Greetings!
You and I are both marketers. In fact we all are marketers. If you have a day gig you are selling your services and time. If you are a freelancer, you are a marketer. You sell your product or service. Or, if you are in school you will soon be doing what I have just described.
Because marketing has become a discipline / study in and of itself, some people use it as an abstraction and as a talent to simply “market” something – whatever it may be. That’s fine for them, but I find it much more interesting to sell myself and my music.
Even rock bands are marketers. They provide an experience, and eventually provide bookers and promoters with an evening of profit when they bring their following to a show.
For the past few days I have been checking out some of my favorite “information gurus” to see how they use free samples, or even gifts as a giveaway. Everybody loves the idea of “FREE”. I do. It implies no risk. And, it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling about the person I am getting something free from. I must say – I have gotten hooked on people after getting their free stuff.
FREE MP3s, PDF files, reading blog posts, you tube videos….get me hooked. Ok, I’m easy! 🙂
So I have been observing myself, and my own emotional buttons, seeing how I feel when they get pushed.
At “Trader Joe’s” grocery I got a tasty little treat of a sausage slice in a mini dixie cup. Yummy, at 8pm when I have not yet eaten. That made me more likely to buy them sausages. Wait- I actually did buy some!
In my quest to get better educated about marketing, I recently saw some “marketing web pages” of nobody’s whom I have never heard of, selling $497 ebook products with no free sample. Hmm, curious. What happens is I see it, and say “NEXT!”
For them to ask for a sale without giving me something is just bad marketing!
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I attempted (and still do) to look “under the hood” as it were – to take a cosmic view of this selling, marketing, free stuff. Sounds crazy I know. Leave it to us Americans to spiritualize making money! 🙂
But seriously folks, I love what I do and want to continue what it is I do – play music. So that means I have to sell the little gems that pour out of my mind, whether they are videos, books, pdfs, mp3s, CD’s or shows.
So…up rises a fear factor, a survival “worry”.
“What if I give it away when I could have sold it? That was too much work to just give away” and so on….I have experienced that. As it turns out, the more one closes off giving, it’s like putting gaffers tape over receiving! (Thanks to Mike Littman for that analogy!)
And so in a meditation, where I had clarity – I realized this:
1) No energy is ever lost.
Even if you go out to the woods and scream, everything around you received that vibration and it just gets transferred over and over, back and forth. This means, to give something away whether it is for free or not – the energy will surely boomerang back.
2) Time does not exist! Don’t forget.
When you give away a free thing – and you know step 1, that the equivalent will surely come back, the basic difference between a freebie and a paid item is the amount of time it takes to “receive” in return. If you give a freebie away, there are no “guarantees” in the material plane of getting paid. No one is writing a check or hitting a paypal button, but if you wait – and here’s the condition – truly given a piece of yourself, of your spark, of your genius – it must come back.
So there’s no real difference in a way. Giving the free thing away means you have faith that this law works.
(I think of this often when I play gigs…how I had to “sit in” for free for a while, give people a sample of “my playing” and now it has come around so that I get paid to play guitar.)
3) Feel the Worth in What You Provide
All this having been said, we all have our different gauges and inner workings as to what we charge for, what we sell and what we give away. I think another very important point is this:
Even though you might be giving it away for FREE, you must feel the worth in what you provide. If you don’t feel that what you are offering has true worth, that will be reflected back to you!
4) You’ll Get What You Give
Here’s why you need to follow step 3. If you give out CRAP, you get CRAP. If you give out LOVE, you get LOVE. Trust me, I have experienced this and know it to be true.
This is part of the reason that doing what you love, following your bliss, is so important!
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Food for thought! Now it’s time for breakfast….have a great day!
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The website ihype.com is about to launch at the end of this month. It’s a very cool idea, especially to bloggers.