On the Internet, earning income by publishing content is still debatable. According to this nytimes.com report, for most companies, going the freemium way seems to be the way of the future. Well, what do we have to learn from this? Nothing much except that if you wear the lateral thinking hat and apply the same model to some offline businesses, it might make for an awesome strategic move that could out-beat your competitors and make them run back into caves. Here are some excellent strategies that online businesses use that we could use for businesses operating off the Internet:
- Where is the “free Trail”? : I approach businesses on a daily basis because I am a customer myself and I don’t see a single business that allows for a free trial of their products and services. The small business owners are so full of themselves and their businesses that they think they are doing the world a favor for having taken the trouble to put up a shop there. Without a free trail, I won’t have the confidence to open-up, try products and services risk-free and make my decisions based on experiences.
- No visuals: If you look at some of the websites of leading services, everything starts with being visual: the color of the sites, the graphics, and content on the site. They go so far as to ensure that even the buttons and the navigation panels fit into the overall design interface. Where is all that here back on the turf? Off the Internet, however, you see businesses that don’t go visual. The business owners don’t take an effort to get effective logos and don’t bother with good marketing collateral at all. This attitude won’t sell, would it?
- Persuasiveness and salesmanship: if you look at any random website trying to sell any kind of product or service, you will that the website’s copy does a lot of work trying to convince you to at least take a look at what’s on offer. Sometimes, business owners or webmasters also use lead-generation tactics such as using a whitepaper, free report or an e-book in exchange for an email address that the businesses can use later for email marketing purposes.
Somehow, online businesses seem to have more going for them and they seem to have leveraged technology. They look smarter, they sell smarter things and they have a lot to teach the otherwise boring offline businesses.
