One of the surest ways to get traffic to your web site is to give something away for free. But how is it that a service that a lot of people are willing to pay for can be offered by another company for free. Well, I have gone through free conference calls before and explained how that can happen, but what about free web conferencing?
A conference call service company that provides web conferencing to its customers has to pay for a number of things in order to provide the service. Some of those cost items include the following.
- Software development – If the conference call service company has developed the service themselves then they had to pay to have the software developed in the first place. And like any software you develop the development doesn’t end there. There are on going improvements, bug fixes and so forth to fund.
- Reseller fees- Some conference call services don’t develop their own software, they simply resell someone elses technology. In this case there is always a cost to the company who is reselling the service.
- Hosting environment – If you are supporting your own software you need to have a server or servers depending on the number of users to host the software and make it available to your customers.
- Internet Connectivity- If you are hosting your own web conferencing service you need to connect it to the internet and the connection needs to allow many users fast access so you will also need a very good and potentially expensive connection.
- Support Costs – And like any other conference call service you will need to support your web conferencing service with sales and service personnel.
So, if there are all these costs, how does anyone provide free web conferencing? Well, some conference call service companies will offer a dumbed down version for free hoping you will upgrade because the free version doesn’t do much. Or the web conferencing service they offer for free is an old version they no longer support and instead of retiring it they simply give it away so you will come to their site and but the other version. Either way, if you investigate the free web conferencing versions out there you will see that they are not a full version, current representative of what web conferencing can do. And it just may not have the reliability and capacity you would expect with a service you pay for. After all it is free so how hard can you complain?
If you really need a good web conferencing service don’t use a free one. For a low monthly fee you can have access to a web conferencing service that save you time and money wihtout breaking the bank.
