How do you get people to use your free stuff? And how do you move people from free to premium?

Seth Godin’s 3 minute answer:

Create Quality > Get Attention> Connect >Monetize= Free to Premium

One example is musicians: the more music they give away for free, the more money they can make from live gigs and records.

Another example is Seth himself: by giving away for free his “Unleash The Idea Virus” book, he ended-up selling more full-priced hard-cover books than his previous book.  Readers check the book and if they decide they like it (i.e. if there’s quality to it), they will buy it and they did. No one buys business books anymore without knowing what they are about.

Internet has become a radio for ideas.

The video is recorded by Ron Hogan and featured on http://www.mediabistro.com.

With 75,000 apps in the App Store, how do you convince a user to buy your paid app? The magic word seems to be Freemium.

Who says so?

First it was Admob in its July mobile metrics report. The mobile ad network run a survey on about 1,200 users of the Apple App Store and Android Market and found that the top reason for purchasing an app was that users had liked the free version.

What conversions are we talking about?

According to a recent Mobclix’s study:

-Apps with a lite version will sell 2 or 3 times more.

-Supposedly from 50% to 60% of the lite version users upgrade to the paid version!

Here’s the full video of the event.

It would be interesting to know what categories are experiencing the most success with this model. If it’s just games or if it applies across the board.

Another point worth noting from the Mobclix presentation, is that even if you add the lite version later, you’re still going to experience the same bump in sales.

So, watch the video, think about your strategy and next steps. But watch out from the freemium buzz virus!  Building a freemium model is about re-inventing a business which offers real value to the end-user (additional levels of the game would do it), charging for what is scarce, not a mere giving away stuff for free.