There’s an exchange of value, even when “FREE E-BOOK” is what you’re giving me. Are you, as a business person, valuing that exchange?
Frustrated here at Area 224 HQ. This one is our own doing – we signed up for a “Free E-book” and had some serious questions about how good it would be.
It was average, at best. Outdated, filled with clip art graphics, wasn’t written in an engaging style at all. Looked like it was borrowed liberally from elsewhere – which is fine, as long as they tell us where it was borrowed liberally from.
The E-book and its signup-download process had us questioning the value exchange. We invite you to do the same, using a 3-step process. Here goes:
Step 1: What Is Your Time Worth? Easier said than done, right? I mean, if you’re working an hourly wage for The Man, it may be $6 an hour. 10 cents a minute. If you’re one of those hi-falutin’ billable types, you could be billing out at hundreds per hour. (3 bucks a minute, perhaps.)
You have to have even a rough idea of this figure. It could vary by task, by department, by person. But you have to know it.
Step 2: Is Your Time “leverageable?” We’re gonna lose half of you here. Can you take whatever you learned and apply it for maximum effect? Can you turn the knowledge into power? Leverage – more than a technical term with pulleys and fulcrums and stuff.
Let’s say this E-Book was about Social Media Marketing. (It was, but it used an outdated term to explain what it was about, thus tipping the firm’s hand as to whether this would be a burr in the Area 224 saddle or not.)
If there was an item in there that gave you pause, in a good way, and caused you to figure out how to apply it to client situations – you may have found something leverageable.
If not, might be valueless. See Step 3.
Step 3. Can You Put a Dollar Value on the E-Book? $0 Leverageable information on one side of the equation, 10 Minutes of my time on the other. It’s either zero or infinitely bad. Not sure which.
If you can put a dollar value on what’s in the book, good. Even if it’s one little resource in the book that saves you fifteen minutes of Googling, you might have a valuable free E-book.
It might be more of a soft science here, too. Maybe it’s a really clever idea that you picked up, but you can’t quite quantify the value. Maybe you’ve now made a connection through this Free E-Book that will help you down the road.
Remember: FREE might be worth the price. Or, even worse, might cost you more than you’d expect.
