Exposure Companies will often provide a light version to gain attention for fee-based products or services. This often allows potential customers to see a product's or services potential. The hope is that providing something free will generate both brand loyalty and interest in fee-based options or services.

The Problem with Free If a business or individual is truly providing something for free, there is a cost involved. Whether time, resources or services are consumed to provide free item or service there is an expense involved. If cost is at any point greater than benefit or perceived benefit of offering free item or service, business or individual will likely review options to better balance cost-to-benefit ratio.

They may:

Discontinue support Companies or individuals that provide a free product may continue to provide item free of charge but discontinue support. If item is something like software, expense has already occurred. By providing item without technical support or customer service they can reduce their staffing costs. The only ongoing expense to provide item free of charge would be ongoing hosting costs, which are usually relatively small. If item is critical to a business or individual's operations, value of item will be lost if technical support or customer support is no longer available.

Abandon Businesses may simply discontinue offering free item or service without notice.

Compensation Individuals or companies may begin requesting donations, compensation, volunteers or a benefit listed above in order to continue to provide item or service free of charge.

Cut Corners Often free items are of reduced or inferior quality. Cost-conscious businesses or individuals often try to minimize expense associated with free items and will use less expensive materials for free items.

There is value to "free" just be sure that you know what it is. Next time something is offered for free, evaluate quid pro quo and determine what you are giving in return, because very little is ever really free.

About the Author: Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for NotePage http://www.notepage.net a wireless text messaging software company.

Step 6, associated with Step 5, lets you copy in your Adsense web search code, if you use it. When you sign up for Adsense, you have option of displaying context-sensitive ads and of allowing a Google search from your pages. The code we're talking about here is code that supports search. Entering it in Step 6 of Directory Generator is optional.

Step 7 in Directory Generator process lets you control how many results should be shown on your results pages. You can choose a fixed number or let tool present a random number of results (a number between a lower and upper bound, say between 5 and 15, for example). Step 7 also lets you choose link colors, and how your generated pages will be stored in folders, that is, all in root directory, or in a subfolder of root.

Step 8 is article entry form. Directory Generator lets you add articles directly into your generated pages - a good, convenient way to add useful content to your site.

Step 9, called Add Ons, gives you a place to add Audio Generator code if you're using that product to add audio to your pages. You can paste in RSS Equalizer code into second box, again, if you're using that product, and you can paste Amazon code into third add-in box if you choose to, to support selling Amazon items.

Step 10 lets you add an exclusion list if there are particular sites you don't want included in your results pages - like your competitors sites, for example.

Step 11 lets you specify folder you want your generated pages to be stored in, and provides a few other parameters that determine how fast generation process will run. It also provides a test function that let's you see what pages will look like before you generate entire set.

That's all there is too it! Nothing very complicated at all. By way, here's a little helpful hint. Directory Generator goes to another site to get a thumbnail picture of each website listed on results page. If your personal firewall is too tight, you may not see these thumbnails displayed when you look at your generated pages on your site. I thought initially that Directory Generator wasn't working properly (it is) until it dawned on me to look at my security log on my machine. Once I twiddled my settings, everything looked fine.

I haven't found a bug in program yet - I did, however, try to use one of input files in a Directory Generator run while I had it open for editing - and guess what? Directory Generator told me so...So, from my personal experience, it appears to be well-written code - not some slapdash thing put together overnight. So if you're interested in putting some sites out there for any reason - Adsense income is a good one - try this product. I'm pretty sure you'll like what you see.

Peter Cullen is the Webmaster at http://www.howtostartonline.com which reviews software packages and tools.