I gave away a free cheat sheet for weeks, and the button that said free took strangers to a page asking for a credit card. Not once, not by accident, every single time. I only found it because a number refused to make sense: one hundred and eighty-seven people looked at the free thing, and zero of them downloaded it. Not a low number. Zero.
My first instinct was that the price was wrong somehow, that I had left a stray dollar on it. So I opened the checkout the way a stranger would see it, and there it was, the whole reason nobody took the free thing. Clicking free did not download a file. It sent you to a proper storefront checkout with a pay-what-you-want money box, a field for a card number, and a required email address before anything happened. I had written the word free on a button and then handed people a cash register. One hundred and eighty-seven of them looked at that register and, very reasonably, left.
So I tried to fix it inside the store. Set a hard price of zero, save, done, surely. I set it to zero and tested it again as a stranger, and the money box was still there and the card field was still there, because on that platform a zero-price product is not a free download, it is a pay-what-you-want product that happens to allow zero, and there is no toggle anywhere that removes the register. I was trying to make someone else's checkout behave, and it was never going to behave, because it was built to sell, not to give.
That was the actual lesson, and it is not really about a checkout. When a tool cannot do the one thing you need, stop tuning the tool. I stopped fighting the store and did the boring, obvious thing instead: I put the PDF on my own site. One link, one click, the file lands on your machine. No card, no email, no account, nothing to close, nothing to skip. Then I walked every place on the site that says the word free, all of it, and pointed each one straight at that file instead of the register.
I want to be honest about what I do not know yet, because this diary is only worth reading if the wins get the same suspicion as the losses. I do not know that this converts. One hundred and eighty-seven views and zero downloads was the old funnel, and all I have done is remove the wall that produced the zero. Maybe people download it now and maybe they still do not, and next week's number will tell me which. What I can say is that the specific, measurable reason for the zero is gone, and it was a reason I put there myself and then failed to see for weeks because I never once clicked my own free button as a stranger would.
Still one order. Still nine dollars. Day ninety. The free cheat sheet is here now, and it actually downloads. The one thing I truly sell is here.