One thing that will attract customers to your website is free stuff. Everybody likes to get something for nix.
You should consider offering something on your site for free – for example, a white paper, an electronic book, free reports, forms or templates. This will help to attract prospective customers to your website and to help build your mailing list.
Here’s some free stuff that I provide on my company website: http://www.bluetrainenterprises.com.au/goodies-useful-docs-templates.html. I am getting some good traffic to this page, as people go in search of CV templates, interview proformas and small business templates.
Here are some tips for providing free content:
- Make sure that the free stuff is good stuff – there’s no point providing something that is not good quality. The free stuff needs to be representative of the quality of your business and help build your credibility in the eyes of prospective customers.
- It is important that the free stuff is good, but you shouldn’t give away your entire suite of intellectual property for free! Your free stuff should be a taster, prompting the recipient to engage in further business with your organisation. For example, you might offer a free PDF containing a single chapter of a book you have written - if the recipient enjoys reading the free chapter, then it is likely that they will want to purchase the entire book.
- Ensure that your free stuff contains appropriate copyright notices and links back to your business, so that readers who have been forwarded your document know where it emanates from and can get in contact with you. It should also be in an uneditable format – ie. PDF instead of MS Word – so that the content is not easily stolen and rebranded (this is a real problem on the web today).
- You should try and capture the prospect’s contact details prior to giving them access to the free stuff – for example, you might only give a person access to a free report once they have filled out an online form that provides you with their email address details. This interaction enables you to market to the prospect at a later time via an email newsletter or a follow up phone call (it’s a good idea to expressly state what you intend to do with the contact details on the subscription page, in accordance with privacy guidelines)
- Do a follow up with all recipients, preferably by telephone. The fact that the prospect has downloaded a free document or tool from your website ensures that your call is not ‘cold’ – you have a context in which your phone conversation can take place, making it easier to determine whether the prospect is interested in further engagement with your organisation. At the very least, you can ask the prospect whether they enjoyed the free product and whether they have any suggestions for improving it.
- Many people use the search term ‘free’ in their search engine queries – make sure that your pages and documents are search engine optimised for this work. For example, if you are offering a ‘free CV template’, then consider having a separate HTML page optimised for this search term combination. That way, you are likely to attract many more people to your site.
