

Ask HN: How does free compete with paid? - ecaron

Our free website makes money off of CPC revenue, but our chief competitor charges a monthly membership fee. This means they can run promotions saying "Hey! Sign up now and get your first 2 months at 50% off", while we can only say "Uhh... we're still free."<p>So they get coupon site love, and we end up in the free-site bucket. (Though our site totally kicks their butt, not that I'm biased:-)<p>And this leads me to my question: WWHND?
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noodle
freemium.

say "hey, our free version is just as good as those guys' paid version. plus,
if you want even better stuff, you can pay $X/mo and get some even more super
awesome features that those guys don't even have at all! here's a coupon."

~~~
ecaron
Where would you say "Hey, we're better"? Mentioning it on the service's site
isn't that useful since the visitor is already there.

~~~
noodle
adwords is a good start.

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chanux
The site he mention is <http://linkup.com> . HNers please suggest how to
promote the FREE service. I have no connection with this service but like to
see things free as long as it's possible. (No offense with making money with
technology but if someone is happy & able to offer a free service it's cool I
guess.)

~~~
swombat
How about starting a blog about how to find jobs in this market?

That'd no doubt be highly diggable and gather hits from all over the place.
Then page rank goes up. then hits come in.

~~~
ecaron
We've got a Twitter account, and a Facebook friend's page.

I've leaned against doing a blog for two reasons: 1) There are many other
experts in this field who praise us & eclipse my knowledge (like
<http://jobsearch.about.com/>)

2) Other job search engine blogs have been miserable failures, based on number
of comments & attention they've failed to attract (like
<http://blog.indeed.com/>, <http://blog.simplyhired.com/>,
<http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobseeker/blog/> and
<http://monster.typepad.com/>)

~~~
swombat
It's good to see that you've done your research, but I wouldn't discard the
blogging route just because of those examples (so long as you have a good
writer on your team).

Looking at the examples you gave, and tearing them down one by one:

<http://blog.indeed.com/> \- fairly basic design, and all the articles seem to
be about themselves.

<http://blog.simplyhired.com/> \- again, mostly self-serving and/or random
articles... "2009 Simply Hired Nugget Bowl"?? Who cares.

<http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobseeker/blog> \- better content, but terrible
design. It's painful to even look at, let alone read.

<http://monster.typepad.com/> \- better content again, but mostly ultra-short
articles.

None of those are blogs that anyone sensible would read regularly, because
they mostly regurgitate fairly boring or self-serving points without any new,
useful ideas, and they're badly designed.

By "doing a blog" I don't mean doing a blog about you or about your business.
I mean doing a blog about the topic that your business is related to, and
making a genuine effort to write thoughtful articles that will influence the
industry positively and/or be of interest to your target market.

I'd like to give our blog (<http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/>) as an example,
but it's a little bit shambolic at the moment. Yet even so, the "thought
leadership" articles we posted there generate some good hits and have
generated some very good leads for us. Importantly, they've also massively
upped our pagerank (because we run it on the same domain rather than a
subdomain), which means, for example, that woobius comes up on the first page
of results already for, for example, "construction collaboration".

So there's multiple benefits to creating a _good_ blog. Of course, creating a
good blog is hard, but if you can, imho, it's worth it. Whether you can is a
function of whether you have interesting ideas about your industry (you
probably do) and whether you have a good writer on your team who can write
those in a clear, blog-friendly shape.

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ecaron
The business is a job search website. Although the discussion certainly
doesn't need to be limited/oriented towards that niche.

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Chocobean
depends on what kind of bussiness you're running though...

If it has anything to do with "exclusivity" or "privilege" or "be the first to
do blah", you _must_ charge. You can give "special" customers a free or
heavily discounted pass, but you must make it seem like it's only them getting
something exclusive for an exclusive price. Think country club or night club
style business.

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swombat
This begs the question... why aren't you charging a monthly fee? Too much
money sloshing around in your bank account?

~~~
ecaron
We're not charging a fee because we're firmly against charging jobseekers (who
are usually unemployed). We're able to finance ourselves through the CPC
methods.

~~~
ajdecon
OK, so you won't charge jobseekers. Does your service have a flipside where
you allow employers to search resumes, or do any sort of matching between jobs
and seekers? Are you charging the employers at all? And if not, why not? A
free service is good for individuals looking for a job, but charging companies
looking for excellent employees will actually make you look more credible.

~~~
ecaron
Since the service doesn't have jobs on it, it just points to josb (like
Google, ignoring their cache), there are no resume services offered. For
people wanting resume hosting, we point them to <http://emurse.com>

The service charges employers for sponsored listings, like Google's AdWords.
Another paid service is for more frequent indexing, and another is for direct
access to customized company-specific job feeds, which is useful to
recruiters, affiliates & competitors.

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chanux
Hey let's do some campaign to promote yours, if it's really good.

~~~
chanux
Hmm... I knew this would be a down vote magnet. Anyway I was trying to help
the FREE service.

