Embrace Free, Implement Freemium
Fred say’s “Go Freemium“!
“Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.” – Fred Wilson
How do you make FREE work effectively in a business model?
I believe the most notable examples of monetizing and making FREE work is Google and Yahoo!, both offering free information while wrapping with paid content. Advertising companies pay to leverage products and/or services to a specific demographic, geography, or just broad base users.
Enter, Indeed.com, SimplyHired, and Recruit.net who provide these types of performance driven advertising mechanisms for the online recruiting community. – Jobs Are Free.
Don’t forget about LinkedIN and TheLadders who have embraced freemium subscription based models. These models offer free content, tools, and platform usage while selling upgrades to their more premium tools, jobs, newsletters, etc. Demonstrating you don’t have to be a search engine, vertical, or AdSense pusher to make FREE work in your favor. Although wrapping all of those into one package, creating a industry mash-up, might be a great idea…??
