I really don't understand. (People want it FREE!)

[Coalission]

The people here very much insulted me first. I asked a clear question instead received half a$$ generic responses that I HAVE ALREADY TRIED. That's what I mean by they don't know what they're talking about. Just regurgitating the same advice that doesn't work.

Brush that F*cking chip off your shoulder first before asking for advice. And here I thought I was overly defensive.

Like someone else mentioned, if you can't get business owners to pay $100 for something, you aren't showing them ~$200 of value. Sell the value of advertising in your publication better. Look around at other companies' media kits (scroll all the way down and click on "Advertise with Us" or something like that).

Here's an example: Newsmax - Advertise

You don't have to go all out like that for $100, but you get the idea.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[MJ DeMarco]

This isn't rocket science. If people want your service/product for FREE, they don't value it highly enough to pay for it.

In other words, to echo what numerous others have said, you aren't providing relative value in the marketmind's eye.

The only other explanation is your messaging and targeting is off. You can offer value, but if you don't message it properly to the right audience, you will fail in attracting sales.

Basically what many people here are saying comes down to your product and its value proposition.

You're saying, "how do I make my boat go faster?"
We're saying, "your boat has holes and leaks in it -- those need to be fixed first."
You're saying, "No, I don't want to fix the leaks, you're all insulting me -- just tell me how to go faster."

We're here to help you, not insult you or tear you down. The best result this forum can get is a success story.

 

[Tiago]

Hey there! I come to this site a little perplexed. I am a Magazine Editor and Sponsorship Associate at 716 Live. We run an multinational publication, radio station, and numerous podcasts and shows.

Each month we reach over 50,000 people from all over the world. We have a solid social media presence with stellar reviews from our supporters. There is only one problem: people want our services to be free!

We are not a charity, though we do believe in supporting those in need by providing our platform at crack head prices (for now). One example is our publication: 716 Live Magazine. Each one page slot comes with global networking opportunities, exposure to thousands, and a chance to win free commercial airtime on our Radio Station. Most other outlets will charge well over $2,000 (we checked rates from our competitors). We only charge $100 and people aren't even willing to pay that! They always try to bargain us down even more or just ignore us altogether.

What should we do? Is anyone else experiencing a similar problem? Thanks!

What do you really want to create? It all comes down to that.

 

[rollerskates]

Based on your website, your product (videos of what? podcasts of what?) has limited appeal. I haven't heard of anything you promote and all of the text I see overlaying your videos seems to be geared towards an audience who doesn't care about proper English. It looks like it is for young people, who generally don't have much money.

Also, your Twitter account--heck, lady, I've got twice as many followers (not just egghead fake accounts, I've got major magazines and news people who follow me and I am in a creative business too) as you and I rarely tweet. You have just about zero engagements with others. You have to be social on social media--engage and tweet things other than you you you you you you and your services all the time.

And lastly, you should think about whether you are offering content that is valuable enough to pay for. You can't monetize a business by selling advertising alone, you also have to have good products. It seems like you are selling interviews with musicians, but I am not sure there is value in that unless perhaps it is geared towards success in the music industry, and even then, it will have limited appeal.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[samuraijack]

I don't understand, I go to your FB and Twitter and I don't see a huge social media following. I downloaded a few of your magazines and they are 20 pages with huge font. How many people download your magazine?

With the businesses that I run, I get calls and emails all the time asking to place ads in magazines. The biggest reason I won't pay is value. If I pay $200 for an ad in a magazine, print or digital, am I going to make $200 in profit? If your magazine gets 1000 downloads, what are my chances of getting 10 sales from it at $20 per sale?

It all comes down to value and when I look at your magazine, it just doesn't look polished. The photos are great and some of the articles are laid out great. But overall the magazine does not piece together very well. All the fonts, spacing and font sizes are different. There are no margins. It looks like a bunch of different people just appended a bunch of PDFs together. Hard to attract savvy magazine advertisers that way.

Not taking sides here, but just had to come by and say bio just dropped some value here. He actually took the time to review her stuff and gave specific advice. We can all learn from this as posters when trying to help others.

 

[TheRegalMachine]

2.) We are not a local company. Ten seconds on our website will show you that. Yes we support local but they are not our focus.

Being an online hip hop show/radio/magazine/t-shirt company doesn't mean you aren't local.
Most of your guests look like your run of the mill local rappers, granted you seem to have booked a few big names here and there), but they're literally whos from New York or where ever.
I'm going to be real blunt with you, your site, your social media profiles, your set up, your hosts, the whole gambit look like any other online hip hop show out there.
You came here making claims like you guys were crushing it but your comment sections and interactions are a ghost town.
You claim that anyone advertising with you would get "global networking opportunities, exposure to thousands, and a chance to win free commercial airtime on our Radio Station" all for 100 bucks. Truthfully, If it were for $10 I doubt most would take it because your show/site/radio doesn't have the numbers to draw attention to a small business. Because you offer less doesn't mean it's alluring especially when there is no value to be gained. If I were looking to reach your demographic and I went to your website I'd hit the X button within the first minute of scrolling.
You have an event for Madden 2017 tournament on the site charging $20 to win $100. Essentially you want 16 people to pay you $20 so one of them can win an $80 profit leaving the other 16 out 20 bucks which per your blog post is non-refundable.
You say no one on this forum knows what they're talking about but I question the advertising logic of the person who planned this tournament and who runs this site more than anyone here who have actually given you some fair sound advice.
Call me an a**hole for being forthright with you but hey you came to us for help.
Personally I think you should nix the plan to get money from advertisers or the few users you have and focus on actually building an audience base willing to interact and build value for your site other wise your website will end up with a 404 error and your social media accounts the bleached bones of a company trying to get ahead of themselves too fast.

