"Move The Free Line" with Eben Pagan

0:00 what I'd like to do now is introduce a marketing approach and even though this wasn't invented yesterday it's something that I think we can interpret in a modern way and that if we want to master modern marketing I think that figuring out how to implement this strategy in our businesses can really help out I call the strategy moving the free line moving the free line so I'm going to give you a little

0:47 visual now and call this the free line you might think of this as the relationship the progress the relationship with a customer when you start without meeting a customer you do things for them that you might consider to be free this is the free stuff you might give them a little sample or the ad you run might be free for them to look at or they might call a free recorded message or maybe they'll go to a free website whatever it is typically it's free whatever it is that's teaching them about you getting a little bit of education and over here here I call this the depth line so this is the

1:36 depth line there a free line This is the depth line over here and as you get to know a customer kind of chronologically over time start out maybe they buy a low priced product Maybe upsell them to the next level sell them another thing and maybe you've got a mid-priced product maybe sell them something else another thing and maybe you've got your premium priced product over here maybe this is a free report they can download on online or maybe some free information they can get on your website maybe there's a $10 product or a $50 product and then maybe

2:22 there's a $100 product then maybe over here is a $200 300 maybe that's a$1 th000 product well the idea behind moving the free line is to take this line of stuff that they can get for free and move it over and something that maybe used to cost 10 bucks or 20 bucks a person would be used to paying now they can get from you for free and when you move the free line when you take this and no longer have it here but maybe it's like here what happens is your your lead funnel opens up you appeal to more people a lot

3:07 more people are going to be interested in getting something for free that's very valuable now what you can also do then is take this depth line over here and you can move that as well and whereas that was a thousand product maybe it was a $2,500 product or $5,000 product because if you open up your funnel and you get more people over here what that means is you're going to have more of the cream that's going to be in there with your milk an example of this system and how I how I've used this is some of our altitude marketing the way that I launched the altitude

3:54 marketing program all the beginning of the marketing was with the free business business analysis quiz that I showed you that led to the giveaway of a free piece of software so that you could make your own that was the process first we showed how a quiz can with some sources of traffic get higher opt-in conversion percentages than standard landing pages since a lot of people had been knocking off our landing page we thought it would be interesting to show them something that potentially could work better and then to really blow everyone's mind then give the software away so you could create your own so you could do it yourself from home now that was tied to another strategy of affiliate marketing we marketed a little bit to our lists but

4:40 most of the great majority almost all of our leads on our traffic came through affiliate Partners I didn't just do that to give to the world I did it because I knew that this audience of online marketers would think that that was cool and they'd want to tell their lists about it just because they want to tell their lists about cool things because they want the people on their list to think that they're cool so I knew it would be going above and beyond we moved the free line we gave away you might consider it to be you know we could put a value of hundreds of dollars to anyone that wanted it now what that also allowed us to do is instead of just selling kind of standard information products to start

5:25 out with altitude and selling you know a program for 100 bucks or 200 bucks it allowed us to sell our very first program for $10,000 right out of the gate because we were able to get tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of people to come to the website and check it out because we moved the free line I'll tell you if I would have called up all these internet marketing gurus and all these folks who I've just I had just been getting to know a lot of them and said hey we're going to be selling this thing for a lot of money and uh it's going to be cool and uh I'll give you some of the money if you sell it so tell your list about it most of them would have

6:11 said you know I got a lot going on busy schedule's full what I did is I went to them and I said hey check this video out that I made and it was a video of me talking about our landing page and talking about you know a cooler landing page and then talking about the software and I showed them the softare W and showed on the page I didn't say will you tell people about this I said watch this and then you know what they all said I got to tell my list about this this is cool and that's really how it all started just moved the freeline right out of the gate right from the beginning gave away a massive amount of value it's one of the great things about the internet you can give away webinars you can you can get a

6:57 thousand people on a webinar you you can have your own webinar line that can hold a thousand people at a time and you can have it 247 for under $100 a month use it as much as you want you can give away free webinars you can give away streaming video you can make a video on a little pocket camera you can upload it to Google video put an hourlong video on there have a video that you it's worth a $100 give it away to as many people as can watch it create a downloadable PDF book that's worth 50 or1 bucks or whatever whatever value it has whatever it's worth you translate the value you can give it away these are strategies that are being used by people that have no list no

7:43 Market no product to go generate huge lists of people move the free line now on the one hand I'm saying this because it's a good marketing strategy on another the other hand I'm saying it because I actually think that we need to get a little more honest with ourselves and with our customers and we need to start letting our customers see what what it is that we're selling so that they can make an informed decision because too many business models are built on I'm going to sell you a bunch of stuff and then you're going to be too lazy to ask for a refund or to call the credit card company to get a charge back and I don't want to um Talk negatively or disparage other people that are in our industry but when I hear about things that you know like designing the packaging of your product so that once

8:29 the person opens the package it makes it so it's impossible to return and you've got a return policy that's really good but once they open it it messes up the packaging and now they can't it's like that stuff's a little weird to me I don't doesn't feel right in the gut well on the other side of that instead of saying give me money and I'll show you what's behind the curtain if for your own Integrity right for your own um kind of for your own good to hold you to a higher standard you say I'm going to show you something some of my stuff I'm going to let you Avail yourself of who we are and maybe you sell uh refrigeration systems for hotels and you sell these big freezers and you say how do we get the hotel to get an experience with the refrigerator I don't know what the answer is but you could figure it out

9:16 you could have a way where you know maybe you have a little webinar where the people that buy the refrigerators in the hotels get on the webinar and you take them through your company and you talk to them about you know how you do business and show them some of your customers and talk about your philosophy I don't know what it is there's a way though to move the free line and to get your prospective customer a bunch of the value UPF front I like it for that reason too I think it holds us to a higher standard but there's another reason why you need to do it if you don't do it now someone else will someone's going to figure out that by giving away something that didn't take them that long to create or by packaging up some of the stuff that you sell for a lot of money and giving it away they're going to steal all your

10:02 business and so you need to do the math in your head and say okay I see where this is going if I'm the best and I hope you are I need to prove it by giving enough of it away that people say wow you are the best because the best kind of always Rises to the top in some way there's a reason why Rolex watches sells so damn many watches year after year after year after year after year there's a reason why they keep selling them there's a reason why Ferrari keeps selling car after car after car when you can go buy a perfectly good used car for a few thousand dollars it'll get you well you'll drive it a lot

10:47 more than you'll drive your Ferrari or you can get a perfectly good watch for five bucks that'll probably keep time way better than that mechanical Rolex there's room at the top for the best so if you're the best and you let people have a little bit have a little taste and they see that you're the best you you will have an audience you will have people that will want to work with you right there's always a market for the best so move the free line so here's something that we saw earlier on remember the headline unlimited TransUnion credit reports and scores free for 30 days your credit report and credit score quick and secure every day if you want I love that language every day if you want