SEO Fast-Track: Give Something Away

Fast track your search engine optimisation (SEO) by giving something away for free. Here’s how.

Faster, Easier SEO

Fran: You know, in Tibet, if they want something, do you know what they do? They give something away.
Bernard: They do, do they? That must be why they’re such a dominant global power.

It’s a marketing trick as old as the hills, or at least as old as the markets: If you want to sell more stuff, give something away. Yet it seems very few people have cottoned onto this idea on the Internet.

The Psychology

There’s an interesting documented psychological phenomenon that is exploited by giving something away. If I was to try selling charity raffle tickets to a random person I’d never met before I might persuade them to give me, say, £2. If I go buy myself a drink and buy that person one too and THEN sell them the tickets, I will generally sell them considerably more than they otherwise would have been willing to buy.

More, even, than the value of the drink I bought for them.

And it doesn’t just work for charity. People who always buy the first round at the bar typically spend less than those who shirk buying the drinks.

Real World Examples

The typical approach seen in the real world is to add a free percentage to the product: “33% free!”

When a consumer is choosing between two brands of baked beans, a percentage free may just be the clincher that seals the deal. And often people don’t bother to reassess their purchasing decisions, simply continuing to buy the same brand of beans because that’s what they always buy.

Other examples include free toys in cereal, or a free t-shirt when you send in 5 promotional beer caps.

Some Great Online Examples

Nancy Blachman tells us that she made her mark with the Google Guide by creating the Google Cheat Sheet, which is free, and by creating all of her content as creative commons, thus encouraging others to share it.

Many websites give away a free ebook which drives traffic to their website.

There are a number of websites providing free productivity tools. They’re free to use up to a certain limit, after which you have to pay for the service.

Viral videos are, in essence, giving something away. A company can go from unknown to household name overnight simply by striking a chord with a viral video.

And last, but by no means least, giving commenters a link back to their own website is a small but powerful gesture that has certainly worked wonders for the ComLuv network.

About Matt Lowe

Matt Lowe is a WordPress web designer / developer based in Newbury, Berkshire. After 8 years of doing the nine-to-five for other companies and watching them make the same mistakes over and over he set out in business on his own, forming Squelch Design to help businesses get online and make money.

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