You worked for weeks or perhaps even months creating your Web presence. You registered your site with all the big search engines. You spent endless hours visiting other sites and securing reciprocal links. You even bought some banner impressions in hopes that they would come. But still, they never came.

Now you decide you need something to draw people to your website. You are going to run a freebie offer. It works at trade shows. You get your name out in the crowd with a nifty logo key chain or even a pen or a mousepad with your company name on it. People love freebies. You have at last found the simple answer to get more customers to your site. Or have you?

Free offers do bring traffic to a Web site, without a doubt, but what kind of free offer is going to work for you and how are you going to implement it? Without proper planning what may seem like a marketer's dream can turn into an administrative and customer relations nightmare.

The three most common mistakes in making Internet freebies offers are underestimating the response, underestimating the costs, and overestimating the sales leads you will obtain. There are other pitfalls, but these are the most common..

If you offer a free item, whether it is a product sample or a promotional freebie make the assumption that you will have more requests than you will have items to provide. There are hundreds of sites on the Net that list free offers. Chances are very high that your offer will quickly be located by the operators of these sites. The freebies sites have a loyal following of Net surfers, and you can bet that your requests will skyrocket. You will have traffic.

Many businesses figure they can afford to give away a few hundred key chains. When they have promised to give all their visitors a key chain and instead of getting hundreds of requests they get thousands or even tens of thousands of requests they have a problem. That budget of $500 has now ballooned to $5,000 or $50,000. The frequent result is that most of those orders go unfilled and that creates a negative image of the company in the eyes of the disappointed visitors.

Let's say you have come to terms with the costs involved. You are spending marketing dollars and look at all the sales leads you have. Unfortunately, the facts are that even if you have had thousands of requests for a sample of your wonderful product or promotion, you probably have very few people who are going to become customers. I encourage my visitors to only request freebies in which they have a real interest. Many freebies sites don't bother to do that or even encourage people to "order everything". Even when people are asked to act responsibly, we all know that many will not. The overall result is that if not properly executed you may have spent thousands of dollars to generate hundreds of dollars of sales or worse. There are things you can do to improve the quality of your leads, but that could be another article in itself.

So, am I saying that you should forget offering freebies as a way to build traffic? Definitely not. I am saying you should carefully plan your offer and become "Internet freebies literate".

If you are considering promoting your site with a contest or sweepstakes you will not want to miss Hosting Your Own Contests and Sweeps from the About.com Contests Guide.