Generosity Pays

Why Free?

I decided to put all of my MP3 downloads on the net without cost! Someone told me it was devaluing my work and could not see the point.

At the same time I put my Kindle book downloads to 77 pence or just over a dollar.

Within 12 hours I had sold quite a few books and many people had taken the free download offer, I was very pleased with the result.

I then looked at my website and used a free website testing tool to see how I could improve the site.

I awaited the results of the test like a patient in a hospital. The results were not good I had a very sick web site and it needed some repairs.

What I learned was that the site took an average of 9 seconds to navigate through the pages and the page site speed had to be less than 3 seconds for the visitor to stay on it. Speed counts in the world of the web and I had spent many hours building and adapting it, only to find out it was not fast enough.

The excellent software that tested the site also guided me to where the problem was, one hour later my site was as fast as a very fast thing.

Every page on my web site has a FaceBook like and before I made the changes there were 89 likes to the home page as I type this only two hours later it is at 103! Nothing really incredible in the great scheme. Although to me it was wonderful.

Back to the statistics on the MP3 downloads and again plenty of downloads now they are free. I am very happy about this. Interestingly, the purchases of the paper version of the books have been better sellers than the kindle versions.

I investigated the reason for this.

The answer is very simple it is the PRICE!

If you want to sell on Kindle and sell in numbers then the price must be low. I check the statistics for the Kindle downloads and what do you know? Five sales in a morning, again I am very pleased with this.

What is this blog all about? It says you cannot charge top prices when you are not well known, and giving products away is cheaper than advertising.

Generosity still rewards and money should not be the first gauge of success.