Want Your Customers to Take Action - Maybe They Should Pay For It

I'm all for offering freebies to my readers and I give them out all the time. I give out a full-fledged traffic course with my newsletter sign up, I give out ebooks, audios, hold teleseminars and even have some cool pieces of free software coming.

I give these out for a few reasons:

• I like to help people
• It helps build trust with my readers
• When you give, you often receive plenty more back in return

But my business partner, Kelly McCausey and I, seemed to find an exception to the benefits of offering free stuff. We have been running a website hosting service at Mom Webs for a couple of years now. This service was completely free, in return for displaying some subtle advertising on the page.

Neither of us have ever been fans of free web hosting. If you want to have a BUSINESS, you've got to be able to shell out a few bucks for a professional web presence. But we came into contact with a lot of people who were dying for free web hosting, so we decided to provide it.

Our free hosting was different in a few ways:

• The advertising we put on the page was very subtle
• It was full-fledged cpanel hosting with great features
• There was an option to upgrade to ad-free hosting (that's not an original idea...but a handy feature for those who were ready to go fully legit)

We had it all set up and guess what happened? People signed up for accounts and never used them. Some built websites, but never promoted them. In other words, in most cases, the people who got it for free did just about NOTHING.

So, Kelly and I decided that we're going to scrap that free stuff and just charge for our hosting. That way, we can attract people who are serious about their businesses. We've amped up the services, but kept them affordable. You can see what we have available here.

Free is good...but maybe not always the best. What do you think?