Giving things away for free can be a valuable tool to promote your business. You can use it as bait, to attract prospective clients. You can use it to funnel people to a sales page, or affiliate commission. “Free” can be linkbait to help you rank higher for a keyword, thus funneling more targeted traffic toward yourself and your business. Free content can help you build credibility or authority in a niche to build your brand. There are many uses for “free” that are worthwhile and beneficial to you and your business.

What “free” is not is a business model. Somewhere you need to draw the line. There is a point where the ROI (return on investment) of “free” begins to hurt your business rather than help it. This is a lesson that some bloggers I read seem to be either learning, re-learning, or just being reminded of.

Grizzly, who gives away an unbelievable amount of free information got disgusted by the response he got from some individuals when he issued a call to action in response to a big Site Build It! fiasco. Many individuals that demanded he hold their hands and walk them through how to make a website and make money from it responded to his call to action by telling how wrong he was to do so. He finally felt the need to vent, and write a rant about how people don’t appreciate free Internet Marketing advice.

Now, I don’t think that Grizzly is just learning this lesson. I think it is more of a rude slap to remind him of something that he knows, but somehow slipped under the radar for a while.

Justin Briggs, a Search Engine Optimization engineer, points out how he made a great Grizzly Wordpress theme, and one user didn’t seem to appreciate the time and effort that Justin put into it. At least one person did not appreciate the value of “free.” He also points out a quote from Arron Wall that really gets to the heart of the issue. People that want something for free, and only for free, do not value you or your time. They don’t have any value for YOU at all. They only value themselves, and they don’t care how much money or time you lose in the process of giving them what they feel they are entitled to.

Paul tells us about how he used a site as a case study, and as a result of his benevolence, he lost the site and it’s income. He won’t be giving away free information anymore. I remember seeing an exchange somewhere, and I don’t remember where it was, or who were the participants. One person said that he was not worried about his site. Google has better things to do than to review his site. Another responded, “But 10,000 assholes on Digital Point don’t.” That’s pretty much the point. Vic points out how even if you get approved after the process, it still costs you money.

This really stuck with me, because these are the very same people that Arron Wall refers to as not having any intrinsic value for your time. These are the 10,000 assholes on Digital Point that get sites deindexed, because they have no sense of how to actually make it in Internet Marketing, so whenever they come across anyone having any degree of success, they feel the need to tear them down, and bring that person down to their level.

The 10,000 assholes on Digital Point take and take and take, because they feel they are entitled. They only see not making money as a legitimate business model. If you make money, they want to know your secret (which is probably not a secret, but rather hard work) and they demand you give it to them for free.

If you have the audacity to ask for financial compensation, then these 10,000 assholes on Digital Point realize that they have just discovered a “spammer.” No shit. That’s their limited, narrow, pathetic, absurd view of making money online. If you want to charge for your time, you are a spammer. So, it stands to reason that a “spammer” should be reported.

My father owns a retail store. It’s a physical store, not an Internet retailer. From time to time they give away something for free. This is done with the strategy of promoting the business. Often it will be something like T shirts with the business name on them. Sometimes it will be something of greater value in some sort of contest. Other times it is something small an inexpensive that is okay to do for promotional purposes, but they don’t give away the inventory for free. Free is not a business model.

By extension, Grizzly gives away a lot of information for free. This is fine. It funnels traffic to him, and builds authority. One commenter on Justin’s post, Patrick, observed that he would be willing to pay $100 bucks an hour or more to pick Grizzly’s brain. You need to draw the line between free content and free consulting. Once you start holding hands, you need to either cite your hourly rate, or refer (with affiliate link) to someone that does charge a rate if you don’t want to do the consulting yourself. Either way, you are compensated without spending hours re-answering the same n00b questions over and over again.

Create an FAQ page with all the beginner questions. Make all the questions point with anchored links to where those questions are answered. When a question is asked the answer is a link to the FAQ. If the person wants more than that, then it is time to charge or attempt to earn an affiliate commission. If the person doesn’t value your time enough to pay for it, then perhaps that person doesn’t value his own time either. In that case, good luck finding all that “free” information out there.

After 6 months of attempting to separate the good advice from the bullshit and scams, and you haven’t earned a dime, you’ll learn that your time is valuable too. I have paid people for their time, precisely because I value MY time. I didn’t want to spend 6 months filtering out bullshit. I wanted good advice, and I wanted it now, because I realized the value of my own time. I realized that what I can learn in a few minutes of having it handed to me will save me hours of time filtering bullshit.

Free is a good promotional tool, but never forget that you are running a business. Don’t give away the inventory. 10,000 assholes on Digital Point will only screw you over for it.