Yes. Yes it did (sort of). In fact, you could skip this post and sign up free for 30 days right here (though there's more cool details I'll explain below).
Last week, in the midst of an extremely busy day, the team at SEOmoz huddled around a bowl of green jelly beans to share something even more magical than tiny green candy - our numbers. We recently passed 7,500 PRO members and January was our biggest traffic month ever, with nearly 1 million visits to SEOmoz + Open Site Explorer. The web app alone is tracking nearly 20,000 campaigns (sites), 500K keywords and 60mil+ pages each week. Linkscape just had its three fastest index updates, meaning the data in OSE, the mozBar and the web app are the freshest and most accurate ever.
January has been good to us, so it's time we return the favor. That's why, starting today, we're making SEOmoz PRO membership 100% FREE to try for the first 30 days.
But... That's not all. For the first 10,000 folks who take the free trial, we're entering you to win PRO membership free for life:
If you're already PRO (or sign up before 12am midnight tonight), you're already entered to win. If not, you can try it right now for free, so I'd suggest doing that :-) You can get all the details of the contest here.
The free trial includes every feature inside PRO, including:
#1: Track Campaigns in the PRO Web App
The new competitive link analysis tab in the web app
Create a campaign for the sites you care about and every week, the web app tracks:
- Keyword rankings for hundreds of keywords on the engine of your choice (including ccTLD extensions like Google.de or Google.com.br)
- Up to 10,000+ pages on your site, which it crawls every 7 days to report errors, missed opportunities and friendly notifications (like rel=canonicals or 301 redirects)
- Key search traffic metrics (via integration w/ Google Analytics)
- Link data for you and up to 3 competitors (as in the screenshot above)
- On-page recommendations for any page(s) ranking for a keyword that might have an opportunity to perform better
The web app is still in beta, so new features launch every few weeks and we're always open for feedback about what you want to see included.
#2: Unlimited Access to Open Site Explorer
Our link analysis tool, Open Site Explorer, has become one of the most popular SEO tools on the web and PRO is the only way to get unlimited access to metrics, reports, link lists and CSV exports.
A list of anchor text phrases pointing to searchengineland.com
There have been some great posts on how SEOs use and apply the data in OSE including - An Inside Look at Competitors' Backlinks (from Fabio Ricotta), How We Used Open Site Explorer at Microsoft (from Chris Moore) and HTTP Status Reports w/ OSE, VLookup and Xenu (from Richard Baxter).
#3: Use of the Entire SEOmoz Toolkit
Although we're constantly upgrading and migrating features into the web app, we've still got an impressive collection of dozens of useful tools for SEO professionals and web marketers. PRO gets you the awesome upgrades to the mozBar - our SEO toolbar for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.
Just a few of the SEO tools we provide
And it includes great tools like the new On-Page Optimizer, the powerful Keyword Difficulty Tool, our classic Historical PageRank Tool and many more.
#4: Ask Your Burning Questions to the Q+A Experts
Sometimes you have all the answers, but you still want to double-check. SEOmoz's team of experts has years of consulting experience and we love to share out knowledge and our advice with PRO members.
a very kind tweet from DavidBlg on Twitter
In addition, there's 4 years worth of questions and replies to search through and find an answer instantly.
#5: Exclusive Invites to PRO-only Training Webinars (and the webinar archive)
Every month, we give educational, 90 minute webinars covering topics ranging from The Cutting Edge of Organic Marketing to Local SEO to Advanced, Competitive Link Building.
A slide from December's webinar on Cutting Edge of Organic Marketing
I personally make and deliver many of these, and the feedback is always tremendous. Plus, the slides are always available for download and use, meaning you can re-use my cheesy comics to help present your ideas and plans internally (and educate your team, too).
OK, technically there's lots more, but you've got the idea - PRO membership is definitely worth trying FREE for 30 Days. And, heck, you might win a lifetime of free PRO, just for signing up.
Any questions? Just ask us in the comments!
This is great news! If you're not already a pro member, you should sign up. We don't even use half the tools and it's worth twice what we pay.
That's not a call for a price increase though guys....
So, if you used ALL the tools, it would be worth FOUR times what you pay? ;)
I'm in! :)
Thanks for the kind words! Glad we can help you kick your projects into high gear. We're working on lots more cool stuff and launching them over the coming months... so stay tuned and enjoy!
@seomom: finally got in and I have a rather so-so experience so far. Would love to share my thoughts, but not on a public platform. Maybe a DM or something? what would suit you better?
