Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams

OK, so I’m a little behind the conversation.. like 3 months… but there’s been a lot of chatter recently about “moving the freeline”

Now, the “free line” concept comes from the sales funnel, where typically, the sales process begins with a free ebook, white-paper or audio download… in an effort to build trust with the prospect so they will buy from you further down the funnel. Nearly everyone online has experienced this - it’s what the industry was built on.

Moving the free line is the concept of giving even more stuff away for free and converting what previously were paid for products into free resources. So, what was previously a front end product you had to pay for, becomes a free resource now sitting above the free line.

Eben Pagan is the man who has been credited with coining the phrase and this is his take on “moving the free line:

“MY EXPERIENCES MOVING THE FREE LINE

… BUT that’s exactly it, and the point so many people are yet to articulate:

You are not giving away free resources - You are trading your resources for something of value that is perceived to be free.

As an business owner, online or off (there I go again; on my “you’re not an internet marketer, you are an internet business owner” rant) you never want to give anything away for free, you always need to get something of value in exchange for this “free”. Notice I said ’something of value’, not necessarily money.

An email subscriber (as Eben mentions) is something of value, that doesn’t cost the prospect anything out of their pocket.. but it does have an empirical value.

This empirical value can be calculated by working out how much profit you made last year, and divide that by the number of subscribers on your list…

And that right there folks, is what each subscriber is worth to you.

So in reality you are *selling* what is perceived as free, for a real $$ amount (in future income), because you are trading an ebook for an email address,… which in turn is worth $X to you.

So if by moving the free line you can exchange more email addresses for “free” stuff then, and only then, does the theory/concept/practice makes commercial sense.

So for those playing along at home…

No matter what form of business you are in;

Give a free ebook… get an email subscriber.
Give a discount.. demand a referral (or three).
Give an audio… extract a suggestion/feedback/response.
Give a bonus… require a testimonial.
Give X… insist on Y
Go above and beyond… get some value in return.