By Deborah Carraro, with special thanks to Eben Pagan for the inspiration

Last month, I was tied to my laptop. Okay, most of you who know me personally just giggled at that statement because I’m never too far away from my computer but last month was exceptional.

You see, one of the marketers I respect the most (Eben Pagan — and I wish I could be part of his team!) launched a new program. As part of his product launch, he created an exceptional series of videos that inspired a flurry of activity and helped me focus on the next steps I needed to take to move my business.

He created a ton of valuable content. Some of the videos were close to an hour long. He gave several seminars too during that time that if they were anything like the video tutorials — must have been packed full of useful information.

Every video left me wanting more. Every video taught me something that I could put into action right away. In the two or three weeks that I followed the launch campaign, I got closer and closer to my goals.

And that’s what free content should do.

It should help people!

Gone are the days when you could put together lame content that was merely a sales pitch in disguise. Internet users are much savvier these days and demand much higher quality than in the past.

For your online business to succeed, you need to offer valuable information that’s accessible to your target market at no cost to them.

Eben Pagan calls this “Moving the free line.”

This concept is instrumental in the timely movement of prospects from free resources to paid products to high-end back-end products.

Now it used to be that the free content was what you offered people to get them into your sales funnel. If you picture a funnel or inverted triangle with the widest point at the top, the free line would be at the top of the triangle, and all of your free stuff would be outside your funnel. Yaro Starak has a great illustration on his blog which I’ve copied for you here.

Moving the free line means moving that line further down your sales funnel so that some of the information that you used to charge for becomes a free resource that is now sitting above the free line. Again, an illustration from Yaro’s blog helps us better understand the concept.

funnel

The concept is simple, really, and once you get it, it will change the way you look at your business forever!

You must give away some of your best content to capture the attention of your target audience.

So how do we do this and how does it relate to your squeeze page?

Your “enticement” needs to be some free resource that addresses the most emotional need that your target market has and offers real results as quickly as possible.

The content needs to have value and substance. It needs to offer results and solutions, not marketing sales pitches for other content.

You need to earn trust in advance, especially if you’re just starting out, by delivering real value and blowing them away with free content. Once your audience trusts you, you can sell them on your paid stuff, and you won’t need to do any convincing because you’ll have established a healthy relationship with your prospective customers.

If you grasp this concept, you’ll be able to move people through your sales funnel easily. I’ve seen it in action time and time again.

Embrace the concept of the free line and make it part of your online business blueprint.