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Internet Mailing Lists Auto Responders FREE
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Success StoriesThe following Web Marketers have made a practice of giving something away for free. In each case they provide valuable information, products or services for free with a consistently high degree of quality. Each person was invited to provide comments on their philosophy of "Free" as a Marketing Strategy. Tech Direct honors each of these Internet Marketers with the Internet Strategist Award.
David BeroffThe largest client of Sarnat WebSuccess is David Jack, the famous children's recording artist, (the guy the White House (USA) calls when they want to entertain the small fry), and their job includes the promotion of his future website, still in the early stages of development. Like many businesses, the goal for David Jack's site will be to attract visitors to his site, to appreciate his product (music tapes) and his service (live concerts), and to encourage these visitors to purchase said product and service. Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that there are literally tens of thousands of musicians on the Web, all with similar goals. Thus, in addition to the various free marketing approaches, one would normally need to invest heavily in advertising in order to attract a reasonable audience. In the ancient history of the Internet, (i.e., before 1995), people performed various services for free strictly because that was the culture: most people gave something back to the community, and everyone benefitted. (e.g., Yahoo! was originally just a hobby, a service provided by two guys to help other people get their bearings on the Web.) This is still a great idea, but business folks need to see some cash flow to support the computers and other costs of free services. Thus, many devote a small piece of the web "real estate" to paid advertising, in hopes of gaining an income. David Beroff, Senior Webmaster for Sarnat WebSuccess, explains his business challenge: "My personal goal was to find a way to expose a large number of people to my client, David Jack. Knowing that our advertising budget was rather limited, I decided to provide a free service which would attract a high number of visitors, and then advertise my client to those visitors. FreeForm is a service which is provided to webmasters, allowing them to add free fill-out forms to their site. They can get feedback from their site's visitors, without needing to access CGI on their provider's server, or to even know CGI. Though the FreeForm site itself is targetted towards webmasters (people who provide web content), and gets reasonable traffic, my concentration is on the page that is displayed after a form is submitted. Every time a web user fills out a form on one of the many sites that use FreeForm, the response page (showing the contents of the submitted form) gives us an opportunity to expose that user to our client. My short-term goal is to get ten thousand hits per day on that page. At a typical $10 CPM (cost per thousand advertising impressions), this corresponds to an advertising campaign that would otherwise cost my client $3000 a month. By providing both the impression supply and demand, we can bring him these visitors at no cost." Beroff follows the example of the Link Exchange, which exhibits slow but steady exponential growth. Every time they display an advertising banner, they also display a 40x40 "LE" button and a text link, both of which bring visitors to their own site. For every thousand people that see these, a small percentage will take a look at what they have to offer, and eventually, some visitors will use the service themselves. Thus, in a week, a few more webmasters will have added the code to their site to display a Link Exchange banner, and the cycle repeats with a slightly larger population. A year ago, in May of 1996, they were serving four million ads a month. Today, they serve five million a day. This 38-fold increase represents a growth of 7.2% per week. By displaying a small text link ("FREE web form...") on every site that uses his service, Beroff hopes to grow exposure in a similar fashion. "Once we start the RealAudio server at David Jack's site", Beroff asserts, "I intend to use a similar approach with his music itself. We will generate HTML for visitors' websites, which will use our server to play David Jack's music at their site. Of course, there will also be a small button stating that the RealAudio music is courtesy of www.DavidJack.com . Over time, I think we will see the same exponential curve of visits to his site." The Link Exchange model seems to bear him out.
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