As I wrote the post yesterday about giving away content online, I started thinking about my beloved Duotrope. (Yes, there really is a love affair going on, or maybe more of an infatuation, as is more one-sided. Anyway.) Duotrope is free, they give away their content, and they work amazingly hard at it. Instead of charging up front for it, they instead have a status log that keeps track of their money level, and they ask for donations from users. I never would have paid up front for the service, simply because I had no idea if it would be as good as it seemed. However after using it for a while, I willingly donated last year, and twice again as much this year, because their service really is that good. However, asking for money after writers tried their service was a large risk for them. What if their users didn’t think their content was good enough to pay for? What if they thought it was good, but not good enough to pay for? It’s a gamble, but so far it seems to be paying off for them, although not by a whole lot.
It is a gamble for authors to give out content online as well. As a blog writer, you also have to be a savvy marketer. You have to figure out what people will like, and make sure that the content you post is of a quality that will not only keep a reader’s attention, but also make them remember what you wrote about. The window of opportunity to grab people’s attention is very small, and if a piece of writing is of low quality they aren’t going to read further, come back or – perhaps most importantly – recommend it to anyone else. There goes your word of mouth. And word of mouth is one of the most important tools of all.
Giving away any type of free content is a gamble that requires hard work, but done correctly the payoff can be worth it. For Duotrope, they receive the funds they need to stay running, and great word of mouth. The payoff for a writer isn’t necessarily going to be in cash, as while you are marketing books you aren’t going to be soliciting donations. The payoff in word of mouth however can be better than any paid advertising.
