Business Model 3: Free Portal Converting to Paid Model

 Combining the Free Portal model with the paid model can be a very good way to get your business going and then generate income. Here is how it works: You set up a Free Portal and so companies sign up to your free listing in droves. The excellent content and quantity of it (optimized on keywords) drives your website high on the search engines. Now with this high traffic and stats of each page (visitor numbers) you can convert your free portal to a paid model.

You may consider that at this point you are likely to lose most of your customers, but the key is to only convert when you can generally prove good traffic figures for many of your pages. You can then go to listing customer 1 and present your proposal, which will include:

 a) Cost to continue their listing,

 b) An additional benefit(s) of new format of listing such as additional image, text, multi-map feature, add PDF feature etc (all this would need to be decided before you offered your original free offer), you would intentionally leave some features unavailable on the free offer, then offer to later upgrade your offer when converting to a paid model.

 c) Specific traffic stats on particular pages on your website, and Rankings of appropriate Keywords from a range of search engines. We explain how this is easily achieved later.

 Obviously you will need to give some thought to how you convert customers, so as to get best results. You may decide to run a test on a small group; alternatively you may wish to leave some room for maneuvering. You clearly are not going to convert every single listing, but if you can prove how much traffic they are getting and the benefits of continuing their listing (or losses when stopping it, this is generally less affective as it could be seen as a threat) then most will pay, because you are offering them real value for money.

The benefits of this business model combines the benefits of both Free Portal and Paid Portal Models that is building your large website, with good content in the shortest time possible and then converting them to payments. 

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