Freemium Content for Membership Websites
Tuesday, November 10th 2009 @ 4:16 PM 
(2 ratings)
"Freemium" or Free and Premium was first articulated by venture capitalist Fred Wilson WAY back in March of 2006.
"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."
It is exciting to see the number of online businesses that have embraced the Freemium model and from what many of the successful online marketing experts say, the model is very profitable and here to stay.
So what are some ideas for using the Freemium model in a membership site?
There are MANY ways to offer Freemium content but nearly all of them
will fall into one of the following three categories:
1. The Free Trial
This is the oldest and most common form of Freemium. You offer your members a free trial so they can see what you offer without risk or any barrier to entry. The challenge with this plan is how long do you give the free trial? if you make it last too long you run the risk of the member grabbing all your content or exploring enough information during the trial that they lose interest--If you make the trial too short you run the risk of not engaging your member in enough time to "sell" your site to them.
2. Free is your inventory
In other words, if you offer a free membership site you are trying to build a large number of members that you now can monetize by selling advertising or sponsorship because you have enough "eyeballs on your site". This is a popular model as it is probably the easiest...the downside is that it can take time before your site is large enough (and popular enough) to be valuable to a sponsor/advertiser. Patience and persistance are needed for this approach.
3. Free offers to Paid
This is my favorite approach to Freemium as it is the most subtle and natural to do...AND there are literally hundreds of different ways you can make money. Here are just a few:
- Offer free membership to your site and provide consistent, valuable content. At some point, combine all (or some) of your valuable content and create an ebook or video, report etc and sell it to your members. Leo Babauta, the wildly popular blogger (Top 10 Blog) of Zen Habits wrote over 1000 blog posts before combining them into successful ebooks ( and more recently videos) . Frank Kern, the well known, "surfer-dude" internet marketer often tells members that his pricey $2,000 Mass Control program is basically laid out in the 80 hours of free video blog posts he has on his site. If you like either of these guys you most likely will buy their products to save time and to get the focused "cliff notes version". Does it work? Frank is a multimillionaire and Leo was able to quit his job and now blogs full time for a living.
- Charge a membership fee and with the membership offer an unbelievable amount of free material that you drip to the members every month--this is in addition to your membership site content. Month #1 they get mailed an intro packet with a variety of your niche based stuf. Month #2 they get a downloadable ebook or video that you made or that you bought from a Private Label Reseller. You can edit the content to include more targeted info and make it all your own to offer. etc...The biggest advantage to doing it this way is that your material you are dripping is NOT placed on your membership site so new members won't automatically have the material--like they do when they join your site and have access to all your archives.
- Create membership levels and in each level activate more tools and applications a member can use.iGrOOps is ideal for this due to the number of tools that can individually be set for various access levels.
There are many other methods to using Freemium and I highly encourage you to read Gary Vaynerchuk's new book, "Crush it!" to learn a bunch more. Gary's story deserves an entire blog post so I won't go into that here but if you want to watch a video that is incredibly inspiring and motivating check out a video on his Social Media presentation. Fair warning: He does use rough language and pulls no punches but he is the real deal and is "crushing it" using Freemium. 
