Give More Away and Still Earn More!
I want to share with you the results of a recent experiment that I did. My goal today is to stretch your thinking a bit. There are all kinds of ways that you can turn your traffic into income. In fact, I encourage you to perform your own experiments on your blog and do not be afraid to try new things.
Last month on my career coaching blog I decided to give away a $47 service for free. In the past I have offered to write 2-3 page resume critiques for $47. This is designed to help those who do not want to pay $197 for a full resume makeover.
My Goal – Personally Engage With More People
Instead of waiting for visitors to purchase my $197 order, I wanted to give something of value for free. I wanted to see that if I gave lots of value up front if I could turn them into a paying client.
The results were amazing! I nearly doubled my full resume makeover orders. The downside is that it did require a bit more effort on my part, but I was okay with it since it produced more income. What can you give away for free to get people into your funnel? You need something on your site that allows you to start a conversation with people.
I will admit up front that passive income streams are best. They are more scaleable and are not as time intensive. However, if you do offer services to people, you can always turn them off on your site when you are too busy.
If you are interested in doing a similar experiment, here are the steps that I would recommend.
1. Make the Free Offer Prominent on Your Site
You can place the free offer in the navigational menu of your site, at the end of the post or even in the sidebar. I also had an existing mailing list and simply reached out to my targeted audience that way. Find ways to promote your free offer. Below is a screenshot for my free giveaway.
2. Develop Systems to Streamline Your Time
If you offer a service, then it by very definition requires some of your time. You need to be prepared ahead of time in order minimize your time. I went through all of my old resume critiques and create one document of common resume problems that people have.
As new resume critiques came in, I quickly identified the problems in their resume, copied & pasted the template text, made changes where necessary and sent the critique back to them. I was able to cut down my time from 30 minutes down to 5 minutes per critique. I used WorkFlowy.com to keep everything organized. Below is a screenshot.
3. Offer an Unadvertised Discount
The last thing that I did was to offer an unadvertised discount from the normal price of the full resume makeover. I did this to try to get them to take immediate action. Of course, some people just ran with the changes that I offered them in the free resume critique. However, I wanted to offer an attractive discount to a targeted customer who I already had given tremendous value to.
Re-read that last sentence as I believe it has been the key to my success in this experiment.
Obviously, I realize that you might not have a career coaching blog, but I believe that some of you can take the principles from this experiement and apply them to your niche in some way.
You can give more away and still earn more!
