There will be a Free Listing option ... sort of.
I mentioned in a previous post that there would be some people who get a free listing in the beginning and that those listings would expire. After discussing this with a crew member, I think we will go ahead with free listings that don't expire.
Part of it has to do with the time and effort it'll take to manage the removal of free listings. I tend to give myself too much to do, which means I usually change course to an easier version after mulling it over.
Another change I think we're going to make is extending the period that we'll offer free listings. The original thought was to offer free listings to a few only in the beginning as we built up our traffic. Once our traffic was high enough, all listings would be from paying members of the site.
However, I think there might be some advantages to keeping the door open to free listings a little longer, perhaps even indefinitely. Time will tell.
Not Acutally Free
Though Free Listings won't cost any actual money, they won't be free per se. Everyone who gets a free listing will have done something for us in exchange, following the spirit of what the new site is all about—a spirit I hope I have been able to achieve with this site as well.
There will be three ways to earn a free listing:
- Follow the new site's Twitter account.
- Tweet about the new site.
- Blog about the new site.
All three of these will be managed with Rafflecopter. For option number 1, only a few people will win free listings (the normal function for Rafflecopter). Everyone who completes the tasks described in the Rafflecopter widget for options 2 and 3 will get a free listing, and blogging about the new site will earn one round of promotion.
As you can probably guess from that last statement, there will be multiple options (rounds) for promotion. A certain basic amount of promotion will come with a paid membership. Other levels of promotion will be available for reasonable fees.
There is a hitch, though
Except for getting some promotion in exchange for blogging about the new site, free listings will have a major disadvantage in comparison to their paid (promoted) brethren.
Very little traffic will be driven to free listings. They may receive the occasional visitor who is browsing the genre, subgenre, or keywords the book is associated with.
However, the true value of this new site will come from promotion, which isn't easy for me to do, involving time and effort (and even possibly the occasional expense).
There will be some distinct advantages of a paid listing, which I will blog about next time.
