Thursday, October 15, 2009

Selling Information And How To Handle People Who Want It Free

When selling information there is a very good chance that someone will ask you to give you your information product to them at no cost. How should you handle that request? This article does not discuss giving products away to friends and family. That is your choice. Also not up for discussion here is giving bonus ebooks away as a special promotion. That is a specific marketing strategy that can be discussed at another time. What this article discusses is the concept of people contacting you out of nowhere and asking for your product for free.

I get this request frequently. A person that I do not even know will contact me out of the blue and they will ask me if I would be willing to give them a copy of my product for free to help them out. What these people fail to realize is that this is not an appropriate request. If they owned a traditional business they would balk at someone walking into their store and asking for their products for free. Why they feel they can do the same to me is beyond comprehension in my opinion. Besides, more importantly what they do not realize is that part of the value from the product comes in paying for it.

I am a perfect example of this. I have a lot of products on my computer that I have never looked at. The reason why is because these products were given to me for free. Those very same products that if I paid for them, I would have read or used. Since I did not pay for them I have no value attached to them and thus no motivation for using them.

This is a topic that I can talk about all day and what is funny is that I get these requests almost every day. There are even some people who have suggested I give them my product for free and if and when they make money, they will pay me back. This is of course a silly concept because they have nothing invested into the product. If they got the product for free, there would be no need to implement the concepts, so I would basically just give my products away for free without anything in return. I have to earn a living as well and the way I do that is by selling information that I am passionate about. Also, the fact of the matter is I have invested significant time and knowledge into the products that I offer. The bottom line is if people have to spend money and invest into an information product they will typically have a much greater chance of using the product and getting value out of it.

Think about my business model. People online constantly are looking to learn how to make money online. They want to know the meat and potatoes. They want step-by-step instructions. This is why I do well online. I use step-by-step videos to show them exactly how to make money online. If you follow what I do and you also make sure you go through all of the details, as opposed to highlighting concepts, you will also do well when you are selling information online.

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Copyright Stephen Beck, 2009
You have permission to reprint this article as long as you don't make any changes and include the bio below.

Stephen Beck enjoys teaching people how to sell information products. Check out Stephen's three free videos at http://8WeekstoProfits.com so you can begin today.

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