Yesterday we touched on the importance of making your site habit-forming for search marketing and optimization. One of the many things I learned from watching HBO’s The Wire is that if you give your potential clients a taste of the good stuff they’ll come back for more. Even better, you create converts and we all know how annoyingly persistent they can be about getting others to try something new, whether it be the latest web app, crazy cult religion, or mind altering drug.

Radiohead did this when they allowed users to name any price for their latest album. Though many people downloaded it for free, they also spread the word about it across MySpace, chat rooms and file sharing spaces, linking to the download site and driving huge amounts of traffic. Some of this traffic did choose to pay and not just a nominal fee either. The premium version of the album with extra goodies and tracks was also available at a higher fixed price at the same site. And, as the theory goes, people who got the album were prime candidates to spend money on the ensuing live shows or even merchandise like t-shirts.

Wired’s recent cover story on free stuff online preaches the same mantra, while also making me wonder what why parents don’t name their kids stuff like “King” anymore. Author Chris Anderson shares the story of King Gillette who gave away a bunch of his razors knowing that the replacement blades were where the real moolah was. If only he were alive to see the advent of the five-blade razor!

The concept of the free trial works especially well online, where the costs of sampling are incredibly low. Countless web services have launched and built a business model by building really cool, but kind-of-sparse freeware application, while reserving their higher-end toolset to the paying clientele.

A great example of this in action is Animoto. Animoto lets users create short films from their online photo galleries, set them to music, edit them and post them to social media sites or wherever else they want to. For a clip under 30 seconds this is all free. However, for $30 (they seem to like that number) you can make videos of any length to your heart’s content for a year. The guys at Animoto are betting that their tools are so good and easy to use that a significant portion of people will opt for the subscription and so far they seem to be correct.

More to the point, in the act of sharing and plugging your site with posts, messages, links and other content, they do a whole lot of offsite optimization for you. This is the kind of link lovin’ that Google goes ga-ga for. This is high-value SEO that continues to build on itself thanks to the long tail.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 1:02 pm and is filed under ECommerce, Online Video, Search: How-To, Search: Video, SEO, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.