This is a great day for the SEO community. Honest. No BS. OSE alone is worth pro membership fees - and for newcomers to the industry and people needing to stay on the cutting edge, the plethora of resources in a Pro membership are beyond invaluable. To now offer a free 30 day trial is beyond great to see, because it'll give an untold number of people who might have been missing out on why this is such a great resource just enough of a motive to check it out. And once they do, they'll see what they'd been missing.
Congratulations to the moz team on this epic step.
yep its awesome :)
With respect....
When a car dealership offers you a test drive and then enters your name in a draw to win a car, they generally would not have the bare faced nerve to say that their cars were now free.
Hiya Buono. To use your same analogy, what SEOmoz is doing is the equivalent of a car dealer giving you the keys to a brand new BMW 7 Series and telling you it's yours to use free for the next 30 days. No limits to where you can drive or how many miles you rack up, and as a bonus, the gas is on them.
I say this with all due respect to everyone who isn't a Pro member already...you are certifiable if you don't jump in and take advantage of this offer!
...but at the end of your 30 days you either give them the car keys back, or you pay MSRP for it. Assuming you aren't one of the lucky lottery winners. And they only give you 10 bucks a month for gas.
Ok... lets talk with numbers...
I think I'll be working as an active SEO for the next 25 years (whatever SEO will be and whatever SEOmoz would have transformed itself and its tools)... so:
(99 $ * 12 months) * 25 years = 29,700 $
Not bad as a prize if you win the Lifetime Free Contest :)
When you put it like that I'd better register for a million free accounts ;-)
First comment as a SEOmoz Pro member :) Even though I have been a member (and fan) of SEOmoz for some years now (and used the Pro account we had at the agency I worked for until a couple of months ago) now I am using Raven (because it also has Social Media Monitoring features SEOmoz unfortunately lacks)... but, of course, I miss the Q&A's, the Knowledgebase, the Webinars, the PRO guides -I have found that the best of SEOmoz are not necessarily the SEO tools themselves, which are great btw, but the know-how!- this is the deal I was waiting for... cross my fingers to win the Pro membership for life ;) Congrats for the move!
Wow. I know I shouldn't be surprised to see neagative coments as they are a fact of online life. But really, free access for a month to SEOmoz Pro with no strings attached? How could an non-Pro member not see that as a good thing?
As far as existing Pro members concerns about the Q&A getting clogged and the Web App slowing its crawl, yeah, that makes sense, but still, we got through the initial launch of the web app OK. Were things gummed up a bit? Yeah, at first. But Kate and her crew sorted it out eventually.
And this is just a fact of business growth. Ultimately every single Pro member benefits because along with the influx of new users comes new cash. And SEOmoz has demonstrated time and again that they plow their cash into the Pro tools.
So I said all that to say this...Bring the growth on baby!
The Q&A crew, both on-site at SEOmoz and in far-flung places like over here in London, will do our best to make sure the response time does stay timely :)
We know it can get to a few extra days until things get answered at times, but we've been prepped for an increase in volume. You'll see me in there in a few hours' time, in any case!
We Pro know you are always doing your best, and to wait is not a problem when the answers we receive has a value higher than the subscription price. So, thanks Jane, Lindsey Dr Pete, Casey, Richard, Will and Tom, Rand and you other SEOmoz staff and associates :)
Once this opens to the community, the answers will become much quicker. I am excited to get feedback from gfiorelli1 and goodnewscowboy among others. Not that I don't like the answers from SEOmoz, but as we have seen here many many times, diversity in experience makes for a more rounded knowledge base.
Always great things coming out of SEOmoz!
Beware Richard, as you don't know what monsters are you calling from the darkness ;)
Good stuff guys - congratulations on the trial's launch.
Looking forward to meeting a whole new breed of Q&Aers! I should meet a few of you tonight. It's bound to get busy in there ;)
I have signed up for the free trial, and thank you MR Rand Fishkin for doing this, but to be honest there is nothing here that I have seen so far to justify paying the $99 IMO.
Open site explorer is nice, and well done on creating such a great tool, but, there are free tools that can show competitors links as well, I won’t mention names. I am just a normal website owner. My site does not even bring in $99 per month.
I do like seeing the metrics of a page and domain, but half of that is already free, and already a good indication to the quality of a link.
Don’t get me wrong, I love this place. I never fail to watch a white board Friday, and I do feel I should give something back to seomoz, but I’m afraid it won’t be $99 per month.