 

[fhs8]

1. Magazines are so 1980s.
2. Free content elsewhere. For example over 5 million results interviews of rappers on Youtube. rapper interview - YouTube
3. Website layout isn't good and it's complicated.
4. You're in a very competitive market.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Kung Fu Steve]

@Steve F & @LateStarter : you guys have some incredible patience.

 

[RHL]

We like to say here not to chase money. We like to say that it's not about the money. We say money is like a cat, if you go after it directly, it runs away.

But in the end, it is kinda about chasing money: You don't want to create something that has no clear pathway to you getting paid. You don't want to figure out payment details later. You don't want to have to brainstorm or fundamentally change your mission to make money.

It's clear that you all like what you do. It's clear that you're putting in a big effort to roll like professionals. Sure, there are better social pages and better websites than yours, but that's true for damn near every website and social page out there. This shows initiative and drive. That's great.

But unless you can eat follow-backs and retweets, you need a monitization pathway where you maintain control and get paid first. You need your customers to want to pay you, and need to pay only you, specifically, not any competitor.

Let me give you two media examples, one of fail, and one of win:

Fail: Woman starts a blog to share her short stories. She's a good writer, and puts her best foot forward, but there are lots of other good writers out there. Her industry mandates that her content be free on her blog. She has 20,000 readers a month, but advertisers will only pay her a few hundred bucks a month for ads. On top of that, the pop-ups she has to run actually reduce her traffic and increase her bounce rate.

She came up with an idea then thought up a monitization strategy later. She has no control because she doesn't produce the thing that's sold, other people do. She's just a conduit. The minute her popularity drops (or, in this case, if it never gets off the ground), she's toast.

Win: The Points Guy. This is a dude who got the idea less than 10 years ago to start a website about all the sweet trips you could get at a discounted price from credit card companies. This is cool, because you get to travel and eat out a lot, but that cool factor masks a killer monitization strategy: Credit card referrals are some of the highest paying affiliate products out there. His whole travel website is a bonanza of these referrals, so he gets to have fun, but the HUGE payday is front and center. He makes something boring and conventional, credit cards, something people will actually read about and get excited about.

I don't know what TPG earns in a year, but I know he has a centurion card, which are usually given to people worth multiple millions with the expectation that they will charge at least $250,000/yr on the card.

Be like TPG. Build your business around a killer monitization strategy that pays you first and delivers a HOLY S**T ROI every single day.

 

[RogueInnovation]

Well from a sales perspective I see it like this
You have some advertising spots (of whatever quality, you say good, others may disagree... whatever)
So you have some spots you want to sell, but you are either not reaching enough small businesses who could use your advertising or your sales messaging is off.

From what I can tell, your messaging is "we are really cheap but really relevant"
The problem is the "really relevant" part, because it is vague and based on your opinion
And what if YOU are wrong?

What are the ROI's people can expect to make?
How many of those people you gave advertising are happy after the fact?
How were they benefited?

Once you know that, you then sell the results of advertising on your platform
This cannot be "the results are great cuz we are relevant"
You must know the ROIs of those purchasing ads
Or you do not know the product you are selling and therefor cannot sell it with any confidence

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[LateStarter]

Uhmm... y'all know that you're just talking to yourselves now, right?

That's not to deter you from continuing the thread (there's some solid wisdom here), but I highly doubt that @JasmineTheAuthor will be back to read the good stuff here.

 

[TheRegalMachine]

Uhmm... y'all know that you're just talking to yourselves now, right?

That's not to deter you from continuing the thread (there's some solid wisdom here), but I highly doubt that @JasmineTheAuthor will be back to read the wisdom here.

Threads like this where the OP asks for advice/help, doesn't want advice but hand holding, and takes off with their jimmies rustled are great case studies. Some good stuff has been posted and could be beneficial to someone down the road.
If I were a staff member of an amateur online music site joining the forum because I'm having advertisement issues I'd either stumble across this via search or be directed here by a member. I'd be able to take the wisdom dropped here that whatshername didn't want.

 

[I Am I Said]

Uhmm... y'all know that you're just talking to yourselves now, right?

That's not to deter you from continuing the thread (there's some solid wisdom here), but I highly doubt that @JasmineTheAuthor will be back to read the good stuff here.

@JasmineTheAuthor I see you've been back; did you do some more research? What have you found? What happen next for your business?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Almantas]

The responses you've gotten from this thread alone can help you save your business. Community did more than enough to help you out. Whether you're willing to accept suggestions and take proper actions is a different story. I wish you and your business best of luck.