“We average 55,000 to 60,000 unique hits [on TGP site ATKingdom.com] every day,” said Chris Gkikas, manager of ATKCash, the affiliate arm of ATKingdom.
“Some people think [free site surfers] are freeloaders and are going to cost you all kinds of crazy bandwidth, and no one is ever going to buy a membership; but in actuality, with all that traffic, we convert on average around one in 200 [visitors] on this [free] site.”
ATKingdom founder and CEO Kim Nielson added that his company typically retains members brought in through the TGP site for about six months on average.
The trick to getting results like that from a free site, Gkikas said, is understanding the fine art of the soft sell.
“With a [hard-sell] tour model, when the surfer gets there, you give your sales pitch once and if they buy, they buy; if they don’t, they don’t,” Gkikas said. ”Rarely are people going to bookmark a tour and come back…With a tour, you get one shot to make the sale. If you don’t make it, you lose it.”
“We decided that a free site model is [better for us] because it offers multiple selling encounters. With a free site, you get loyal bookmarkers who keep coming back.”
And every time one of those loyal surfers comes back to your free site you have another opportunity to impress them, win their trust and overcome their reluctance to join. It may take weeks or even months, Gkikas said, but with careful planning, it can be done.
One key is teasing surfers into wanting more, which ATKingdom achieves by limiting free galleries to six images.
“Over the years, we’ve realized that you can come to a balance in terms of the optimum number of pictures to give people an idea of what the content is like, what the quality of the content is like and still keep our bandwidth cost a little lower than giving away a whole lot more,” Gkikas noted.
To make sure they are using the right pictures, all 17 staff members at ATKingdom take part in a weekly contest to predict which of the 24 models being featured that week on the free site will get the most clicks. They then study the results to gain insight into how elements such as lighting, outfits, hair styles and poses effect click rates and use the analysis to refine the site, as well as their paysites.
The final and most important ingredient in using a TGP effectively, according to Nielson, is providing good customer service. It doesn’t matter that you’re not making money off of surfers, he said; you still have to treat them like valued customers.
“We answer every email [we receive],” Neilson said.
The company also forbids blind links or any other element that may turn off surfers or lose their trust.
To retain members, ATKingdom saves its best content for its members area, adding 16 new photo sets daily, with up to 200 images in each set, as well as 50 new video clips weekly. The company's philosophy, said Nielson, is that it is better to gain four or five new customers per day and keep them for six months than to gain nine new customers who quit after a couple of months because they are dissapointed that the site didn't live up to the promise of its tour area.
While the idea of posting 16 new photo sets daily may seem intimidating, and impossible to newcomers, Nielson said leaner operations can still realize big profits by focusing on niches.
Still, he added that new site owners should be prepared not to make money for several months.
“You have to build the site and build traffic before signups start coming in,” Nielson said, illustrating the point with a story about one webmaster who almost threw in the towel after six months of flat sales and is now making $5,000 per month on a part-time basis.
