**by Aaron Wall**
You only get to launch a product or service or piece of featured
content once. Is the best way to maximize economic yield to make it
free or paid? If it is free is can spread far and get many links, but
it does not produce any revenue directly. If it is paid a much smaller
audience will see it, and potentially one of them will be a competitor
who will recycle your work and make it public to pull in links (I
cant tell you how common that is). I like the idea of trying to blend
the free and paid ideas to get most of the benefits of free while
actually being able to profit from your work.
Venture capitalist Fred Wilson recently posted about how he likes the
monetization model of the Financial Times
<http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/07/monetize-the-audience-not-the-content.html>
, which
allows you to view up to 9 pages a month for free, and then starts
charging for the 10th page and beyond if you want to consume that much
information.
This model works well because it leaves the content open to the
active web for linking and social media exposure while also making the
content accessible for search engines to index and rank it to build up
a passive latent audience. It is nearly as good as scroll cloaking
<http://www.onlinemarketer.com/scroll-cloaking/>
from a monetization standpoint, but offers a much more credible and
brand-friendly user experience.
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Some people who are tech savvy will likely get around some pay
restrictions. Danny Sullivan demonstrated how to read the Wall Street
Journal for free
<http://daggle.com/read-the-wall-street-journal-for-free-337>
, but most people will pay, just like people pay for billions of
dollars of songs on iTunes that they could download for free. Insert a
minor obstacle between the content and if it is popular and well-known
most people will jump through it.
The loss for not using security is generally quite minimal if you
have a good product at a fair price and target the right audience.
Back when I sold an ebook it was available via an unencrypted and
unsecure page. Over 10,000 people bought it, only about 5 people
complained about the lack of security, and more than 5 people emailed
me to tell me that they read it off a torrent network and then decided
to buy the most current version.
Did the lack of DRM mean that I had to deal with a few dozen people
who bought the ebook and then asked for a refund within 3 minutes of
their purchase? Absolutely. But very few actually did. The end result
of the model was more sales and more satisfied customers. I left the
ebook unencrypted because that created a better customer service and I
knew that any distribution via theft & sharing would act as free
marketing and prevent me from having to deal with many of the worst
potential customers.
In search, some people are great at getting lots of traffic, while
yet another group of people are great at turning traffic into cash. It
is a rare talent to be good at both, and I think many people in the
SEO industry put too much focus on traffic and not enough on profits.
I was certainly a member of the under-monetizer club, and have just
recently started giving up my cool kids badge
<http://www.copyblogger.com/two-tribes/>
.
The three ways I have been able to do blend the free and paid models
so far have been:
Using the link equity from well-linked to pages to subsidize the
rankings of pages that are commercially focused
Splitting the content in half & making the first half free
Launching for free, but erecting a barrier to entry after the content
is well-established.
The first method is part of the classic affiliate model. You do
something that is remarkable to pull in links, and the rising tide
from that effort helps lift the rankings of all other pages on your
site. If Google has to chose between ranking 5 approximately
equivalent sites then the site which also has some well-linked content
published on it will typically win.
When I wrote a post about the Google Vince update
<http://www.seobook.com/google-branding>
I knew it was going to cause a stir. I wanted the exposure, but also
wanted it to generate revenues. The solution I came up with was to
make the first half free and the second half part of our paid content,
and market the premium content at the bottom of the free post with
Want to read the rest of our analysis? If you are a subscriber you
can access it here. The post earned a couple thousand inbound links,
a response video from Matt Cutts, and it brought in a couple dozen new
subscribers to our site. Not a bad return for about 4 hours of work.
For a while we had a pop up ad on the SEO Book site, but I didnt
much like it, and many visitors complained about it. We instead
decided to remove the pop up and shift some of our free Firefox
extensions to require registration on the site in order to download
them. This was accomplished by adding php if/else statements on the
download page that verified the person was logged into a free account
on our site before allowing them to download the tools.
The extensions already have tons of inbound links and great rankings,
and using this strategy enables us to offer the option of getting our
auto-responder to people downloading the tools. The tool download page
also markets our paid services and we use our affiliate software to
track sales. We have tracked many paid sign-ups through the tool
download page, taking our free tools from a loss leader marketing
channel to something that can pay for itself while offering free
promotion & exposure to the site.
How do you blend free and paid? What have you found that works well
for you?
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and
not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Aaron Wall <http://searchengineland.com/author/aaron-wall/>
is the author of SEO Book <http://www.seobook.com/>
. He also works with Clientside SEM <http://www.clientsidesem.com/>
to help large corporate clients improve their search engine
rankings.
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