Build your Internet business model from the bottom up
Whether you are a paid website that sells products or a free website that sells advertising, your business model requires some kind of visual component that acts as a roadmap for the future.
The first step in this roadmap, is deciding what your website will offer and how it will make money. This is why, in every business plan we create or help create, a Mequoda Media Pyramid is built.
The Mequoda Media Pyramid supports the notion that media products have a natural hierarchy.
Building a Mequoda Media Pyramid is an exercise through which you dig down and determine exactly how you’re going to run your company. The pyramid provides a method for organizing content to maximize profit.
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Mequoda Media Pyramid Key Concepts
Here are some tips for building (and implementing) your own media pyramid for use in your online business plan.
- Media products have a natural hierarchy
- This follows the time, money and trust media continuum
- Use outside media to acquire new customers
- Leverage “free media” first
- Use content to build a permission database
- Components of a niche media super-brand
- Create many products in many formats
- Recycle, reuse and republish content
- Pull customers up the pyramid to maximize profit!
The foundation of the pyramid shows how you’ll draw prospects into your customer base, or online hub and build relationships. Then, level-by-level, you monetize those individuals by pushing them up the pyramid to product levels that are increasingly more valuable to them and certainly more profitable for you.
Designing your enterprise in a Mequoda Media Pyramid is a dramatic departure for most media companies, which have historically been horizontally integrated as magazine, newsletter or book publishers. Over the past 30 years, we’ve seen special interest media evolve toward vertical integration in which the goal is to produce media in and for a variety of content platforms.
Media companies implementing this vertically integrated strategy use outside media to acquire new customers, leveraging “free media” first. They use content to build a permission database. They create many products in many formats and recycle, reuse and republish content. Finally, they are able to pull customers up the pyramid to maximize profit.
