Now you're probably wondering how I could write a post about making money from offering free software. The basic idea is that you write some software. Then you offer the software for free and even consider making it open source. If your software is good, a year or so from the release date you'll be able to make a boat load of cash from the web site that hosts the free software.
The money is going to come from the outbound links you will sell to others. These links will be valuable to others because your site is likely going to have an impressive link profile. These two things will come about because people love to link to free software that they find useful. And over the course of a year (maybe less if you get lucky) these inbound links can add up to a site that Google will reward with a high PageRank. This high PageRank will then translate in to a valuable link opportunities to those that do search engine optimization (SEO).
A real life example of this set up can be seen with the FeedReader application. This software is free and was, I believe, open source up until version 3.0. The software itself is solid and quite good at managing RSS feeds. I should know since I use it. It beats out the competition by having the same features they do and then by throwing in additional functionality like being portable.
The site now has a PageRank of 9. If you don't pay attention to such things let me assure you that such a PageRank is incredible. This value is usually reserved for the big players like CNN and NY Times. A site like this can easily make thousands of dollars per month selling links. And if you look at the lower-right corner of the FeedReader site you'll see a handful of largely unrelated links that I'm 99% sure have been purchased.
What I think the FeedReader folks are doing wrong is linking to unrelated sites. I suspect that eventually Google will discount such links and may even eliminate all value provided by them. A smarter approach would be for the site to either list only relevant links or to build out pages with content related to the links. Doing either of these things could keep the paid status of the links hidden.
So there you have it. All you have to do is write some really useful software, give it away for free, and then monetize it through link selling. Easy, right?
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