I don’t want to offend anyone here, but $30 per month would be something I would be willing to spend here, and I have no doubt in my mind that more people would pay $30, but I guess that would not pay the wages to the SEOmoz staff.
Totally agree with you, most of them are available free outside and also 30$ per month seems reasonable to spend on this.
Thanks for the feedback, we appreciate it! I'm really glad you're giving the free trial a shot too, as I think you might be surprised by what all is really included in PRO. Rand alludes to this in the post but it might be helpful to see it listed here as well. What you get with an SEOmoz PRO membership:
Anyway, I just wanted to point out that you're not just getting one thing with PRO, you get the whole kit & caboodle. And this free trial opens the door to every single one of them. We're not holding back anything from you in this Free trial. :) Thanks for hearing me out. :)
Oh! and I tried to add links to all the tools and such but we're having an issue in the editor. Should be fixed soon though!
As a company or for a full-time SEO, $99 month is very reasonable. But for everyone else it's a bit steep. I think packages or tiers would work better...
1. Open Site Explorer (many say this alone is worth the $99)
- Agreed that this is the best tool
2. Web App which gives you
* Rankings for 250 keywords including how you rate against your competition
* Crawl Diagnostics of your site with in-dept analysis and help to fix issues
- The idea behind this is pretty good, but after using it once or twice, it's only really useful if you're working with other people's sites.
* On-Page Optimization
- This is a pretty undeveloped and unsophisticated tool. Has a lot of potential though.
* Link Analysis of your site & your competitors
- Useful occasionally but again, limited in terms of number of competitors and other options.
* Traffic Data - we connect right to your GA account. Woot!
- Never used this
3. Toolbar (both in Chrome & Firefox) which includes a SERP overlay to see data on your competition right in the SERPs (yes there is also a free version but w/ PRO you get full access)
- This is just a convenience thing because the info is provided elsewher in the tools, and most toolbars are free anyway.
4. Keyword Difficulty
- Again, very restricted. If I type 'the' it claims it's an extremely competitive keyword, and seems to be based on frequency rather than actually based on a niche/industry.
5. Competitive link research tool (found in Labs & rocks my world)
- Nice idea but again it's restricted in terms of number of competitors and ways you can use it. Would like to see more of a focus on value and then how many competitors have links to it.
6. Linkscape Visualization & Comparison charts - Cool way to visually see how you stand up against your competition
7. 15 other tools (that I will let you check out for yourself: https://www.seomoz.org/tools)
- The weakest is the Juicy Link Finder IMO. In our experience it tends to just spit back a list of sites which are either our competitors or links which would represent a conflict of interest. I also find that the tools overlap quite a bit - for example, there are tools which could be merged together for a great all-round experience, yet they seem to be separated and lacking a bit of functionality.
8. PRO Webinars - These aren't your average webinars. We pick and topic, go all advanced on it & take usually 40 minutes of questions from PRO members. That's us answering your questions as you ask them. Pretty cool stuff.
- Not tried this so can't comment - mainly because they are outside our working hours. I know there are transcripts available, but none of the topics have particularly struck us.
9. Q & A - this has already been discussed a bit, but I'd highly recommend jumping into Q & A and asking a question. You'll get a response from either an SEOmoz staffer or an Associate who is highly skilled in the specific topic you ask about. You don't something like that for free (except for the next 30 days eh?) Plus in the next month we're opening up Q & A to allow answers from other PRO members. That means your questions will get answered faster & we'll still be around making sure the responses you get are spot on.
- We've tried this once and didn't find it very helpful.
10. Discounts yo! Are you interested in going to conferences, or trying other software? We have a PRO Discount store that gets you discounts to all sorts of goodness.
- Discounts are good, except at least one of them doesn't work (sponsoredreviews.com).
(Urgh, sorry about the spacing. Using the alternative way to comment since the original way doesn't work 75% of the time. Might be best off copying & pasting into a document)
I'm sorry you didn't find Q&A helpful. It's something I've worked fairly hard on in varying capacities for a few years now. I managed it as an employee two years ago and have helped out when I can now that I work overseas. I'm now indeed one of quite a few people who operate in there.
I hope you gave it more than one chance, or will try it again in the future.
I will do, we are beta testing the new version now and it looks fantastic. To be fair it's not an accurate portrayal given that we haven't used it that much in the past. But we're looking forward to using it more :) - Jenni
Guys - just my opinion, but constructive criticism is not something to downvote. I'm sure the SEOMOZ team appreciates the feedback, no matter how critical, when these individuals offered it in a constructive fashion.
