I’m loving my Klout perks lately, from free prescreens of popular movies to alcohol and flavored water they seem to have me covered. Some of it’s great, some of it sucks – but either way, here is a shout out to MetroMint for hooking me up this week!
Advertising
You have built a stellar product, closed all the viral loops you can think of – yet here you are sitting with a beautiful product that just doesn’t pull the numbers to be your full time gig (unless of course you have already sold your last project for millions.)
What now?
Let’s not sugar coat it, are you even in a viable marketplace? There are so many ideas that have been built out there that boggle the mind in how the entrepreneur ever thought it would turn a profit or create a personal audience for something even bigger. Can your idea ever be at the level it needs to be for you to put 100% into it? If not it’s time to shoot the project in the head or pass it off to someone who can give it what it needs.
“I’m positive my idea can make the cut, it just needs more traction.”
For those who are so positive that their idea “works” it just needs to scale my first questions include things like “What does your conversion funnel look like?” , “What does your at scale cost analysis consist of? Have you been too conservative on your margins at scale?”. Most blindly optimistic entrepreneurs give a deer in headlights look at this point but that’s ok. Starting a new venture is more of a learning experience than anything.
Conversion Funnel: For each new user, how much money do you make? This is calculated both in immediate financial returns as well as the lifetime value of that lead/customer. Depending on your vertical this could be a long and slow release of value or could be figured out within the first 24 hours of someone hitting your site.
The Numbers Work! I just need more!
Assuming your numbers work and you have spent time split testing your traffic to make each lead as valuable as possible, there are a few ways to drive traffic that make sense for your business. Knowing your numbers here is especially useful because it gives you leverage. Knowing your numbers let’s you pay for access to audience you wouldn’t otherwise be have access to.
Many businesses with large audiences are constantly looking for new ways to monetize their traffic in the largest way possible. They will know their numbers like the back of their hands to be prepared for shark like mentality when approaching these individuals. They only care about to things:
1. What is the conversion rate of your visitors into paid members?
2. How much are they going to make from your service by promoting you.
If you can concretely answer these questions you have a prayer of getting their attention and bringing down your servers with the ridiculous amount of traffic the big players can bring your way 
Hold the Presses
I terms of traditional buzz from members and blogs there is a few ways to drive traffic that pretty much breaks down into two legs.
Leg 1: give an amazing value to your users
No natter what your business, what the century, or what your skill set is one thing hold constant. Customers respond to value, and while the bar continually gets set higher and higher due to competition you are going to get people’s attention by giving them something amazing for free that solves a core problem they have.
This method has most often been used in prelaunch scenarios in things like “refer 5 friends and get a free download of my marketing software.” The value needs to be tangible and relevant but I’m sure you either have something your users want or you can build something for less than the cost of a reasonable AdWords spend.
Leg 2: piss off someone deemed important (Jason Calacanis method)
This one is the classic move, “all press is good press”. Just how millions and millions of people have heard that horrendous Jessica Black song called ‘Friday’, we were still talking about it and now she has a massive audience that is worth real cash.
Jason Calacanis uses this method almost daily, and while not really creating crappy content he will stir up the pot simply for attention and to build his audience. You see, Jason knows that every time he lies, looks incredibly stupid or just down right like an asshole – he gets press. He has been especially successful in pissing off Mike Arrington of TechCrunch which has garnered him multiple posts on one of the most trafficked blog in his space. Not to mention the hundred of comments debating the topic.
You see humans are funny, because we love a good cat fight more than we love getting shit done. It draws our attention and focus repeatedly. This ultimately turns into an audience, eyeballs and cold hard greenbacks.
With all the fanfare surrounding Hulu after it’s launch (especially in the College scene) as a free LEGAL way to watch premium TV shows (movies are available too, but have traditionally been lackluster). As Netflix got serious about their “Watch Instantly” offerings, many people found themselves signing up for the $9.99/month because it brought many students armed with their existing xbox 360 to get quality content onto their TV’s in a way that wouldn’t have the schools IT department knocking on their door and/or turning off their bandwidth.
So what is Hulu’s response to the higher resolution Netflix offerings? Hulu has notoriously been a completely free offering which was monetized through targeted advertisements, so it was only natural that Hulu would try to have more users (or at least more active) by offering higher quality resolution video across more devices (read: iDevices), and that service came under the name of Hulu +. “Great!” you may be thinking, and at a price of $10/month for recent episodes presented in High Definition it sounds fair.. until you realize that they STILL HAVE ADS.
Hulu has proven more than once that they are driven completely by the content owners (read: taken by the balls), so much in fact that the content owners are arrogant enough to think that with the age of the internet, we as consumers are stupid enough to pay for ad laden content. Hulu is even on record for pleading with ABC to NOT launch their free application on the iPad that gives users access to recent, quality content without an added fee.
Recently, according to ComScore, Netflix has edged out Hulu in traffic across their domain. While ComScore is not a greatly reliable source for accurate information, their trending data is a great gauge for how consumers are voting with their dollars. Why isn’t Hulu absolutely CRUSHING IT with a freemium model right now? Hulu could easily be syndicating their Advertisement laden content across as many devices as possible at standard definition, with an upsell of advertisement free and higher resolution content. In the Internet age, customers are voting that with ads the content should be free, and with a fee it should be high quality and delivered without advertisements.
Freemium is an amazing way to drive user base, upsell opportunities and other revenue generating procedures that continue to drive value for the consumers in exchange for their usage and/or their dollars.
