That would make an intriguing, new kind of free gift that would generate buzz, get attention and encourage people to attend live instead of listening later to the recording, so they can get the most out of the experience.

Future of the Free Gift presenter Andrea J. Lee’s doing just that – starting next week in her Coaching Skills Intensive.

She figures it will increase:

- Kinesthetic learning. In addition to learning through your EARS, you get to process your learning physically, by typing your comments and aha’s in the chat window. The act of taking notes while learning has been proven to improve results.

- Powerful connection and conversation. Fellow entrepreneurs of all different stripes will be in the chat with you, and as you connect, you’ll have the opportunity to broaden (and deepen) your network. (All without leaving your office! Talk about leveraging an already free training.)

- Pure fun and coolness. Multimedia learning is a very strong trend that is permeating entrepreneurship. As a leader of your community or organization, the online chat integration into the Coaching Skills Intensive will afford you a way to experience this for yourself. Who knows – maybe you will add this bit of income stream thought leadership to YOUR business model in the future?!

I, for one, can’t wait to see how it all turns out. I think that adding this additional layer of interaction into the free gift experience will make for deeper learning, better community building, more inclusion and that it will probably be incredibly cool.

You can sign up for free right here

“How much of the past do we need taken away?”

As in, if you’ve got a free gift from the past, do you need to throw it out and start over?

Or can you take what you’ve got, update, refresh and evolve it?

How can you tell where the line is?

And I think the answer depends on many things. I’d start by asking these questions:

1. Why do you think you need to update or do-over this free gift? What has changed?

2. Are your clients still craving this kind of information?

3. Why wouldn’t you change it completely?

4. Is this concept still a relevant and good doorway into what you’re selling now?

5. Can you see how you’d make this into something that you’re beamingly proud of?

The goal here is to help you create a fantastic free gift that people love, that gets leads, opt-ins and starts your clients on the road to sales. That people will want to tell others about. And that you’ll be proud of!

Here’s an excerpt of an article  that I wrote over on www.brandstyledesign.com about improving your brand experience:

In fact, the experience your clients are having with you is more important than how your web page looks, or what you write on it. This experience is more personal than anything they can passively read or look at about your business because the experience happens when they engage with you.

Here’s how to get started on creating your Brand Experience:

1.  Set the tone for your brand. The emotional tone of your brand – how you want to be in it – will be carried throughout the words, pictures and experience in your brand. Intentionally set y our tone. Choose to stay in alignment with that tone throughout your marketing and branding. Check in from time to time to make sure you’re still in alignment. This will enable you to create the consistent tone that’s so important in building trust through your brand.

2. Create a wow first experience with your free gift. Your free gift is your opportunity to give your clients the very best first experience of you that you can. Create a gift that’s generous, useful, helpful, and sparkling with personality. Make it fun and entertaining instead of dull or dry so that your clients are more likely to enjoy engaging with it. Keep in mind that the most “wow” worthy free gifts are going to be those that your client gets a real result from – that they learn something, change something, or grow somehow.

3. Serve your clients gracefully. You want your clients to have an excellent experience with you once they’ve become a client – because happy, cared-for clients are more likely to become repeat clients and to refer business to you. Know that your brand doesn’t stop at the sale. Integrate your brand’s tone and fulfill your promises while you’re delivering your services, running your classes or in your products. Give them the care and attention they deserve.

What format your clients would like to get from you.

Are they on-the-go and want to listen to something on their iPods?
Are they visual people and really into beautiful stuff? Design something gorgeous for them.
Do they love networking and connecting with you and each other? Try Livestreaming.
Are they way into video? Consider your own Web TV show.

Think about length + time

Longer/ bigger/ more isn’t necessarily better.
Are they experts themselves, looking for one specific bit of info?
Do they have lots of time to go over your gift? Or just a little time?
Shawn Driscoll shared with us that the average adult attention span is right around 20 minutes. “What’s the most powerful thought I can give in 20 minutes? Because that’s an adult mind’s focus time span. In 20 minutes, you have to say your most important thing, or they’re gone.”
Clocking in under that 20-minute marker can help get your free gift used – and that’s the biggest key to having it turn into more work and more clients for you.

