This is a new concept in advertising that I have come across. Giving stuff away for free, I mean totally and completely free with no strings attached whatsoever and getting paid for it. This radical new concept comes from RevResponse by NetLine and if you are a publisher and have your own blog/website you get paid whenever visitors to your blog download free stuff that you put up from RevResponse. All that it will cost you is the advertising space on your blog. You might be tempted to say so does every other affiliate, but visitors to your blog have to purchase the affiliate products for you to earn your commission right? RevResponse on the other hand does not sell any stuff, but only gives away stuff for free on your blog/website and whenever a visitor signs up and/or downloads the resources put up by RevResponse you get paid.
You might wonder how does RevResponse work and what is their marketing model? Well for starters it’s not like other conventional ad networks and does not work on the CPC or CPM model. You are paid every time someone downloads any of the free resources from RevResponse displayed in a widget or banner ads on your blog. Now these resources are free so it does not cost your visitors anything, but just CTR does not get you the commissions. You only get paid for downloads of these free resources. You might wonder how this works and what profit is there for RevResponse. Well for starters the advertisers would be paying RevResponse and the advertisers are in turn paying for advertising on your blog and also the advantage in this method is they are placing their products in your visitors’ hands for free and reaching out to them in this unique way. As my economics professor used to say, no one does business at a loss, hence I am sure this is profitable for all concerned. How much would you get paid you might wonder? Well from what I have read it’s in the vicinity of around $1.50 min and going as high as $20 depending on what is downloaded. You can receive payments by check, but more good news is that you can receive payments via PayPal too. The minimum payout amount is $50, which is not too high, but one gotcha is that payments are sent out 45 days after the end of the payment month. In other words for the month of July, the payment will be sent out only 45 days after the last day of July, which seems to be a tad bit too long.
Now coming to what you can offer for free on your blog/website that will interest your visitors in downloading it for free? Mainly from what I have seen till now there are tons of business resources, software trials, free magazine subscriptions, and white papers. One thing you will note is that they are all mainly business related and I guess the main chunk of advertising comes from big business houses who want to advertise and give away some free stuff to reach out and connect with the visitors to your blog. The main topics or categories under which these free resources are sorted/categorized are:
- Agriculture
- Automotive
- Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals
- Computers
- Construction
- Education
- Engineering
- Executive and Management
- Finance
- Food and Beverage
- Government
- Healthcare
- Human Resources
- Industrial and Manufacturing
- Internet
- Information Technology
- IT – Data Management
- IT – Security
- IT – Software and Development
- IT – Storage
- Insurance
- Mechanical/Machine
- Meetings and Travel
- Multimedia
- Network/Communications
- Purchasing and Procurement
- Retail
- Sales and Marketing
- Small and Medium Business
- Telecom and Wireless
- Trade/Professional Services
- Transportation and Logistics
- Utility and Energy
Apart from putting up resources on your blog/website in terms of a sidebar widget, banner ads, text links, RevResponse also gives you a personalized website that you can promote and link to and direct your visitors to. What is unique about this website that RevResponse creates for you is that it is personalized to look just like the theme on your blog and it in fact looks like a page from your blog! I have been chopping and changing themes on my blog so I have gone with the default RevResponse theme on my RevResponse page, which you can check out at http://nela.tradepub.com/.
You can sign up for RevResponse using any of my referral banners below and thanks for the same.
Feel free to drop in any comments/suggestions or even queries about RevResponse.
