Did the above headline catch your attention?

The word “FREE” is the most powerful word in direct marketing.

Always has been. Still is today. Will still be 10 years from now, in my opinion.

“I saw someone use FREE effectively on eBay recently,” copywriter Charlie Byrne told me in an e-mail the other day. “Rocker Jimmy Buffett is coming to town. His fans love to party, especially with Corona beer, the one you squeeze limes into.”

There are MANY tickets for the concert on sale on eBay. If you look at the listings, you’ll see:

“Buffett Tickets for sale!”
“Jimmy Buffett – Good seats.”
“Buffett Tix for sale.”
…ad infinitum…

But one clever person wrote:

“Buffett Tickets + Free Corona and Limes!!!”

If you buy the tickets, he throws in a $10 gift certificate for the local Florida supermarket chain.

Charlie adds, “I noticed his ad got MANY more ‘hits’ than all the others—another demonstration of the power of a FREE offer.”

In his new book, “How to Turn Words Into Money,” millionaire entrepreneur and master direct marketer Ted Nicholas devotes quite a bit of space to discussing the power of FREE.

“I’ve never sold anything that didn’t sell better after offering free bonuses and gifts,” says Ted. “Free is the most powerful word in the English language. If you’re not using gifts and bonuses in your marketing operations now, your sales in many cases will go up 2, 3, and 4 times.”

One of my friends worked in a medical ad agency. The clients were large pharmaceutical manufacturers targeting doctors with promotions about new drugs.

The agency used direct mail to invite doctors to free seminars (called “symposia”)—educational programs about the diseases the drugs treated, designed to get the doctors to prescribe the drug as treatment for the diseases.

The agency split-tested a straightforward invitation vs. aversion that offered a free gift—a pocket day planner—as an incentive to attend the event. The wholesale cost of the pocket calendar, including imprint of the client’s logo, was about $1 each.

The invitations offering doctors the free $1 pocket calendar generated 6 times the response from doctors (all of whom back then were making handsome six-figure annual incomes) than the invitation that didn’t offer the free gift.

That’s 6 times the results—just because of the offer of a little free gift…something the doctor might very well toss in the trash if it arrived unsolicited in the mail.

I get asked at least once a week the following question: “Bob, hasn’t ‘free’ lost its power?”

The person asking the question is concerned that, because of overuse and increasing sophistication of readers, FREE is not effective any more.

My answer is always this: FREE alone is not enough today to make a promotion profitable. In the early days of direct marketing, perhaps it was.

But now there are so many people advertising FREE, that simply saying FREE does not make you stand out. You need something more, like a powerful benefit or unique selling proposition or a masterfully written promotion.

But once you have those things, combine them with a FREE offer. Saying ‘free’ still, even today, increases response significantly vs. the same copy without stressing a free offer.

Bottom line: FREE still works in advertising. Use FREE for yourself and see!

Bob Bly is the author of “World’s Best Copywriting Secrets” and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him “America’s top copywriter”.

A magazine called “Canadian Business” calls Facebook the biggest business ever.

Its potential is so big it has already rubbed off on any affiliates who try to get involved with Facebook marketing.

Talk about “collateral benefit”.

My buddy Kevin Young did just that. He took the plunge and made $257.86 on the first day.

Then he did $55,321.41 in the first month on complete autopilot while he was on vacation almost the whole time!

All he did is send traffic DIRECTLY to his affiliate link and immediately made money.

No landing pages, no product, heck, not even an e-mail list.

The Internet makes no discrimination against anyone who want to make an income. Kevin is only an 18-year-old kid who actually just graduated from high school.

The irony is he proclaims to be the “laziest teenager” you would ever come across and the system he’s using is no different.

This thing will stuff your pockets with cash day in and day out…All on 100% complete autopilot.

Just look at his Facebook Cash Generator and size up what it is all about. You’ll be amazed.