One of the best strategies for growing a business, launching a new product or building your customer base is to give away valuable stuff. Such freebies might be a test version of your product, a trial product sample, an insider’s look at how your product lines get to market, hot tips on latest trends and up-to-date training for sales reps. (More suggested giveaways-to-get-customers below.)

Offline merchandisers use this giveaway-to-get-customers free samples technique. Haven’t you tripped over smiling food samplers in large grocery and boutique markets? Who can resist a coupon for Freebies or Massive Discounts, whether they pop up on a receipt print-out or a Sunday newspaper ad drop or, these days, are fed to a willing potential customer’s mobile phone? (With mobile geo-targeting, some ad networks claim to push the freebie coupon to a Whole Foods searcher just as he or she nears organic food advertisers’ stores.)

Online merchants offer “Download This” buttons, “e-Coupons Exclusively for Our e-News Friends” and “Listen to this Author” or “Get The First Training Lessons Free” with a click of a web site button.

I’m a free chapters junkie at my bookseller member sites. Without that free taste, I’d never have purchased an 815-page hardback of H2G2 – Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – of compiled Douglas Adams. Nor would Prophecies of the Hopi Elders or Where White Men Fear to Tread – autobio of American Indian Movement founder Russell Means – have made it to my bookshelf. Who knew Hopi elders and Means had spilled the beans?

Online merchandisers also call such freebies “link-bait,” meaning if you give away a popular download of music, a funny video of Fashion Faux Pas, or a hot humor page that puts your own industry’s foibles on the laugh meter for a day … then the link backs to your web site are likely to cause traffic jumps and click-through bonuses on your search listings or paid advertising.

Marketing maven Wendy Maynard practices what she preaches, giving away a no-cost report on marketing strategies at her site at www.gomarketingmaven.com/free_report.html. The Marketing Maven calls such giveaways to get more sales Tiny-Spoon Marketing. (Wendy’s title comes from ice cream stores that offer a taste in tiny spoons to help you make up you mind from dozens of flavor choices.)

Here are other tiny-spoon marketing ideas from the Marketing Maven for any product category:

· Create a CD or Tips Sheet to give people at networking events, trade shows or if they call your company looking for more info.

· Capture names and email addresses of web site visitors, but don’t go stealth. Offer them something – an e-course, a white paper, an audio clip – in exchange for their contact info. (Follow up immediately with an autoresponder email, thanking the visitor for their data and note of where they find their freebie e-zine, course or special report.)

· Bundle worthwhile articles, blog posts and company info and give it away as special reports.

· Create an e-course that gives tips and tactics to, for example, your resellers or distributors, to support their sales and marketing training needs.

· Give away a free audio interview of, for example, your buyers on a sourcing trip to China or your managers checking quality control on a major supplier’s assembly line. (The Marketing Maven suggest Audioacrobat as an easy program to record audio segments and then upload them to your web site, email the clips, or mail them in CD format.)

· Offer free chapters of a book you’ve written … or a quick summary of, say, clothing marketing trends you’ve uncovered in your buying cycles … or Customer Case Studies on how their sales performed with a new line you’re offering.

Of course, there is always the free initial consulting – or introductory services offer – to give a new potential customer a tiny taste of how you do business and what kind of results you can deliver.

Sometimes, you have to give to get back.