Use your marketing resources wisely

When you have a platform that gives you an opportunity to reach people, you would be foolish not to use it.

People ask me all the time why they should be willing to give away content for free. They wonder how can they monetize something if they give it away. For example, a record artist makes far more money performing than from royalties from a radio station yet they won’t get a lot of publicity without the radio station playing their music. (So why does a radio station have to pay to play?)

Having a blog or free content, like what I do with the tutorials at www.TributeMedia.com allows you to provide a permission based marketing platform. People can subscribe and then have given you permission to market to them.

Of course, if you take advantage of that permission, they will turn you off faster than they turned you on.

Dilbert is a great example. I receive my daily dose of Dilbert in my RSS reader every day. I may skim over other content I receive, but I always take a moment to read my daily Dilbert.

Look at today’s cartoon above. Notice that Dilbert started a new business. I thought that I would go to www.DilbertFiles.com and see if it was real. Sure enough, it is. Looks like a competitor to www.Box.net (which we use in our business to great success).

Now, I can’t speak to the quality of service, but it got me thinking. If you can build a platform that allows people to listen to you for free, then maybe it is a bit better than paying for any level of advertising.

I’ll be interested to see what happens with DilbertFiles.com. I just wonder why they don’t have a free version.