased were moved to a new customer list.)

The sixth email (three days later) was again content, leaving off with a teaser at the end about how a specific problem talked about would be solved in the next email and to watch for it. This email lost about 10% of the “paid” list, and a whopping 40% of the “free” list.

The seventh and final email in my test (sent out two days later) was purely promotional, sending subscribers to the sales page for my second product. This product was priced at $47. I lost all but about 15% of my original “free” list, and I retained approximately 75% of my original “paid” list.

Further, I had almost no click throughs to the sales page from my “free” list and only two sales (less than 1% conversion), but from my “paid” list, 60% checked the site. Of those, 10% made the purchase!

My Conclusions

Free products – no matter how good – are perceived as “cheap” and of little value. Often people will download free items and never give them another thought. Those who part with actual cash to obtain a product will often go through it from front to back, usually as soon as they get it.

I also learned that when people have paid for (and liked) a product and are provided with relevant content and additional materials along the way, they are much more likely to purchase a second time. Between the original sale and subsequent emails, you have position yourself as a respected expert who provides real value.

It’s also notable that there was a marked difference in the email address quality between the two lists. The “free” list contained many aliases such as “giveaway@gmail.com” or other obvious throwaway accounts, many using free email services. The “paid” opt-in list was of a much higher quality, most using their own domains or their ISP address.

I’d love to hear your thoughts!!

The economic problems that so many are facing right now from the backlash of what’s happening on Wall Street does not mean that is what’s happening in online business. In fact, ecommerce and online revenues are expected to rise steadily over the next several years in spite of everything going on in the offline business world.

People will still buy.

If you don’t believe this, turn off the TV and avoid the doom and gloom on the news for a few days. Get on the computer and do some research.

The media makes money by delivering bad news. I spent the bulk of my offline career in the newspaper business, and I know this to be true. People eat it up, and the media? They love it. It draws more attention than a bad accident on the side of the road. Remember, they have their own motives – it’s to fill their pockets.

The fact is, new businesses are being started right this minute – and fortunes are being made as I write this. You simply need to be positioned correctly!

I began my online business 10 years ago – and survived the economic crisis of the post 9/11 era. And left a secure job to do it, and have never looked back.

People turn to the internet even more in times like these to compare products, save gas, start their own business, supplement their household income, make extra cash for Christmas, and much more.

Why should you not benefit by creating a presence online, becoming an internet entrepreneur?

There are fortunes to be made in recessions. The internet is the key.

These plugins are great for helping you automate and monetize your blogs! As far as I know, all these plugins are compatible with the latest WordPress version. Please feel free to suggest other great plugins below.

If you find these useful, help spread the word and STUMBLE THIS POST!

Landing Sites – When visitors is referred to your site from a search engine, it shows them related posts to their search on your blog.
http://theundersigned.net/2006/06/landing-sites-11

Maintenance Mode Plugin – Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end.
http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/maintenance-mode/

Theme Test Drive – allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as an administrator, while visitors continue to see the default one.
http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/theme-test-drive

Comment Relish – Sends a thank you e-mail to your first time commentators.
http://www.justinshattuck.com/2007/03/19/comment-relish-wordpress-plugin

Digital Fingerprint — useful for detecting content theft.
http://www.maxpower.ca/wordpress-plugin-digital-fingerprint-detecting-content-theft/2006/09/25/#intro

Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to recieve notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/

MyAvatars – shows MyBlogLog’s avatars in your comments
http://www.napolux.com/2006/12/14/myavatars-a-wordpress-plugin-for-mybloglog/

Brian’s Threaded Comments – adds a ‘Reply to this comment’ link to every comment. Makes it easy for people to reply to comments and discuss better.
http://meidell.dk/archives/2006/12/19/brians-threaded-comments-159/

Dofollow – lets you remove the nofollow attribute from your comments.
http://www.semiologic.com/software/wp-fixes/dofollow/

WP-Contact Form with Spam Protection – creates a contact form on your blog, through which your readers can contact you easily.
http://www.douglaskarr.com/projects/wp-contactform/

Google XML Sitemaps Generator – creates a sitemap of all articles on your WordPress blog. Helps Google and other search engines index every article you write.
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

All in One SEO Pack – Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Enforce www. Preference – will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference and will strip off index.php from the ends of URIs.
http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/enforce-www-preference/

Quick META Keywords – will automatically add META Keywords tags to every single post based on categories under which the article is categorized.
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/quick-meta-keywords-wordpress-plugin/

Related Posts – Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. Increase pageviews by providing targeted related content.
http://wasabi.pbwiki.com/Related%20Entries

Lightbox JS Plugin – used to overlay images on the current page into neat Javascript-powered overlay popups.
http://www.4mj.it/lightbox-js-v20-wordpress/

