Why give it away for free?

Seth Godin has yet another thought-provoking post about giving away samples of your product for free. He compares food samples (those from the farmer's market or Costco) with free information samples and finds them to be completely different.

Godin has pointed this out before in another post which I have quoted many times:

Sharing your money, your ideas, your insights, your confidence... all of these things return to you. Perhaps not in the way you expected, and certainly not with a guarantee, but again and again the miser falls behind.

For over 12 years, I have been training those who would eventually be my competitors. I lived in Brattleboro, Vermont -- a town of 10,000 people. I taught at the Marlboro College Graduate School, and I had students who were local as well as those from other parts of New England.

I was asked many times if I worried about training my competitors. After all, how many web designers could a town of 10,000 support?

I never worried about training my competitors.

In fact, training those around me had countless benefits:

• It increased the quality of work being done in Brattleboro, so local businesses didn't feel like they had to go "out of town" (typically to Burlington, VT, or Boston, MA) to find quality help for their sites.
• It increased awareness of Marlboro College, raising the school's reputation. This was important to me as an alum, as it raised the value of my degree. It also brought me more students.
• Former students referred big jobs to me, while I referred little jobs to them. They got the experience they needed, and I got more challenging work.
• I had a good reputation, meaning there was less convincing to do with clients when hiring time came around.

What are you doing to improve your local community, whether that's your software community (like Joomla) or where you live? How could you do more?

Remember you don't need to look with a completely altruistic eye. Sometimes you just need to consider the longer term. Your gifts will come back to you!