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Free
Content is a Great Word, But It Doesn't Pay The Bills...
By Terry Dean One of the most
recognized and endorsed types of online businesses has always
been the "Free Content" web site. A "Free
Content" web site is a site which basically gives away
information or free tools to generate a large audience or a
large community of users. If you were to
listen to some web experts, you would think that all you should
do at your site is give away free stuff. These
"experts" have the idea that if you give away enough
stuff for free, then you can build a site with loads of traffic.
You can then sell advertising for millions of dollars. There is only
one problem with this idea. If all of the
traffic at your site is only there to pick up free stuff, then
they won't buy anything from the advertisers. The advertisers
lose money. Eventually the advertising money dries up and you
don't have a profit model for your site anymore. Only the top
100 or so web sites on the net are able to currently make a
decent profit selling advertising space to their audience. The rest of the
millions of sites out there following this model are quickly
finding out that just having free content is not enough to build
a successful Internet business. Yahoo.com is an
example of a successful site with free content following this
model. They have a directory, articles, news, weather, chat,
forums, and everything else you could possibly imagine for a
free content site. Yahoo is the
King of Content sites. They have been around since the early
days of the Internet and are one of the few major corporations
who actually earns a profit online. Yet, even they are considering changing to a Paid Membership Model For Some of their Content. Am I suggesting
that you should never give away freebies? Not at all...I still
use quite a few freebies of my own including this article you
are reading now. What I am
suggesting is that you shouldn't be giving away freebie after
freebie hoping to just build traffic at your site. Every freebie
you offer should have a specific goal in mind. In other words,
you should be thinking about how this freebie will generate more
customers for products and services you are selling. Below are two
ways to turn web content into profit...
Model #1:
Joint Venture Endorsements Instead of just
selling banner ad space or text ads on your site, use that same
space to make deals with companies you feel good about
recommending to your customers. Then, do
personal recommendations of these companies products or
services. You will find that the response rates they will
receive from a personal endorsement from you will be three to
five times what they would have received just buying ad space
from you. This will turn
your dead ad space into a cash generator. In most cases you will
also be receiving a lot more money through doing these joint
venture deals than you could have ever received selling out the
ad space. You may have
sold ad space at a price of $20 per 1,000 impressions...if
someone was willing to pay that. By signing up with an affiliate
program and personally endorsing them, you will be able to make
much more than this without worrying about having to sell out
your ad space. For example: If
you signed up with an affiliate program paying 30% on a $100
sale, you would get $30 per sale. If the endorsement you gave
only gave them a 5% click through rate (very low for an
endorsement) and a 5% sales rate, you would be having 2.5
customers per thousand impressions for a total of $75 for the
same ad space. This would have
been done without ever having to worry about dealing with
advertisers, credit cards, or anything else. The affiliate owner
would have taken care of the worries for you. If you have a
high traffic site or some type of other leverage, you can also
make special partnership deals with your endorsements. Instead of just
signing up for an affiliate program, contact a merchant who has
a product you know your customers will love and make a special
deal for them. Get the
merchant to offer a discounted price, an extra special bonus, or
some other type of offer to your customers only. Then your
response rates will be much higher at your site than just the
regular affiliate program link. Model #2:
Paid Membership Sites This is the
next eventual step for online content. General information such
as news, weather, etc. will always be free. Specific and
highly specialized content has started moving over to a paid
membership model. Instead of
giving away their hard to find content for free, membership
sites now charge either a yearly or a monthly fee for access. Most of them
charge anywhere from $39 to $4000 per year or $9.95 to $150 per
month just to see their cutting edge content. The more
specialized and valuable the content, the higher of a price you
can expect to pay. For example, if
you planned to join a "Day Trading" membership site,
you can expect to be paying near the upper limits of the scale
at $150 a month or more. If you joined a
"Brittany Spears Fan Club" you could expect that to be
at the lower end of the price range. Either way, you
can expect that more and more sites are going to follow in the
paid membership path. Some people
don't believe paid memberships will last, but they also
originally didn't believe people would pay for cable TV. TV Networks
were originally free. Then cable stations came out and the major
networks of ABC, NBC, and CBS thought it was an absolute joke.
They didn't think anyone would be willing to pay for something
which was originally free! How many US
customers aren't paying for some type of cable or satellite
service now? Information on
the Internet is going to go in the same direction. General
information will always be free, but highly specialized up to
date information is going to cost you. If you can
become the producer of this type of information, then a paid
membership site will be the best way for you to profit online. Terry Dean, a 5
year veteran of Internet marketing, will Take You By The Hand
and Show You Exact Results of All the Internet Marketing
Techniques he tests and Uses Every Single Month". Find Out More:
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