RSS FeedsDoes Free Content Help You Sell
Oct 22, 2007
A few days ago I wrote a post on how the rock band Radiohead is selling its music albums by not selling. The band has provided the music for free and has left it on its fans whether they want to pay for it or not.
Many years ago when I was designing websites I created a free auto responder-based nine-day HTML course that people could receive every day by submitting their emails. In the final installment I asked them would they like to pay for the similar course. 95% of the respondents said they would be eager to pay if the course was well formatted and contained a little bit of more real-world examples. I was quite encouraged but now I don’t remember why I never got down to preparing a professional, worth-paying-for course. Anyway the point is that people are ready to pay if you provide them great value in a good package. Brian of CopyBlogger talks about how you need to sell information rather than providing free content on your website and make money in his latest report (you need to signup). Although I totally agree with the concept of selling knowledge and making money on the Internet making money by providing free content is not as difficult as it is made out to be. (He is totally right when he says that it is not necessary that an idea is going to work for you just because it has worked for the others.) You just need to generate enough valuable content: content that really helps people and content that is not available on other websites. And of course you need to generate the right buzz. And of course you need to have some alternate source of income while you are building up your content repository.
Making money off free content doesn’t always have to be about making money off advertising. You can make use of free content to generate lots of traffic for your business and to build your brand around your profession: even if you decide to sell information products from your website you need to generate lots of traffic first.
When you share your knowledge openly and freely with your visitors it establishes your authority and people begin to respect you and know you for your knowledge. You begin to get more business queries through your free content. I have seen many bloggers generating thousands of readers and then announcing their book writing venture on their blogs, sharing little tidbits of the books and talking about subjects revolving around the books. This helps them generate the positive buzz and by the time the book are released there are already hundreds if not thousands of eager readers waiting for them.
Coming back to generating free content in order to make money online; I don’t think that all the important subjects have already been covered. Don’t get discouraged by the fact that some very famous bloggers are already writing on the subject you want to write on. They’re known and well-respected doesn’t mean there is no scope for other blogs. Google gained prominence even when most people were using Yahoo! to search on the Internet.
When you do some research you will notice that most of these bloggers are famous because one, they write a lot and generate great content and two, they network a lot. Even if you feel that you have nothing new to add don’t let it stop you from writing. There is always an un-written, unique perspective that you bring in when you start giving your own take on a particular subject. Just start writing. An added benefit of generating new blog posts on the same old topics is that provided you optimize your posts, the search engines are going to rank your posts way above the already existing blog posts.
Most people don’t succeed on the Internet, not because their ideas are not innovative or not genuine; they don’t succeed because the required effort is lacking and the required exposure is lacking. Right content plus exposure plus lots of the right content can surely bring you success.
Technorati Tags: make money online, blogging, free content, blog advertising
Posted by Amrit | Tags: Content Publishing, Blog Publishing, Blogging Trends, Content Writing
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October 22nd, 2007 at 4:35 pm
October 24th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
October 26th, 2007 at 10:30 am