I don’t know about you but I love it when I find a website offering high quality freebies. Whether it’s a free icon set, a free website template or free content, I’ll take it and then let other people know all about it.
Now before I continue I should mention that offering freebies may not be suitable in every niche and furthermore, not everyone will have the skills or resources to offer freebies.
First off, your freebie should be high quality and substantial. If you are in the Internet Marketing niche then simply offering some old PLR articles that everyone and their grandmother already has is not going to make much of an impact. However, if you were to offer ten brand new, well written PLR articles every week, I think that will quickly get you noticed!
What a lot of designers have started doing is to create themes for WordPress. Some of the most popular design sites on the Internet are from individuals offering totally free designs. Some of these sites even have a Google Pagerank of 9! The fact is that when people ask where they can get high quality templates from, people will automatically link to a freebie site, doing all the promotion for you and without the need for you to rely on the search engines.
One website that does this freebie concept very well is SmashingMagazine who regularly offer their visitors a number of freebies from templates to icons to cheat sheets. All of the resources are free to download without any signups or email submissions. They are doing such a great job I’ve even mentioned them in this article – and that’s publicity you can’t buy when people willingly mention your site.
As I mentioned earlier, offering freebies outside the webmaster and web development niche can be a little difficult because the needs are different. However, that shouldn’t stop you from creating a wordpress theme about dog training because maybe an Internet marketer wants to make a website about dog training, discovers your theme and uses it on their site. Your theme will then have a credit link back to your main dog training site which helps get visitors and helps with your SEO.
Another option is to offer some kind of resource that people can come to your site for, like a mortgage calculator or a conversions calculator. If you wanted to be really snazzy you could make a Flash game, keeping with the dog training idea, how about making a Flash game where you had to train your dog to do various tricks? Give people the option to embed the game on their dog training site and you’ll soon see plenty of traffic coming back to your site (not to mention the potential number of links).
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