Back in 2007 Prince upset a lot of traditional media outlets by giving away his album “Planet Earth” for free on the front of the Mail on Sunday. At the time there were predictions that this could seriously backfire and lead to his albums being pulled from stores as people simply stopped buying them. You could see their point – traditional music outlets were and still are being ravaged by the popularity of music downloads, but did it hit Prince in the pocket?

Well it appears not as he is now giving away his next album free in the Mirror on Saturday.

But why do this? Why simply give away what surely took a long time to make? Is giving stuff away for free really the way to make a lot of money?

Well it certainly appears so. After the giveaway in 2007 he went on to sell out the O2 Arena for 21 nights and as concerts is where the money is, he made an awful lot of money. Best of all, he keeps a lot of it too, in contrast to albums where he only sees a fraction.

First of all, he will be paid for the album (although I doubt the papers will tell us how much) and he’ll get 2.5 million copies of his album out there into the public and although many will simply bin them (or pass them on to kids in the family) this will ensure at least some old fans, people who have never heard of him and new fans alike will get to hear his music. This amount of sales would normally make it a multi-platinum album but obviously, they won’t be recognised in the charts however he’ll probably reach more people anyway.

Then there’s his concerts. I don’t believe he’s announced any yet for 2010 – but he has a habit of doing things differently. Give it a month or two and you can bet he’ll announce something to make the most of the publicity.

So is there anything we humble marketers can learn from the king of publicity? Of course there is, and we’ve been doing it for years.

We do SEO, but we also tell you how to do SEO using our free ebook (get it here: DIY SEO), and when we visit potential clients looking for SEO we often see that the book is sat on their desk in printed form.

Free stuff sells. It’s simple – if you want to make money, give stuff away and people will buy it from you. Prince gives his music away and yet people still want to see him in concert. If you have skill that’s unique then consider telling people about it.

So many of us think that in order to make money from our idea and skill that we need to hide it from the public, but this just isn’t true. Get it out there, tell people about it and show people how it’s done.

Here are some ideas:

  • Are you a telemarketer? – Explain to people exactly how you cold-call. Tell them who you target and give examples of your work. Put this information in an ebook or videos.
  • Web expert? – Give away some free websites for people to use themselves. No strings attached – just give them away. All you need is your copyright on the bottom – blam – lots of free advertising.
  • Salesman? – Give away your tips and techniques in a manual and show people how to be the best salesman in the world. People will want you to train them, even though you’ve shown them what to do for free.

The power of free has worked for years and its all around us. Did you pay for the web browser you’re using to view this page? Are Microsoft and Mozilla bankrupt because they gave away this stuff for free?

Of course not.

Free is good, free is easy and most of all, free makes money.