Business 11   20: Creating a Free Service

Which comes first...the product or the web site? 

A lot of people have the cart before the horse. They have a product they want to sell and 

they are looking for people to buy it. Do you know how easy it is if you start with the 

people who want to buy something first...and then offer them a product they WANT? 

Just because you don t have a product doesn t mean you shouldn t start a web site. Pick a 

targeted niche market first...build a site...build Traffic...and then you can either find a 

product they already want or you can sell advertising space. I would pick a web site with 

traffic any day over a person with a hot product. "Hot" products are everywhere. Web 

sites which already have traffic in a specific market are GUARANTEED winners when 

the right product is introduced to them. 

As a matter of fact, I know a lot of success web site models who are earning thousands or 

tens of thousands of dollars monthly and they don t even have a product to sell. They do 

endorsements of other people s products. Once you have the market, there are dozens of 

people ready and willing to let you sell their products to your customers. 

You could also design a web site giving everything away absolutely FREE with one 

purpose in mind...build a large community of people who give you their email address 

and visit your site over and over again. Many people have found this to be true and are 

creating sites which give away free information, link to all kinds of resources in a certain 

area, have free downloads, or have software you can use on their site for free. 

The big key here is to build an opt in email list from your visiting using any of the online 

autoresponder services. 

Build a tool that helps everyone in your market and they will come. Think about some 

ideas you could come up with in this area. It could be as simple as creating a page that 

links to major resources in a certain area. Find the best resources in an area and then ask 

to trade links with them (many of them will gladly trade links with your site). Build up a 

database of these links to hundreds of different useful sites online and watch your traffic 

soar. 

Look at what Freedback.com did. (You can look at their site at 

http://www.freedback.com 

). This site gave away free forms for people to use on their 

site. Many web hosts don t allow CGI to run on their site, and freedback filled a need for 

all of these people being hosted.  

Through their service, people could have forms for free on their site to collect 

information from their visitors. Over time, Freedback has given away over 50,000 of 

these types of forms and is receiving over 300,000 hits a day on their response page.  

They can sell advertising all day long to this traffic. All they have is a FREE service and 

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