Cheesman’s “Battling Free” eBook

I read a great ebook today by Joel Cheesman. Battling Free describes the current opportunities and risks facing all classified sites, including job boards, as sites such as Google begin to run classified ads for free. According to Cheesman, “to remain competitive, it’s imperative for such posting sites to reevaluate market positions, business models and evolve to find new sources of revenue.”
Cheesman’s book addresses these issues and offers over 25 nuts-and-bolts tips, each of which are designed to enable the site owner to raise revenues that they have, are, or will lose to sites which offer competitive content at little or no charge. But what I loved about this book is that rather than just focusing on the problem or offering vague, theoretical solutions, Cheesman dives right in and gets his hands dirty. He provides links to specific web sites that offer specific solutions to specific problems. He provides his opinions as to which of them offer more promising solutions than the others. And he doesn’t pretend for one minute to have all of the answers or to possess the ability to accurately predict the future.
It was comforting to see that we have already successfully implemented many of Cheesman’s tips, such as running Google AdSense code on our site to display pay-per-click text ads as well as pay-per-impression graphical ads, referring visitors to third party sites using trackable affiliate links through Commission Junction, being listed in directories such as Yahoo!, submitting articles to third party web sites, pre-selling sponsorship pages on our site to organizations which offer services which are complimentary to ours, delivering targeted emails to our users based upon their demographics rather than just a one-size-fits all monthly newsletter, encouraging employers and job seekers to pay nominal additional fees to have their jobs and resumes appear at the top of the search results, providing video content, charging for resume access, and selling complimentary services to the employers and candidates who use our site.
But even though we are successfully generating revenue through the above strategies, Cheesman’s book provided me with a lot to chew on. There are substrategies in many of the above areas that we have not yet implemented and there are strategies that he recommends that we have not yet touch at all. The book is $24.99. And as stated on its web site, “just one idea pays for this investment times over.”