White Papers - rates

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Permalink Reply by Joakim Ditlev on October 13, 2009 at 2:25am

Sounds like a great initiative, Keith.

There is a lot of free resources out there, so my approach would be to give the white papers away for free to boost sign-ups. Afterwards, you can make revenue on list rentals, etc.
If you charge for the content, I recommend that you ensure a really high quality - and quantity of pages as well. Nobody will pay for a two-pages document.

My 5 cents...

/Joakim

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Permalink Reply by Mitch Speers on October 21, 2009 at 3:49pm

Keith,
pricing leads can seem like more art than science. If you can deliver qualified leads in aviation, $80 seems low to me, but I don't know your industry. Here's what we look at:

How targeted are the leads? In other words, does the advertiser only want a small segment of decision makers that get pinged all the time? If so, price goes up.
What is the value of a completed transaction? Quality leads for high value transactions can be worth a lot, especially if you can track them to a conversion (unlikely I know).
What is the value of the promotional campaign supporting the leadgen program?
Can you include lead nurturing components that increase the value of leads to advertisers? If so, you can add a hefty premium.

Finally, look closely at all your hard costs to be sure that you are hitting your margin targets. $30 per lead would be a money-loser for us.

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Permalink Reply by Keith Gregory on October 22, 2009 at 9:32pm

Yes! The tech sites (TechTarget, KnowledgeStorm, et al) have ruined things, along with Google.

The issue with quality is that a lot of leads that get generated are 'Consultants', non US based whom some advertisers can't convert, folks with Yahoo addresses.

What I have tried to do is get an idea of what other publishers charge if they are set up for a flat fee. The one I found that is close to my market is IndustryWeek and they are around $1k per month.

In terms of margins- we're not necessarily marketing anything, so all we are talking about is uploading a paper, entering some text. The platform is being used for a lot of other things - so this is gravy.

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Permalink Reply by Aneel Tejwaney on October 22, 2009 at 10:25am

From what I have seen its best to sell packages; specially since its safer and has more chances of success when you are trying get into something new. So if you have a mix of webseminars, whitepapers, channel sponsorship and a promotional newsletter blast the deal with the client becomes more sizable and lucrative. Also something useful I have seen is prioritizing leads from all the sources so the client knows who to go after first.

Just make sure your conversion architecture is well thought out.

Aneel

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