TWO STORIES
I used to work in a biscuit factory. I used to clean out the pipes from the custard and chocolate that go between two biscuits that make it yummy. When you came anywhere near the biscuit factory, you could smell that lovely warm, sweet smell of biscuits being baked. On our first day, the Manager said to us that we could eat as many biscuits as we liked, that’s right, as many FREE biscuits as we wanted to eat! In the early days, me and the other guys had a blast, pressure hosing tubes of chocolate crap, listening to loud commercial radio and gorging ourselves on biscuit after biscuit.
By the fourth weekend of working in the biscuit factory, we couldn’t look at a biscuit, let alone stomach one. Even the smell of lovely baking bourbons made me heave. You see, too much of a FREE thing and the thing starts to lose its value, it becomes sickening so that you don’t want it any more. The FREE thing that was valued because it was lovely AND you didn’t have to pay for it, became the FREE thing I couldn’t bare to even look at. It took me SIX years to eat another biscuit.
The word FREE is dangerous when you use it on your website too. Very quickly, people get used to it being free and quicker even still, they sicken of it. The first time that it’s free, it’s like a treat, the second time, it’s a guilty pleasure, the third time and it no longer has the same desirability. The desirability rate falls sharply and drastically from that point. By making something FREE, you may quickly drop the value of it.
I went to Stratford upon Avon once to see a play, I had 10 tickets for the people with me, but two became sick and decided to go home. That left me with two tickets to the best seats in the house, to a sold out play that people were dying to see. I should add that it featured none other than David Tennant in his earlier days. I stood outside that theatre for 30 minutes before the show trying to give anyone who wanted it the tickets for FREE. A pair of tickets to the top show at the RSC for NOTHING, for FREE. I COULD NOT GET RID OF THEM. No one would take them from me. You see, the value of something that’s FREE is ZERO, it’s nothing at all.
Mark Westbrook is owner and content/copywriter for WritingEngine, a company providing cost-effective SEO article marketing, SEO copy, Blogs, Press Releases and other written solutions.