great post. I agree that if you are planning on selling some kind of digital product, i.e. ebook, the you better have put in your time and effort to writing something uniquely enough for people to go WOW. True internet can be taken from the net, almost anything, but if you can re-package it the right way, it’s worth you selling it.

When I first started, 2 years ago, your Fail as Fast as You Can was a really valuable report.

My take on this is something Eben Pagan said: “If your customers don’t send you emails to tell you how much you helped them”, your marketing have a problem.

I just received an message today about one of my subscribers who told me how much my ebook helped them.

I tested my first IM lead generation ebook ever on DP forum. I was blown away by the response. Hundreds of posts.

So I may do something right.

Franck.

Free reports should be as good as a paid one (as David mentioned). If you set the tone at the start you have a great chance of building from that.

You don’t often get a second chance to make a first impression. Some reports are not really ‘free’ when you consider they are in exchange for an email.

Regards

James

You had one report that was themed on failing as much as possible on your way to success that had some great content in it.

It’s certainly surprising that since more marketers know that the customer acquisition is much more difficult than customer retention, that many continue to put “free” (or as little effort as possible) into the early stages. I’d think you’d want to create as much impact as possible in the beginning (and continue to overdeliver…)

“Free” reports can be crap… I guess you never know until you sign up for someone’s list but because it’s so easy to un-sub from a legitimate marketers list it will only cost you a few minutes time to find out.

The ‘free’ report at my site is something I had sold at one time for $27, but I condensed it and after taking it off the market for a few years decided to offer it as a ‘free’ report as an incentive to sign up for my list. So I know the value is there because people used to pay me for the information it contained.

I think if more marketers really wanted to build relationships with their readers they should take the same approach – don’t give it away unless they can say, “Hey if put up a sales page for this report, could I actually sell it for cash money and how much?”… if they cannot say “yes” they should not be giving it away either as it probably has no value.

Nice post…

Dave

The geist is to highlight the fact that if you put something out there that’s associated with you, your website or your brand, you need to make sure it’s up to snuff.

I hope you don’t blow off my reports, Daniel!