Freemium for Blogs
While contemplating business models for my blog one idea has been the nowadays common freemium model. Freemium means a basic free product and additional premium services. It's very popular with software. What does freemium for blogs mean though?
What premium offer makes sense for a SEO blog or rather a SEO 2.0 one?
I recently joined Contenture, a micropayment service that basically allows you to turn a blog or site into a freemium model publication with ease. The payments are facilitated automatically by Contenture so that users just pay once and then the money gets divided between the publications they really read.
They suggest some basic modes of distinguishing the free from the premium features of a blog. It's suggestions like:
- removing ads for paying members
- granting access to the archives for paying members only
- commenting only for paying members only
I can't really recommend those. All of them have some big drawbacks.
In the SEO industry we have plenty of examples of successful freemium business models. SEOmoz and SEO Book are just two of them. Both of them offer a
- membership forum
- premium tools
besides the free content and tools they offer.
Now I don't program tools myself and to be honest I do not believe in tools. I use them myself but they are worthless even in SEO if you do not have the basic knowledge and social skills to do SEO. In SEO 2.0 we deal more with humans than with software. So how do you imagine premium offers or services in a SEO 2.0 context? Any ideas? You know, I might come up one day with some and offer them so rather tell me right away what you need.
To be clear: I don't plan to create a membership forum any time soon. My time is very limited and I don't think this is the business model that will work for me. Still it's a viable option for some both the users as those offering such forums.
A question for everybody: What premium features would you want to see on SEO 2.0? Don't make me put ads all over place so I can remove them ;-) !
I feel this policy is useful only for the very well-known blogs. For a normal blog getting a decent number of visitors, introducing this technique of making services available only to paid members will make them lose the already existing customers who don’t wish to pay. Its a free world and i feel information should be kept free too, services and tools apart.
Thanks for your feedback Sydney. I’m not sure you understand the nature of the freemium model right though.
It’s not about taking away what was free before but adding something people might want to pay for.
That’s the question of this post: What’s valuable in a blog so that people would even spend money on it?
Also what’s a very well known blog? Is my blog very well known? Not really. People know me in my niche, which is still quite small.
Still, making blogs profitable does not require huge numbers of visitors.
Your proposal freemium for blogs is the best for those people who want to start blogging. But I have my own premium blogs. So will think in future.
You are right when you say you dont need a huge amount of visitors to make the blog profitable but you will need to provide some good, solid, hard to find information if you want people to pay for it. If your information is extremely useful, accurate and upto date then word of mouth alone can sometimes be enough to catapult your sign-ups skywards.
“Commenting only for paying members only” – no no no no noooo!!!