There is a well known Internet marketer by the name of Eben Pagan and one of his best known ideas is the concept of “moving the free line”. In short, it means giving more stuff away to your potential customers as a means to make a sale down the road. It means giving really good stuff away – stuff your customers might expect to have to pay for.

A lot of business people online think it is best to charge for everything, but it is hard to argue with Eben Pagan when the man is generating around $20 million per year in sales.

One of the important principles to recognize in marketing is that of reciprocity. It means that when you do great things for people, they often feel the need to give something back. Using that principle, you can see that giving a lot of real, quality content to your potential customers is going to lead to higher numbers reciprocating when it is time to actually sell them something.

Not only that, but giving away quality information sets you up as an authority in your market. It trains your market to recognize you and to know what the information you provide is good stuff. It makes selling them something down the road all that much easier when they have seen your stuff in the past and know it is good.

Image courtesy of Entreprenuer’s Journey, where Yaro Starak has a great article on this subject.

Using the image above, you can imagine that free line being pushed down the funnel. That stuff you might have sold for $27? Give it away instead and this can lead to great numbers of sales of more expensive items down the road.

You might have noticed that, here at PCMech, we provide a TON of free content every day. But, we also have premium content in that mix, available only to our paid members. The premium stuff is good stuff – really good stuff. But, if we charged for everything, there is a high chance you would have never found PCMech in the first place. You found us because of the volume of free information we post every day. Yet another example of the free line in action.

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