A free-giveaway is a vital first step in marketing your business and building a list of prospects that you can turn into customers and clients.

Once you create your free-giveaway, you don’t need to touch it again.  Remember, there will always be new people who “discover” you - new people you’ll be getting into your marketing funnel, pipeline or pyramid (however you think of it).

Your free-giveaway is aimed at this constant stream of new prospects and is the vehicle you use to build the marketing relationship with them, build credibility, earn their like and trust and convert them into loyal clients and customers.

So your free-giveaway will always exist as a stand-alone and entry point into your marketing system for the majority of your list.  This doesn’t mean, though, that you can’t build on the work you’ve done with your free-giveaway and leverage its power.

Another word for this is re-purposing your work.  That’s what smart marketers and business people do:  take the time and money you’ve invested in something and re-purpose it to use in conjunction with, or as another marketing tactic or product and service.

For example, with your free-giveaway you can take out pieces of it and write articles around it, blog posts and ezine content.  In this way, you spend the time once on creating your free-giveaway but you take parts of the content and re-purpose (or recycle) it to use in other marketing strategies that you employ.

Smart marketers, like yourself, know that the power of leveraging new marketing tactics with existing strategies is the way to get the most out of your time, expertise and resources.

Schedule a few minutes today to see if you are utilizing the power of your free-giveaway to the fullest.

Your free-giveaway needs to be something that your target group finds valuable and has need of.

The product (ebook, CD, etc.) you are giving away for free needs to be something similar to your other products and services (if you have any yet) that you will be trying to sell to these people later on.

Everybody starts to get a bit panicky and anxious when they think about coming up with content for their free-giveaway.  But the truth is that if you take a look around your office, you’ll see you have lots of information that you can pull together or put into a different format that would make a great free-giveaway.

• bundle together articles you’ve written
• combine blog posts you’ve written
• provide a song clip or art sample of your work
• copy of audio of a speech you’ve given
• offer free chapters of a book you’re writing
• transcribe audio or video of a speech
• audio of a teleseminar you gave
• use existing handouts and PowerPoint slides
• transcribe a teleseminar you’ve given
• bundle tips and checklists together
• a video of a speech you’ve given

You can use the content from above to create all kinds of different free-giveaways:

• a checklist
• a quick-start guide that helps people get started in the area of expertise you specialize in
• lessons on how to do something
• offer a free consultation
• 3 months free to a membership group you have
• self-evaluation test or online assessment
• offer an introductory/quick-start session
• list of top ten tips & tricks
• steps to creating something
• free software
• links to free products
• free membership to a forum you run

Take some time today to jot down some ideas about what you know your prospects and clients need on information on and start writing….or better yet, just re-package/re-format something that you’ve already done!

Offering something of value for free is a very important step in marketing. It is a way of introducing yourself to prospective clients in a non-intrusive, friendly manner. People are naturally more cautious and skeptical these days so you need to make it as easy as possible for them to get to know you at their pace - which will be different for each person.

As well, offering a free-giveaway is one of the fastest and most reliable ways to build a list of prospective clients and customers.  In order to do this, you must ask for the person’s name and email address. When people have indicated an interest in finding out more about you by asking for your “sampler”, then you can offer it in exchange for their name and email address.

The easiest way to get a prospect’s contact information is to have an opt-in box on your website.  When you use this in conjunction with an autoresponder/list management system such as Aweber, people’s name and email addresses are captured automatically and put into a list so you can contact them further via email.

In this day and age of Internet selling and buying, the majority of people are comfortable with giving you this information. Once you have this data you will now be able to continue to develop the relationship with these prospects and move them through the other steps in your marketing process.

If you don’t have an opt-in box but you do have a website, the best thing to do is get one created and set up.  It doesn’t cost much as it’s pretty easy to do and many Virtual Assistants can do it for you.

However, don’t worry if you haven’t got your website up and running yet, you can still collect names.  You’ll just have to do it manually and then input them into some kind of spreadsheet (Excel) or a database program like Microsoft Outlook or ACT.

There are many ways to use your free-giveaway and leverage it.  But first you need to have a free product to entice people onto your list, and into a marketing relationship with you.

I encourage you to spend some time today thinking about what you already have of value and how you can repackage it into a valuable free-giveaway that your target group wants and needs.