What sucks about FREE?

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group | October 26th, 2009

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The concept of “free” as a business model, or at least a phase of a business model, is here to stay, but does it really work? The short answer is, yes and no.

One school of thought says to give your service away for free in order to get exposure and dominate the market, then find a way to monetize your service. There is some validity to this, but for most people/companies, it just won’t work. First, you have to have money to support yourself and/or your company during the free period, and this isn’t just a matter of providing the service because a large percentage of the people receiving your free service will expect you to provide free support as well. Another factor is that, quite often, the people interested in your free service won’t be willing to pay for it, so once you find a way to monetize it, you will lose them. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad thing because it will filter out people who will waste your time. Just make sure that you don’t base your financial projections on your pre-monetization users.

Free can work to create exposure, reach new prospects and increase market share, but only if done correctly. Some of these approaches may work for your business model:

• Offer free content, but also offer premium content. A good example of this is Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. He regularly posts useful and informative articles in his blog, but he also has a very active paid membership community where you can find some of the most up-to-date SEO information available anywhere. The free content helps to create exposure, draw in targeted traffic and give visitors a taste of what’s inside, while the premium content is where the real treasure is.
• Provide tools and resources that your visitors can use for free, making your website a valuable resource that others will want to talk about and link to. This helps you to increase your exposure and traffic, and to create a defensible website.
• Develop useful and original free content on your own website and guest-post on other popular, relevant websites. If the quality of your content is superior, it will show your visitors that you are the expert in your field, which you can then leverage to sell them your services.

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