How to Bait Your Hook (Part 4)

After dealing with the importance of baiting the hook through business cards, print ads, and websites, here's the next effective strategy:

Selectively give away freebies.

After years of checking out numerous blogs over the blogosphere, I now understand why plenty of freelance writers give online users access to a free ebook. These authors need subscribers to keep their blogs alive.

They might make an initial offer of subscribers getting a free ebook. If they teach correspondence courses about writing or other topics, a free ebook would be the perfect bait to inform their subscribers about the benefits they can get should they finish a course. 

And such deals aren't limited to freelance writers. In recent years, life coaching has become an extremely fulfilling and lucrative career, to the point that even men and women who have experienced remarkable success in the workplace found it worthy to jump ship and get themselves retrained. 

Now, having a platform is one of the determining factors to a life coach's success, and putting out a website and blog are just a few ways to show that he's serious about his game.

The key to remember when giving away freebies is this: provide just enough information to satisfy the curiosity of your subscribers, but leave out the rest of "the goods" that they'd want more of what you have to offer.

I believe the reason certain companies are hell-bent on programming and brainwashing consumers is this: it's very difficult to make people part with their hard-earned money unless you appeal to a legitimate need they have, like raising their self-esteem, or appealing to their jolts of vanity or sexuality.

Whether advertising is good or bad has never been the point. If it works, who cares about the way I got you to spend your money?

The good news is, you don't have to be a slick-sounding salesman or write a lot of "marketing fluff," like those generic-sounding, pie-in-the-sky promises that do nothing to your credibility.

If you already know how to write quality content, or if you outsource paid writing jobs to competent writers for your website or blog's content, then you're already halfway done when it comes to getting noticed by your target market.

If you can win subscribers to your point of view, and make them see the benefits that they can get from your services, you'll stir up a desire in their minds and hearts.