I’ve noticed that a lot of the free stuff offered online is successful in leading you to make a purchase. After all, one of the motivations for a company to offer freebies stuff for you is to lead you to spend money somewhere else. So the free chocolate samples are great, but the hope is that you’ll buy a couple pounds of peanut brittle after you taste it.

The offers for free money making kits are likely to follow up with additional services and products. The free screensaver may come with a little advertisement, or in downloading the screensaver you must wade through a bunch of ads. Obviously this approach must work since so many companies offer free goodies.

Another example would be where you can get free insurance quotes online. These are legitimate companies that apparently have the ability to analyze your situation and give you a quote—sometimes from several competing companies—in a matter of minutes.

You can learn a lot about the whole process from the websites as well. But again, the idea is naturally to get you to purchase insurance, not to just get quotes (unless you find that your existing policy stacks up well in a comparison).

A final area that I’ve noticed is with some computer software. You can download certain software for free; that product usually has limited features. Then you are offered a better product at a modest fee. If you want to convert files to pdf format, you can purchase Adobe Acrobat, one of the most popular programs for this purpose. That will cost you.

But you can get Adobe Reader for free. You can read, save and send pdf files but cannot edit or create them. Millions of people have the free Reader, and this popularity tends to entice a percentage of users to spring for the paid version. Not a bad marketing concept. I’m sure there are a lot more examples of free stuff leading to purchases.

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