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Created by
Jon Davey
Social Media Director
Business in Berkshire
01753 852904
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FREE don’t pay the bills
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FREE don’t pay the bills, not even double FREE
I was prompted to respond to a question on Linkedin which pointed to the announcement by Ning’s CEO Jason Rosenthal who has identified that you can’t run servers on candles, you need to pay the gas bill and “double down on our premium services business” Here is my post in full ... So many companies take the free route to grab land and build awareness ... many in good faith and ignorance of the realities of server requirements should they be successful. The reality is that popularity costs in regards to hardware should the world want to tap in every day. The problem then lies in turning free into £££ ... freeloaders don’t like paying for anything! I have been through the process myself with our BinB website ... gave it away in the early days when our email marketing business was thriving ... now margins are shot I looked around for our next move ... even considered working for others but thankfully that thought didn’t last too long !! In the early days (2004 – 2008) we gave away over 1000 accounts and in recent months we have chopped away all those that didn’t use the system and so were adding no value to our site ... probably 80% ... Microsoft talk about 80% of people being lurkers online which makes this process palatable ... just image how it felt & how many questions we asked ourselves when we didn’t know what the stats were for space wasters!! Those that added some content have gained traction and 50% will stick around now we are charging ... some of the others will be kept short term as the pages are being found by people searching and so give us brand visibility ... as we grow our base of paying customers it would only be fair to delete the free accounts. We now charge £20 + VAT per month for all the space you can eat on BinB ... last year we had 4,000,000 pages views so not too shoddy for a business site ... our content is picked up by Google for its news alerts programme and so we get speedy organic listings at the same time ... For those businesses locally that get SEO it’s a no brainer ... we just need to bump into them ... Do you know what has really made a difference in 2010 ? Everyone is using Facebook, Linkedin or both and their memberships are going exponential with free registrations. The biggest stumbling blocks that we had in the early days were technology and copy. People used Word, Excel and pinged a few emails but anymore than that needed a techie or two ... people would glaze over and change the subject when I started talking BinB content & SEO! At the same time they probably got a C in English at school leaving them feeling like they couldn’t write. Today, if you want to engage online then you need to logon and get scribbling ... those barriers of entry are dissolving before our very eyes ... I personally think that most of the sites that will work in the future will have a specialism, a clear focus on a topic and they will not try and become too large. They will be run by individuals or small groups of people who are passionate about something and therefore will maintain enthusiasm when times are tough and revenues low. You're right Jon, communities need to value themselves by making some sort of contribution to maintain its presence ... either by assisting with its growth or by paying a fee, the latter being far easier for all concerned on many levels. I could go on but you didn’t ask for war and peace, just a few thoughts! Thank you. Jon Davey |
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