You're right, but I wanna expand a little and let people know that this shit ain't easy.
I help clients run these offers. Let me give you an example of what's required to really make it work.
First, your F+S offer must be valuable. I had a client want to offer a $2 product for free + $3.95 S&H. I set up the page and he was surprised that it didn't convert. Lost client, and a valuable lesson for me: don't run offers that aren't actually valuable. You'll just run traffic and be like 'oh this page doesn't convert'. Wrong: your offer just sucks and nobody wants it.
Most people think that anything can be given away for F+S. Not true: gotta give real value!
First and a half, your F+S offer must be valuable... to your audience. Giving people a $5 knife is only going to be valuable to people who really want that knife in the first place.
Second, you need to know what your cost per customer acquisition is. You might be running a PR campaign with a CPA of $0, an Instagram campaign with a CPA of $2, or a Facebook campaign with a CPA of $8. (Example numbers) Doesn't matter what it is, you just need to know it. This is pretty general to any business, but absolutely paramount to making a F+S offer work.
Third, your upsells need to make sense to the people who are claiming your F+S offer. This takes time and insight, and often where most of these marketers fail. Just offering shit in the same niche isn't going to make it work! You gotta solve problems in a logical order. Otherwise, your CR% on your upsells will be damn near 0.
It's easy to give shit away for free. It's harder to get free takers to pay for something they weren't even thinking about buying in the first place.
The people who make this work best are the people with the deepest pockets. Sad but true. The cheapest traffic sources have scale issues, and the most scalable traffic sources are often the most expensive. Ryan Deiss spends like millions a month. Most wannabe Internet marketers have like $200 in their pocket and think that it'll be enough money to get all of the insight and stuff to make it work on Facebook newsfeed or Google Adwords.
Sure it's possible to make it work on low budgets (especially if you have a loyal audience already that you don't need to pay to market to). But F+S offers usually just generate a bunch of bunk leads anyway that will never actually pay retail for anything. Because of this, you really gotta make sure you've got the valuable offers and the hungry audience to make the numbers work.
Don't market the 'easy way', thinking that 'oh it's a technique that makes Ryan Deiss millions! I'll do it too!' Me-too marketers waste money and lose confidence. Value comes first.
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