How to make money for free products

Balagi Visvanatan (Balaji Viswanathan) as The founder of the Zingfin.com, a financial research website, introduced in this article how the so-called free services on the Internet are making money.

1 free Value-added mode (Freemium model)

Provide free products and services for value-added services charges. This model is used for most SaaS (software services) products.

2) Deadline promotion (2¥q period promotion)

Users can first free trial products for a period of time, the trial period before the user charges. For example, most products of signals have a 30-day free trial period, after which a fee is charged. But it is difficult to control the probation period.

3) Directional advertising mode (targeted advertising model)

Understand the user as much as possible and then recommend ads related to their needs. such as Facebook and Google.

4 Sponsorship Mode (Sponsorship model)

If your product is directly for the Government and other important organizations to provide services, you can seek sponsorship from them. The Khan institution, for example, was funded by the Gates Foundation and Google.

5 wiki mode (Wikipedia model)

You can get donations from the user. Many WordPress plug-ins, open source tools, and Wikipedia do so. The future newspaper industry may also profit by this way.

6 Gillette Mode (Gillette model)

Gillette sold a razor at a loss in order to make more profit from the sales of the blades of the relevant products. The same is true on the Internet, for example, you can launch a free online document editing service and then charge for the process of exporting online documents to local devices.

7 Open Source Model (open Source model)

Provide free products and then profit from the installation, maintenance and customization of the products. Most open source software uses this pattern.

8) According to the use quantity charge (Usage charge model)

Similar to the value-added service model, designed to provide a free version of the product, only when the user exceeds the limit on the use of the product charges (but the number of storage devices, including Dropbox, after the use of this mode has been a loss of users).

9 zynga mode (zynga model)

Sell the product through the application, or insert the product recommendation function in the game.

10) Additional Sales mode (Upsell/cross-sell)

Some products are free of charge to consumers, and then sales of related advanced products to obtain income. For example, if you run a financial Web site, you can provide free stock market data and then charge a deep analysis of the data and financial tools.

11 Brand Effect Mode (build a brand)

Create a brand through a free product and then use the branding effect to sell other related or even unrelated products.

12) Affiliate Marketing (affiliate marketing)

Site A is an advertising system that sets up the ad button for site B, and then gets paid for the sales generated for site B. Some advertisers get the market in this way.

13 Sold to Google (Sell it to Google)

Recruit a large number of users for your product and attract a heavyweight buyer such as Microsoft or Google. Freebase, Powerset and other companies are in this way ushered in rebirth.

14 Let your next company succeed

If the above profit model is unsuccessful, you can still build a personal brand by running a successful non-profit company and attract investment to your next company.

Nothing is really free unless you are talking about a company that is purely altruistic. There is a saying: "If you don't spend money, you are no longer a consumer, but a product." ”

[Source: zingfin.quora.com]