Incentivized Sales or Leads

[suzyvirtual]

I have noticed on my cheapiewidget site that a lot of people arrived having searched for
"free cheapie widgets". I checked around and there aren't really any people offering "free cheapie widgets". I can acquire cheapie widgets in bulk and ship them (including cheapie widget, packaging and postage) for about $1 each.

I have never actually worked with any type of lead collection program before, or incentivized my surfers in any way. But, it seems to me that I could offer a free cheapie widget if you signed up for this or that which paid me more than $1.

Does anybody have any experience with this sort of thing? advice to offer? how would you make the whole thing run smoothly? is it looked down upon by many/most/any places to incentivize the customers.
Thanks!

[GerBot]

I've had experience from different sides of this market.

On a simplistic level the business model seems perfect.
I'll give something away as long as the person does x, y & z which actually adds up to more than the cost of the freebie so I make easy guaranteed money.

The problem is that freebie "shoppers" are worthless.
There are big sites out there who I've seen supply 10,000+ free trial and not one converted. And I'm not talking about weird free trial product either.
I've also seen sites who make their freebie shoppers earn points for buying items, but the charge backs will be so high the merchant will be lucky to hang onto their credit card processor.

I always hear the owners of these program saying if the freebie shopper is interested in your product they'll buy it - but they have a very strange idea of how the human brain works and no idea how marketing does!

I would give the idea a miss

[suzyvirtual]

Ger, thanks for the reply. I totally understand what you're saying.
Seems to me since my cost is so tiny (im not giving away ipods or something) that there should be some way to sucessfully monetize the whole thing.
I actual already bought a fairly small amount of the cheapie widgets and I am going to do a little test run to see what happens.
Seems to me that happing a real name, address, email etc of a person and knowing that they are into "cheapie widgets" is worth more than $1 to somebody. we'll see.

[tsinoy]

what if you make these people say something on your site about this "cheap widget"? that content alone is worth something to someone else eventually... and you can put other stuff for sale or adsense around the content...

basically use this folks to generate content for your site... and google and other SE's will love you for it, and you make money from someone else...

[suzyvirtual]

holy moly---that's an awesome idea! I think I will do this.
Thank you!