The Power and Profitability of “FREE”!
- 17 Comments
- By Zac Johnson on January 21st, 2009
Every day people are trying to think up new ways to make money online. Yesterday I wrote a post on how Markus Friend is making over $10 million a year by offering a free dating service. With the concept of FREE in mind, here are just a few examples of why FREE works and how you can make the most of it.
TwitterCounter
I just read a post over at ShoeMoney’s blog about how TwitterCounter is finally monetizing their site as a revenue source. Now that the site is well established and generating over 11,000 pageviews a day, they can offer a promotional spot on the age for $499 a week to a feature Twitter account.
Business Model: Offer the best service and product around and worry about monetization later.
MySpace Resource Sites
Social networks are huge, but it really all got started with the massive teen craze on MySpace. Soon enough everyone and their mother was on MySpace. Unfortunately for the users, not everyone knew how to create their own images, upload them to servers then host them on their myspace pages. Fortunately, early webmasters, affiliates and designers got in on the action and made free resource sites for myspace users to add content to their pages with a simple copy and paste.
Business Model: Offer something free that everyone uses, and let onsite advertising make it worth while.
Blogging
The general concept for many bloggers is to make money, however blogging is one of the slowest ways to make money online. The amount of time and work involved in building up a blog and a growing reader base is a big task. On the upside, once you have that readership and brand running, you can continually sell advertising on your blog, while offering free information to your readers.
Business Model: Provide free information in exchange for on site related advertising.
Building a Forum Community
Not to keep referring back to ShoeMoney, but one of his most successful (and wasn’t planned to be) sites was his NextPimp ringtones forum. What started out as people creating their own ringtones and sharing with others, had turned into a massive community of die hard ringtone users. Building up any type of community or niche place where members can talk and contribute, is always going to do well.
Business Model: Build a quality place where people can do and discuss what they like, and provide quality advertising and services your users are interested in.
The point is, when you are trying to think of a new business model or ways to make money online, don’t always look at the bottom line, or how you can scam your site visitors into buying something. Try and create a quality product or service and you will succeed that much more, while actually building your site into something people use on a daily basis.
- Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Make Money, Marketing, Web Developement
"With great power comes great responsibility".... my Uncle Ben told me that. Haha, just kidding! I'm Zac Johnson and I've been making money online for over 10 years now. In short, I started making money online while I was in high school... but my passion for marketing and making money goes back way earlier than that. I created ZacJohnson.com to help motivate you to start making money online, and live the life the you always dreamed of.
“Business Model: Offer something free that everyone uses, and let onsite advertising make it worth while.”
yea i remember something like this…it worked for a bunch of companies in the late ’90’s right? i think the result was called the dot com bubble burst
Replywrong quote…i meant to quote:
“Business Model: Offer the best service and product around and worry about monetization later.”
ReplyZac,
I’m sure many people are reluctant to try new ideas and are afraid that their ideas might be too saturated or might not work.
I am personally an optimist. I believe opportunity is endless. Do you believe, and can you reaffirm for your readers that there are “free” business models out there yet to be taken advantage of?
ReplyDo you think it was luck of the draw? Destiny? A great marketing plan backing each of these guys? Personally, I think that in most cases, passion is the draw. Not necessarily passion for that particular niche, but the passion to succeed, support your family, help others, etc. I can’t imagine Shoe being a hardcore ringtone downloader- but his innovation and determination certainly play a large role in his success. Curious to hear other thoughts on this.
Reply@MLDina:
ReplyMotivation and passion is definitely a factor. I hate myspace and still was able to make the most out of it. I’m sure many are in the same boat.
There is always opportunity out there. Nobody knows what the next “craze” is going to be. The best thing you can do is simply hone some skills and hope those skills are applicable to some niche when it comes around and then pounce. Or better yet hone the skills to a point where you start your own craze or improve on another.
You can either spend your time building scams and crashing when they get found out, or you can build something of quality that will last. Nobody said it had to be expensive - build it slowly, you don’t need 100 programmers in a high rise with game rooms and free beer to make a successful company.
The bubble didn’t happen because there were too many good ideas that didn’t make money, it happened because there was too much money chasing the same number of good ideas thus a lot of bad ideas and bad managers got funded.
ReplyZac,
I am continually amazed at those who try to ‘reinvent the wheel’. It all comes down to what you have to offer, remember the hula-hoop or the wheel-o? Fifty cents to manufacture and sold for $3.00. These immutable marketing laws still apply.
Capture the imagination, get word of mouth advertising launched, provide great customer service and wash, rinse, repeat the above.
There is a cool article at the DaVinci institute site regarding ten-times ROI projects to rebuild the american economy.
http://www.davinciinstitute.com/page.php?ID=625
I wonder how these can be reduced to a local level with local funding?
Respectfully,
Nicholas Chase
Replyhttp://www.twitter.com/nachase
Nice–always great to see interesting ideas on how to monetize free applications.
ReplyI appreciate your great reminder on ways to monetize some simple things on our sites and blogs. You have some great examples and nice summary of the biz models. Thanks for some great simple reminders where others would make 20 posts out of this. Love your approach.
ReplySo true Zac, So True! I think this is the best model to make a living online - find something thats needed, offer it for free, and offer paid services around it. I just wrote a similar post today about this on my blog as well!
ReplyWow a very good post
ReplyThis is a great post, I agree free is a great way to make money. It brings a lot of users to your site and helps you make money
Replysurely so.. making things free drives in loads of traffic!!
Replyand hence the best way to make money!
I aggree with the idea of .make crowd now and make money later,it is suck at the fist time I have to admit it ,but remembering the success of twitter make me re thinking too much about making too many advertising into my poor traffic weblog
ReplyJust a quick note to say read: FREE! by Chris Andersen, editor of Wired Magazine
Reply@Matthew Berman:
You sir, are an idiot. Do you know how many of those “foolish” dot com company owners made a fortune before their stock went to zero?
Why would they care that the stupid company’s stock went to zero when they had already cashed out 2 billion dollars worth of it before it tanked? I doubt they are disappointed with their business model.
ReplyZach you are so right, the biggest names in the world gave their stuff away for free, Mr. Gates is a fine example. Say what you want about him, he made the world a better place! I know I will never forget Windows 3.1
Reply