jcCommerce

A Free Subscription is not Always Free Enough

5th September, 2007 - Posted by Chance -

Over at Secure Delivery we are pretty proud of our new free digital download subscription option.

It’s not a free trial or a try-before-you-buy kind of thing. There are no restrictions on how many sales you can make, how many downloads you can deliver, or any of that crap. Its not time limited and will never expire leaving you stranded. The fact is it really, really is free. No billing, no credit card numbers, cancel anytime. No strings attached, really. Heck, we don’t even “build a list” or market to free users with advertising or special offers for other products that we endorse.

Unfortunately, free is not free enough for most forums and communities.

You see to post offers in “Freebie” forums like at Digital Point or the Warrior Forum you are not allowed to request contact information. You can’t collect email addresses or names. You can’t send emails to users after they sign up, even if its to say “Holy Crap! You sold something and made $20!” or you get warned, banned, and tarred and feathered and run out of town. This is where the rub lies as to set up a free account you actually have to, you know… set up a free account.

(as a side note, you can ask any user of Secure Delivery and they will tell you they love to get our emails- just ask Burt)

There is such a stigma surrounding the word Free, especially in internet marketing, because of so many promises of free stuff *with a catch. Its proving nearly impossible to get people to understand that all we want to do is get subscribers to use and abuse us on our dime.

Case in point-

I noticed the rules on the Freebie forum at DP said you could not collect emails to give away something for free. Knowing that our free service would send up a red flag because the person would actually have to sign up for a free account to get a free account (I know, crazy right?), I sent a PM to the guy who posted the freebie rules and asked him for his approval.

This was his reply:

Its not a free download its a “free service” you must make some money from it try services but i guess free is ok but i am not sure

After I recovered from brain damage trying to unwrap his grammar, I decoded his terminal run-on sentence:

Ain’t nothin free! You gotta be making money you ain’t foolin’ me! So um I dunno omg I like pie.

The simple fact is this- We give out free accounts with no strings attached because we want people to be successful selling their first digital product. We know that if Bob sells his first ebook and makes $100 he will probably make another one. When bob wants to sell 2 or 3 ebooks he has to upgrade. Cha-ching! Bob is successful, Secure Delivery has a happy paid subscriber who learned the ins and outs of selling their first digital product on us and has no problem with spending $10 a month to earn $100-10,000 a month, and everything is right in the world.

We don’t want to market other peoples products to our free subscribers. We don’t want our free subscribers wasting time looking at ads for some half-baked “Auto Cash Machine” or other nonsense.

What we want is our free subscribers to focus on marketing their own products, earning money, and deciding to take the next step and make more.

Now the question is, how do I get everyone else to understand our brilliantly simple subscription model without thinking I am trying to pull the wool over their eyes?