B-to-B dot-com pays companies to drive traffic to its site E-businessReady.com gains business by giving away profits. The online B-to-B co-op started a promotion in June that pays companies for each sales lead that clicks through to its Web site (www.e-businessready.com).
At the end of the promotion, it will give 20% of its profits to the companies that sent leads which E-businessReady turned into customers.
The year-old firm markets a software program that enables businesses to communicate by creating Web-based meetings, sharing files and sending instant messages, among other things. The company also distributes other businesses’ Internet B-to-B products and services.
For the promotion, companies sign up as affiliates and promote E-businessReady on their Web sites. Each time a visitor clicks from an affiliate’s site, banner ad or e-mail to E-businessReady.com, the affiliate receives 5 cents per click-through. For each click-through that converts to a registered new user on the site, E-businessReady will pay 30 cents.
E-shares The firm’s affiliate Web sites do not actually own shares in the Toronto dot-com. Instead, they receive points called e-shares, which are awarded based on how much traffic they drive to the site. There are 50 million e-shares available. If a company earns 80% of them, it will collect 80% of the profits set aside for the promotion.
“We adopted this model because that was the only way to run a business like this without breaking Federal Communications Commission rules,” quips Precana Thompson, the company’s vice president for business development.
“The FCC doesn’t let you give away shares in your company unless it’s a registered public company,” she continues. “Therefore, the only way we could do it was to give away a portion of our sales.” To encourage affiliates to sign on, the firm makes no secret of the fact that it was profitable 45 days after its launch – not your typical dot-com story, Thompson adds.
$1 Million Jackpot E-businessReady.com is also sweetening the pot for the promotion: The company collecting the most e-shares will win $1 million. The campaign ends when all 50 million e-shares have been distributed, which Thompson guesses will be by next spring. At press time, the front-runner was the game site www.lottoballs .com, which had steered some 36,000 hits to E-businessReady.com. The nearest contender trailed by 3,000 to 4,000 hits.
The firm is marketing its promotion by posting details on www .commissionjunction.com. Commission Junction has 300,000 affiliates – companies that paid a fee to have their program introduced there.
“I’m a believer that you must pay for everything yourself,” Thompson remarks. “I just carried that same mantra into my business. Compensate everyone along the way so everyone makes money from your success.”
Network
