As most people know, freebies carry a lot of weight. One of most powerful words in marketing, especially Internet marketing, is word "free".

This little word is so powerful that even its mere presence in an email subject line sets off all kinds of alarms.

This is because, by now, most people have been "freed" to death (thanks to accursed spam), so in certain contexts they get pretty suspicious of freebies, as they should.

But way before anybody ever thought about possibility of computers, or an Internet, there was a saying -- "Nothing in life is free."

And when it comes to advertising we all know, deep down, that there is usually going to be something attached when that little word is thrown around.

As long as a customer perceives that there is indeed some genuine value for him or her in what is being given away they'll still grab it, however.

Giving away something for free as a part of your offer has long been considered one of cardinal principles for selling on Web. No matter what it is you're trying to market, you're practically considered to be nuts if you don't use freebies.

Take ezines, for example. The vast majority of ezines cost nothing. They're free. Yet many people who publish free ezines, myself included, use or have used freebies to entice people to subscribe to our ezines. It's so difficult to establish value on Web that we actually have to give something away in order to give something away!

There's a right way and a wrong way to utilize this powerful little word "free". There is also a basic principle concerning use of freebies in Web marketing which holds true for ANY information product, not just ezines.

In few paragraphs that follow, I'd like to pass on a couple of simple little techniques for effective use of freebies which will quickly result in increased sales for you and also help you to develop a new perspective and attitude about establishing value when doing business on Web.

USE BONUSES WISELY

In order to increase your sales by using freebies you need to make sure that you use your bonuses wisely. This way you'll qualify your prospects and get people who'll want to buy. The result will be a marked increase in percentage of prospects who convert to buyers.

Unfortunately, Web is full of examples of how not to use bonuses. For example, how many times have you seen an ad headline that read something like this?:

Subscribe now for FREE to Joe's Ezine and get your BONUS special report!

Now there's nothing wrong with giving away a bonus report to new subscribers. But, it shouldn't be your up-front selling point. Your up-front selling point should be benefits which your product offers your customer.

Ask yourself first, "What can my product do for my prospect?" Begin your pitch with benefits they will receive. Some great sales letters just jump right in with a bullet list of benefits.

Wherever you are doing business, online, or offline you need to present a professional image.

You can have best product in world, most targeted advertising campaign dragging people to wherever it is you sell your product, but when they get there if you don't look like someone who takes their business seriously why should your customer?

For an online business owner, cost needn't be a reason not to look as professional as anyone else.

So ask yourself if you need to address any of following to bring your website up to professional standards.

Firstly, what is url to your business homepage? The url is address you type in to get to your website. If it looks like http://www.somefreehost.com/123/yourname.com you are in need of a domain name immediately.

Domain names are a great first step to creating a professional looking website, and are simple and cheap to setup. I personally use http://www.godaddy.com for my website at http://www.cashinonline.info as a domain for 1 year there only costs $8.95 and is easy to administer to point at an existing site (forwarding) or to a hosting service.

So there's no excuse not to have a domain name for your business, unless it's already taken, but Godaddy will even offer alternative names containing your name so even that's taken care of. Go and find your domain name now, and then continue reading.

The next big question is where you host your site, at first free hosting can seem like a good idea, but your business could quickly outgrow their offerings. Most free hosts only offer very low bandwidth and may have high demands placed by hosting lots of sites. This means your site will load slowly, and your potential customers will move on before it loads.

The next problem is amount of download (transfer) free host will allow you. If your site gets lots of hits (which would be great) they could pull plug to conserve their own transfer limits. Then your website will not be seen.

My reccomendation for web hosting would have to be http://www.Host4Profit.com/cgi-bin/home.cgi?67213 host4profit has an excellent package for businesses, and offers plenty of space for your site and more bandwidth than most will ever need. Your site will always be available. But even better is that as a host4profit user you can refer others to service (with a clear conscience too) and receive commissions each month, and with just 3 people referred using service you are into a profit.