At our ad agency we have a client that sells a product. For the purpose of discussing whether or not giving away free samples is a good idea or not the specific type of product doesn't matter. Our team of professional website designers just finished making an ecommerce website for the client. The client has a product which is sold in many countries around the world but they are new to the United States so there name is not known here. They had the idea that once we begin TV advertising for them people would become fimilar with their name and would go to their website to learn more about their products. This all sounded like a great idea especially since they were offering to ship a free sample to people at no charge. There was no reason why someone wouldn't try the product. Great marketing idea right? Maybe!

Soon after launching the website and submitting it to search engines some people who intentionally look for anything free found the website. The people who look for these things operate websites that list everything online that they can find for free. You can go to any search engine and search for "free samples" and you'll find plenty of websites that do nothing but post links to other websites that are offering free samples.

So where's the problem right? They wanted people to try free samples and now sites that offer links to places that are giving away free samples have linked to them. Isn't that exactly what they wanted? Not exactly.

People who regularly visit sites that link to anything free are just looking for whatever the freebie of the day happens to be. They didn't specifically look for the type of product my client sells. They just wanted a free sample of anything they could get without paying for the sample or the shipping. But still the client wanted to give away free samples and wanted to have people try the product so what's the harm?

Here is the problem. The client had one person who would get a few requests per day as people began to see the product in some stores or they saw the billboard sign we made for them. Once those links appeared on the free sample websites they went from fewer than 10 requests per day for free samples to 17,000 free sample requests in less than 24 hours.

There was something good that came of the free sample nightmare.  When those other sites linked to my client's site this resulted in their Google ranking to improve greatly.  Google sees these links from other sites somewhat like endorsements.  In other words why would some other site link to my client's site unless they thought my client had a really great website.  So for search engine optimization or SEO this was a free bonus to my client.  In a way it was a type of viral marketing.  Not only did these very popular websites link to my client for free but everyone was telling their friends to go and get samples.

In the end the client had a better ranking in the search engines, thousands of people became aware of the brand within 24 hours and sales were made on the website.