5 Ways To Adopt a Freemium Business Model On Your Blog

When you are making money from your blog (and are new to it), it’s easy to get greedy and try to charge for every little thing that you offer. While you want to make money as a blogger (your bills are not going to pay themselves), you don’t want to focus on short-term gains at the expense of long-term growth. There are many affiliate marketers who do that. But many of those folks are just marketers and have no interest in becoming pro-bloggers. Instead of charging for everything, it’s better to give lots of stuff for free and ask your visitors to pay for “premium” content. What do I mean by premium content? We are not talking about more regular blog posts. If you want people to pay and become a paying member in your freemium community, you need to offer them something worth paying for.

Let’s face it. We all like free stuff. Most blogs offer most of their articles and content for free. While you may be able to get away with selling your regular content to your readers in the short-term, it’s not something you can sustain over the long run. You are going to need something unique to get people to join. If you are stuck and don’t know what type of content to offer to your potential paying members, here are 5 ideas that should help:

• Exclusive Videos: depending on your target market, you may be able to use your videos to get people to sign up for your membership program. We are talking about exclusive content here. A couple of websites were able to do just that with their BP oil coverage. You can do this in almost any niche. You just have to be a bit creative. The goal is to offer something people can not find anywhere else. It does not need to be earth-shattering, but it does need to be unique and exclusive to your paying members.
• Offer Reports & Deeper Analysis: plenty of websites have used this approach to boost their freemium business model. Many sports sites offer early reports and analysis to their paying members. Plenty of tech sites provide industry analysis and market break-downs as a part of their premium packages. People won’t mind paying for unique content they can’t find anywhere else. This is easier said than done though.
• Free Tools: a few super bloggers have developed their own tool-sets for all kinds of things (SEO, PPC, or niche finder). Developing a tool is not that hard considering that you can use sites such as Guru.com to do it in an affordable fashion. You can always charge for your tools or offer them for free to your paying members.
• Deals & Exclusive Coupons: if your company offers a paying service or tool, you can always offer exclusive coupons to your community’s members. Also, it never hurts to reach out to other companies (that offer services your visitors may deem valuable) to try and seal exclusive coupons for your customers.
• Connect with your members with Special Broadcasts: if you have spent enough time branding yourself or are a super-star already, you can use special broadcasts as a selling point for your freemium business. Wouldn’t you like to have a chance to talk with someone like, let’s say, Darren Rowse face to face? It does not even have to be you as long as you can secure top guests for your special broadcasts.

Taking a freemium business off the ground does take a bit of time. You just have to be a bit creative about it. People won’t pay for just any content. They will pay for the “right” kind of content. The above tactics may not be all you can do, but they should give you some ideas.

What are your suggestions?