Use Free Bonuses

By Steve Gillman

The strategies outlined in this section are not always relevant for everyone, but almost any business can offer free bonuses of some kind as a way to keep customers happy and increase the perceived value of the products or services offered. And there are two basic ways to use them. One is as an enticement to make the initial sale. The other is as a gift after the sale, to make the experience--and your company--more memorable to the customer.

I have used them both ways. In fact, with several of the e-books I sell I offer bonuses on the sales page to get the order, and then I give the customer another free e-book or report for free on the download page. They don't expect that extra, and so they are usually very satisfied with the total value received.

If you sell anything online, using free bonuses is easy and cheap. Let's look at an example. Suppose you sell luggage and travel accessories from a website. Why not offer a free e-book. In fact, you can offer one with travel stories, another with travel tips, and a third that is all about the best travel destinations. Now, we'll assume you don't want to write these books yourself, so how do you get them? There are two ways you can use (or more, but these two are the best).

First, you can pay someone to write them. Post your project request at a freelance site like Elance.com and you'll have several bidders who will do a simple ebook for you for perhaps a few hundred dollars. Look at their samples first, so you know you have a decent writer. Researching and writing an e-book of 100 pages is easy now with internet resources. Some of these writers can do it in less than a week. You get the rights, by the way, so you never pay royalties.

The other way is to buy books that are already out there. Search "reprint rights books" or "reprint rights products" in a search engine and you'll find many places to buy e-books that you can use as you like. These will costs less. Some may be as little as $20. Cheap, but the first option gives you a truly unique book that is not available elsewhere. Either way you have virtually no additional cost, since they can be downloaded endlessly by your customers without adding much load to your servers.

Free bonuses that cost you nothing to give away (after the initial cost of buying them) are great, but this strategy has been used for ages in many other ways. Years ago there was a furniture store in Michigan that gave a way a bicycle with any purchase. Even if you just bought a recliner for $180 you got a free ten-speed bike. I assume that they bought their thousand bicycles for about $45 each, which left little profit on some sales, but the perceived value of the bikes was around $120 or more, so a buyer of a $400 couch felt like he got a great deal, and the store could still make a gross profit of perhaps $70 even after the adding the bike. I recall that the store was very busy while they were doing this promotion.

How you can use free bonuses will depend on the nature of your business. In general you want to find items that cost you little while having a high perceived value. And again, you can use them as an enticement to make sales, as well as a gift to customers to make them happier with their decision after the sale.

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