WordPress Mobile Edition – shows an interface designed for a mobile device when visitors come to your site on a mobile device.
http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress/readme?project=wordpress-mobile-edition

Popularity Contest – keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular.
http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress/readme?project=popularity-contest

Clean Archives – designed to display your archive listings in a clean and uniform fashion. It lists the Month / Year, the day of the month the article was published, the title of the article, and the number of comments that have been made on each article.
http://sporadicnonsense.com/index.php/2005/04/28/clean-archives-plug-in/

KB Advanced RSS Widget - a wordpress widget that gives you complete control over how RSS feeds are parsed for your sidebar.
http://adambrown.info/b/widgets/category/kb-advanced-rss/

Adhesive – lets you make the posts “sticky”, such that the posts will remain at the top of the page.
http://wp-plugins.net/plugin/Adhesive/#plugin_63

Permalinks Migration Plugin – safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website or affecting your search engine rankings.
http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permalinks-migration-plugin/

Share This – lets your visitors to add your post to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail to a friend.
http://sharethis.com/publisher?type=wpplugin

Digg this – detects incoming links from Digg.com to your wordpress post and automatically display a link back to the digg post, for people to digg your story.
http://www.aviransplace.com/index.php/digg-this-wordpress-plugin/http://www.aviransplace.com/index.php/digg-this-wordpress-plugin/

WP-Notable – displays a series of icons below each post allowing your readers to easily submit you to many different social bookmarking and networking sites.
http://www.calevans.com/view.php/page/notable

WP-Email – Allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend.
http://www.lesterchan.net/wordpress/readme/wp-email.html

WP-PostRatings – Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.
http://www.lesterchan.net/wordpress/readme/wp-postratings.html

EasyTube – allows you to easily embed YouTube and Google Videos using one simple tag.
http://www.ejump.co.uk/wordpress/easytube-plugin-for-wordpress/

Twitter Updater – automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post.
http://blog.victoriac.net/blog/twitter-updater

WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Back up your blog today.
http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup

WP-Supercache – A modification of WP-Cache that produces static html files.
http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/

Batch Categories – Easily manage the mass categorization of posts that match various criteria. Power edit your categories.
http://robm.me.uk/projects/plugins/wordpress/batch-categories/

PodPress – adds lots of features designed to make WordPress the ideal platform for hosting a podcast.
http://www.mightyseek.com/podpress/

TinyMCE Advanced – adds 16 plugins to TinyMCE, the WordPress wysiwyg editor. Adds over 40 new buttons to the toolbar, which is now two rows plus one hidden row.
http://www.laptoptips.ca/projects/tinymce-advanced/

Exec-PHP – allows php tags inside the content or excerpt of your posts and pages to be executed just as in usual PHP files.
http://bluesome.net/post/2005/08/18/50/

Photo Dropper – lets you add free photos (Flickr/Creative Commons) to your blog posts without leaving WordPress.
http://www.photodropper.com/

WordPress Reporter – allows you to easily view your Google Analytics and Feedburner reports in your WordPress administration area.
http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wordpress-reports/

WordPress.com Stats – Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/

Ad Rotator – Rotates Ads randomly from a specified text file.
http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/wordpress-plugin-adrotator-rotate-your-ads-including-adsense-dynamically/2/

AdSense-Deluxe – is a WordPress plugin offering advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts.
http://www.acmetech.com/blog/adsense-deluxe/

Buy Me a Beer – allows your readers to donate money to you via PayPal on pretext of buying a beer.
http://www.blogclout.com/blog/goodies/buy-me-a-beer-paypal-donation-plugin/

WordPress BankRoll – offers to help you cut out the middleman by allowing advertisers to buy reviews directly on your blog.
http://www.wpbankroll.com/

Global Translator - Translate your blog into multiple languages in a search engine friendly way.
http://www.nothing2hide.net/blog/wp-plugins/wordpress-global-translator-plugin/

Feedburner Feedsmith – Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/help/wordpress_quickstart/

Simple Feed Copyright – adds a simple copyright notice to full text wordpress feeds.
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/simple-feed-copyright-wordpress-plugin/

RSS Signature – allow the addition of a custom tagline, signature or copyright message to the wordpress generated rss feeds.
http://www.smackfoo.com/plugins/sig2feed/

Democracy – adds AJAX polling functionality to your WordPress blog.
http://blog.jalenack.com/archives/democracy/

No Self Ping – keeps your site from pinging itself.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/no-self-ping/

Draft Notifier – sends a notification email to your blog’s admin address when a post is written by a Contributor or when such a post is edited.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/draft-notifier/

Cap Comments – turns off comments when a post achieves a pre-set comment count.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cap-comments