Then again… longer can be better if your people need more to get them started.

Are they beginners looking for lots of info?
Do you want your free gift to get them to a certain point, where you can then help them better from?

In either case, give them enough and make it good – a stingy gift is no fun for anyone and won’t help you get clients or build your list. 

What format do you come across best in?

Not “good at video”? Skip it. (Or, practice behind the scenes until you get better at it, or hire a pro to help you through). Follow Jimbo Marshall for useful tips on how to get better if you wanna.
Are you a talented artist behind the scenes but don’t bring that part out into your business? Incorporate your artistic side.
Does the thought of staring down a blank word document to start your eBook give you the icks? Dial in to a conference line and record your piece instead. If your people want to read something from you, have your recording transcribed.
If you dig writing, then a workbook, ebook, interactive ebook or white paper may be the way to build your list.
If you’ve already got a lot of text writen, photos, videos, audio, PowerPoint presentations, etc. – then consider the interactive ebook that lets you put all of these things together into one very awesome gift.

Get more tips in The Future of the Free Gift Summit… it’s all about how to make a really awesome free gift.

This is a question that my friend and colleague Denise Wakeman gets as well, and answers beautifully in the post below. She talks about 8 kinds of free gifts that you can give away – from the report/ ebook to an audio file like an interview or tele class, to a video or series of videos… and so much more.

The big ones that I have to add to this list are:

1. The Interactive eBook (see www.govirallab.com for more information on what exactly this is and how it works)
2. A simple quiz like Shawn Driscoll’s Trailblazer Quotient
3. Something beautiful, like a desktop, mini-poster, printable, pinnable graphics, graphic kits, etc. Check out this audio sample of beauty from Fabeku Fatunmise: Sound Shifts Stuff
4. Infographics
5. Livestreaming technology – Livestream, Ustream, etc.
6. Whole big, valuable products – especially if you’re trying Kelly O’neil’s Impact Model.

Here’s Denise’s thoughts on this:

Perusing the LinkedIn groups I belong to, I stumbled on this question:

“Here’s a standard, oft repeated and elementary question, but one I could really use some answers to about now: What are some of the most effective and ethical ways of building one’s mailing list for a relatively new coach?”

I’ve had conversations with two VIP clients about list building in the last couple of days and offered several ideas. Here’s the answer I gave on LinkedIn:

Here’s the standard, oft repeated response: give away something of value in exchange for an email address. 

It does work. Here are 8 gifts you can give away to build your email list:

1. A report
2. an interview
3. a series of videos
4. a white paper
5. a free teleseminar
6. a workbook
7. an mp3 of a program
8. a webinar….

A few years ago I did a series of interviews called Conversations with Experts, every week for over a year. The first one had about 20 people on the call. By the end, hundreds were signing up. And that’s before there was Facebook and Twitter. Often the person you interview will invite their list to sign up to hear the interview.

I still offer freebies to build my list: 5 free videos on how to get the best out of your blog; a 7 part eCourse on how to boost your visibility on the web; a free audio on 5 Critical Tactics for Business Blog success.

I put a subscribe form on my FB page, on my website, on my blogs. I send tweets periodically inviting people to get the freebie. My list grows every day.

Hope that gives you some ideas!

Whether you’re a coach or service professional or small business owner, the answer applies to you. In order to build a list of folks interested in your business and how you can serve them, you need to have something of value to give away.

You also need a list management system. I have used KickStartCart(1ShoppingCart private label) for a very long time and am happy with it. Others use InfusionSoft which is also a combo shopping cart/database management system.

But what if you’re are starting your business and don’t need a shopping cart and don’t want to spend a lot of money at the outset?

There are many options. There are fees with most systems like Aweber, Constant Contact and iContact. But generally the fees are low when you have a small list and don’t send too many email broadcasts.

