Your small business blog should be coming together quite nicely by the time you get to this point. If it’s not up to your standards or you aren’t bringing in the traffic you were expecting, perhaps it’s time to put a little more effort into bringing those readers to your blog and keeping them there. How can you do this? One low-cost method is to give away a free information item.

In order to take best advantage of your information product, you first need to understand your audience, give them something they want that no one else is giving them, and use an opt-in method to capture their e-mail addresses so that you can continue to market to these prospects in the future. By understanding your audience, you can decide on what type of information product to use. You may choose from one of the following:

• E-book
• Industry Report
• White Papers
• Video Tutorial
• Podcasts
• Newsletter
• How-To’s
• More

There are of course many other options to choose from, but make sure you use the platform that is most likely to appeal to your audience and that they are able to use (not everyone knows how to use podcasts yet, for example). You are also going to want to check out what some of your competitors are giving away. Preferably, you want them to not be giving anything away. This will help you gain some of their prospects.

In order for your free item to bring you any benefit, it is imperative that you have an opt-in mechanism that will capture all your new prospects’ e-mail addresses. Giving away free information is counter-intuitive at times, but when you factor in how many interested prospects you now have at your marketing command, it is one of the better decisions you can make for your small business blog. By the end of the month, Prevail will be giving away a free e-bookk called “Building A Better Business Blog”. The reason for the delay is that I want to use some of the information used throughout this series in the e-book. A newsletter is also nearly finished, as it is also waiting for some useful information from this series to be included.

Our hope is to promote the e-book, get prospects to sign up for it, keep them interested in Prevail PR and what we offer through the newsletter and build our e-mail list from there. I believe both information products are top-notch as I’ve researched other products from all types of industries over the last few years. Some are excellent and some are useless. Our hopes is that ours help people do some of the work they’d otherwise hire us to do for them. The reason for this is that it will create trust and as a business owner, I know there isn’t enough time in the day to do everything we want to do.

I’m looking to gain credibility for some of our services with these products and let the prospects decide for themselves whether or not they’d like to do business with us. If they end up doing the job themselves with help from our information products, then hopefully that turns into some form of goodwill. I truly believe that eventually, everything you put out comes back. If we lose some business over this tactic, my associates can blame me, but it’s a philosophy I’ve used in all areas of my life and it more than usually works out to everyone’s benefit. At the very minimum, hopefully our e-book is as useful as I think it is and we’ll get lots of new prospects to offer other services to in the future. Remember, permission is the most important factor in marketing nowadays. Everything else falls to the wayside, ignored and even disrespected. We may lose out on some business, but we are dedicated to gaining permission first and marketing next.

Do you agree with this attitude? What types of experiences have you had with permission marketing?

For other features in this series, please click a link below:

Top 10 Small Business Blog Features - Top Commentators

Top 10 Small Business Blog Features - About Me/Us

Top 10 Small Business Blog Features - FAQ

Top 10 Small Business Blog Features - RSS Feed

Top 10 Small Business Blog Features - USP

Top 10 Small Business Blog Features - Top Posts

Top 10 Small Business Blog Features - Landing Pages

Top 10 Small Business Blog Features - Front Page

Top 10 Small Business Blog Features - Opt-In Method

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