A great example of the marketing power of offering free ebooks

Mobilize Mail has released a post titled People who download free ebooks are considered by marketers as raw prospects – meaning they have shown an interest in your ebook but thats it. If you upset them by starting the pitch too soon you will lose them – forever. So make sure your content has some relationship to what your business is offering so you can keep the communication going by offering more FREE related content. When the prospect is ready she will initiate the next step which is direct communication with your business.

This is not a new type of marketing concept but its just more proof that you need to offer something for free to establish the link between your business and the prospect.

This blog also offers free ebooks and each time we release a new one our own mailing lists grow significantly. In fact I don’t know of any negatives to this strategy – can you?

Mobilize Mail’s strategy to help their clients utilizes some smart software as well as the concept of having a business blog to attract prospects to the site. See the process flow diagram below. The smart part is that by having a business blog you are building up content for your free ebook. So when ready you just collect all the posts and wrap them up in an ebook format. The cost of the ebook is dramatically reduced by using this approach.