People ask why I give away so much free information. Fact is … free sells!

Last week I put out a free report called “102 Proven Headline Formulas“.

I did not put that report out to get sales, and there was no sale call to action. The goal of the free report was to build visibility, some links to gain a start in search, and build some authority. Through reciprocation I expected to get some opt-ins, which was designed to help me get feedback about what people want to know about social media. You can see the question mechanism on the homepage here.

So I did not set out to make sales and there were no sales lead mechanisms in the campaign. A strange thing happened though.

Leads happened.

Sales came through, both for my Authority Blogger Course and for my consulting.

Sales From Free

The reasons for this are simple:

• The more visibility you get, the more chance you have of making sales, even without directly making a pitch
• My sales pages are linked from my content pages in sidebars, and related articles
• Product landing pages are optimized (to varying degrees!) to make best of any traffic that they do receive
• Social proof is powerful – some top names retweeted my report
• The report itself is from my Authority Blogger Course so works as a free sample, without directly driving people to that destination explicitly

The lesson is clear.

If you want to sell, put out some great free stuff and help it spread!