While scoping out options for a client, I looked at MailChimp and was impressed. They have a lot of social marketing features built in and it’s also scalable. Like Aweber, MailChimp offers an RSS to email option which means you can use the service to deliver blog updates as well as handle your other list building activities. KickStartCart does not offer that feature.

If I were starting new today, I would probably go with MailChimp because the service is free for up to 2,000 contacts and 12,000 emails per month.

Let’s help out those who are just beginning the list building process. I have two questions for you:

1) What’s your most effective list building tactic?

2) What list management system do you use and what do you like about it?

About Denise Wakeman

I am Founder of The Blog Squad and an Online Marketing Advisor. I have been using the Internet with great success as a marketing tool since 1996 and am an expert at helping authors, speakers, service professionals, and small business owners leverage blogs for their business, as well as strategically use social media tools to boost online visibility to get more traffic, leads, clients and opportunities.

I write regularly on 3 marketing blogs, am a contributing author on SocialMediaExaminer.com, have co-authored several blogging programs and frequently speak at conferences and workshops about business blogging and how to gain expert status through social marketing. I have been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, Newsday, Canada’s National Post, FastCompany Online, as well as many other on and offline publications.

Get your Free eCourse with 7 Tips to Boost Your Visibility on the Web – easy to implement right now!

I discovered this article out there in the world on how to improve your opt-in gift’s awesomeness factor. If you’ve got a gift that you’ve already put out there, and people are getting it but not coming back – or opting out after they get your gift, then something’s seriously wrong someplace in your process.

It could be that your follow-up email is turning them off, that they didn’t get what they expected in your free gift, or that they didn’t feel like you could solve their problem once they saw your free gift.

All of which are quite not-good.

Here are 3 tips to help make sure that what you’re putting out there in your free gift is good from Ana Hillis…

You have a free gift you offer visitors when they come to your site in exchange for their name and email address. Awesome.

So how come no one is coming back or worse, they are opting out after they get it?

Time to reevaluate what you are offering.

There seems to be somewhat of a misconception on what you need to have as a free gift. A newsletter is not considered valuable enough for most people to sign up to a list anymore. Most people want something of value in order to give you their name and email address.

What can you do to increase your opt-in rate and keep those subscribers?

Here are 3 things to consider:

1. Set your standard

Having something that is valuable, is presented well and offers really good information is important.

If you think that because you’re giving it away for free it doesn’t have to have any value, you are missing the big picture. Putting something together with little consideration as to whether others will find any value in it or if you look at it as, “Well, I can’t give anything away that I should charge for,” is not the best way to look at it.

Your opt-in is an important way to build your list. Without a list, who are you going to market to? People sign up because they are interested in your message and what you offer. If you are giving away something that doesn’t offer any real value, what does this say about you and the rest of your products or programs? I’m not saying that your products don’t offer any value, but if they don’t come back, how will they know?

By setting the standard at the beginning, with your free offer, you are showing that you offer value in everything you do, even if it’s free.

It’s like a first impression. When you meet someone for the first time, if you don’t instill some sort of good impression, they probably aren’t going to come back and do business with you.

2. Offer something of value.

One of the biggest challenges I find when I’m talking to people is that they don’t want to spend a whole lot of time, effort or money on their free gift. And the reason for that is they figure because it’s free, they shouldn’t have to.

So if you aren’t offering value, what are you offering?

Look at other content you have and think about how you can repurpose that content to create something of value. Do you have an ebook that you can repurpose into a Special Report?

3. Invest some time and money.

You need to look at your opt-in as an investment in your business. If you aren’t willing to spend some time and money (it doesn’t have to be a lot) to produce a product that will create an amazing first impression of you and your business, what are you creating?

What impression are you giving to visitors when they come to your site and check out your offer?

What impression are you giving your subscribers when they get it?

Your free gift is essentially more important than anything else you have. If you don’t WOW them with this first product, you probably won’t get another chance. Make this a priority. Show people that whether your products are $5000, $50 or free, you offer great value.

And here’s the scoop in his words: