How Giving Away Stuff for Free Could Help Promote Your Website

So you’ve had a great idea for a website, found the perfect WordPress theme, created your pages, and finished making tweaks to increase its performance. Now you just need to encourage people to come and visit.

If you’ve ever seen the 1989 Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams, you may be tempted to take the “build it, and they will come” approach. But unfortunately, that only works for baseball-playing ghosts and not potential customers for your new business.

Instead, you’re going to need to start promoting your website. There are dozens of ways you can do it too. Pay per click ads on Google and social networks can be a good way to get instant traffic, while SEO can help you build a steady flow of organic traffic. Sometimes, some old fashioned marketing can work too, like running ads in newspapers or using other local publications.

One thing you may not have considered as part of your marketing mix is giving something away for free. This can seem a little counterintuitive at first, but it has proven to be an excellent way of driving traffic to a website, demonstrating the quality of a product, and proving competence in your field of expertise.

If this sounds like an interesting concept, here are some of the ways you can give stuff away for free to help promote your website.

Free Trials and Samples

Free trials and free samples have been used by business people for centuries as a way to let customers “try before they buy”. Today, you can find examples of them in use by companies selling accounting software, laundry detergent, and video streaming services, giving you an understanding of how broad their scope is.

Free trials tend to be used when you’re selling a service, usually one that requires an on-going subscription. Meanwhile, free samples tend to be for products that a potential customer would need to buy over and over again.

For example, businesses can take out a three-month free trial of Safe Accounting to try it out and get set up. However, companies will need to continue using the platform beyond this as keeping accounts is a legal requirement. So Sage can be pretty confident that if users like their software, they’ll turn into long-term paying customers.

A free trial or sample promotion won’t work if customers won’t need to continue using your service or product afterwards. For example, a customer could take a free trial for photo-editing software, use it for one image, and not pay for it as they don’t have a need for it any more.

Therefore, it’s important to consider this before committing to running such a promotion.

Free Versions of Paid-For Services

Sometimes, a completely free version of a service is a better option. Instead of limiting the customer to how long they can use it for, you give them access to your basic features for free and charge for any “premium” options they want.

Mailchimp is a good example of this. The company has four different subscription packages, each designed for different sizes of business. The most expensive starts at $299 per month, but the cheapest is free.

It offers this for free because it knows that when customers get used to its platform, they’ll be willing to pay to get access to its additional features or to have a larger contact list.

Free-to-play games work in a similar way. Instead of making players pay up front to get access, they can download, install, and play it for free. But, if they want to skip wait times, get extra features, or customise their character, they have to pay.

Examples can be seen in almost every genre too. PokerStars has a free-to-play version where users receive 15,000 play chips every four hours but can buy more if they don’t want to wait. Fortnite works in a similar way, it’s free to play but users can buy a “Battle Pass” every few months, granting them new 100 new tiers to unlock that rewards them with skins and other features.

Free Information

The old way of doing business was to keep your knowledge to yourself and charge people to get access to it. But today, many people approach this very differently by offering advice for free by making it available on their website.

This might be recipes, guides on how to paint your house, or advice on acquiring more Instagram followers. All that matters is that it’s relevant to your audience, it’s something they will be searching for, and you can use it to attract people to your website.

A great example of this is Hubspot, who offer free templates and examples that can help with everything from project management to marketing.

Sure, some visitors will use your information to avoid paying for your service. But it’s likely they wouldn’t have turned into a paying customer any way.

The benefits more than outweigh the drawbacks though, as publishing this kind of free information will help you to show potential customers that you are an expert in your field and they can trust you to get what they need done.

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