I was about to run away crying because those of us that are already loyal fans couldn't be included in this amazing opportunity, but alas, you didn't forget about us did you!
Great promo SEOMoz! Thanks!
We wouldn't forget about you! In a way you guys were VIP'd in ;) Best of luck to you lady!
Yes, thank you so much for not treating potential customers better than existing. That happens far too often everywhere else :)
Yes, thank you for not pulling a 'large unnamed phone company' and offering better deals to potential customers than to existing customers.
I already sent my tweet this morning. :)
I just watned to voice my opinion on SEOmoz PRO. It's worth every cent I've paid; you should sign up today (Can't beat the 30 day trial) and there isn't techincally anything to lose.
As a pro member for over a year I can tell you the SEOmoz tools keep getting better. The only downside I see to giving away free memberships is more SEO competition. The information you can learn from just playing with OSE for a month is mindblowing, congrats to all the SEO newbies getting a jump on their skillset with a free month of Pro SEOmoz, I'm jelous and wish I had it when I started in SEO.
Woot! Go SEOmoz team! I think a free 30 day period of awesomeness is worth the signup. I wish I had your dev / marketing / design team Rand, they're too good! :-)
I use OSE ALLLL the time at work but never felt compelled to sign up for my own private account. This promo was my tipping point! My 30 day trial isn't up yet and I already know I'll be renewing my membership. =]
Genius marketing, SEOmoz...wish I thought of it first. ;-]
Love the in-text call to action: "In fact, you could skip this post and sign up free for 30 days right here" ;-)
Huh! happy! proud to be seomoz pro member,!
Signed up today for the trial. Most sections are having trouble pulling data, hopefully it's due to the massive registration and usage for the trial offer? Looking forward to using speed crawl soon and getting access to data which aren't showing up now. Great work SEOmoz!
It should be interesting to see how many "pro member" banners show up in the comments on this post ;)
I was a pro member from way back, until my employer at the time scaled back on things like that in favour of more dedicated SEO employees (which was the right decision for them to take, at the time). Now I've moved on from that company though, and am back in what pretty much equates to a "single SEO" employee role again. This trial is just the kick I needed to sign up again, and hopefully have that 30 days to make the argument to my new employer that we keep it going. Nice work guys.
Hopefully you see a spike in orders from Kansas City area today. I announced the promo at my social media internet marketing networking group and I saw a lot of pens flying and fingers tapping to get the info written down. Great incentive to try it out.
Thanks Ken! We really appreciate it!
Just a quick, slightly off-target note: I really like the recent development in the visual identity of SEOmoz. I don't now if you have hired a new designer, but the Mozbot illustrations are really really neat.
This is fantastic offer... an email goes out to all of my friends... :)
Thanks SEOmoz
Negative comments aside, I'm looking forward to giving the pro tools a try - I'm already playing around - so thanks a ton for the oppurtunity SEOMoz.
Whether I'm going to continue past the 30 days is debatable - my company isn't really keen on spending money (which is strange since they hired me to bring them SEO business in the first place), and paying for it myself isn't on since it will chew a huge chunk out of my salary.
Of course, the chance to win that lifetime membership ... I'm not going to pass that one up.
You know how to make people happy :-) and to make you happy, too. A win-win scenario for all of us!
This is great!
Hopefully in this free month I can prove to the bosses why a pro account could actually make us money!
Thanks guys :0)
I have tried to convince mine, but they cant see it - yet!
Will keep on pushing tho, Pro paid for by the boss would be sweet :)
Having been a member for a few years now I would reccomend SEOmoz to everyone who wants to improve their website - or even web presence. If you're not into that then please, leave now.
If what you want is to get better ROI for your website, share and learn about SEO in an amazingly friendly and dynamic environment then this is the only (and I've done my research) and I mean ONLY place to do it.
Sign up now for the free offer - or you'll be kicking yourself later on this year!
See you in the SEOmoz 'hood!
30 days of using the web app and OSE should be enough to convince most sensible users that these tools save a great deal of time, the other thing they highlight is proof of why certain sites are ranking so well.
Great pitch and I am sure that you will get plenty of takers
this sounds amazing, i really wish i wasn't about to leave on a 3 week honeymoon. any chance of postponing the free trial?
ninja edit to rephrase: i'm really glad i'm leaving on the honeymoon, just wish i could take advantage. :)
thanks!
Psst... the free trial isn't going away. :) Go have a lovely honeymoon, then sign up when you get back! We'll still be here. :)
Let my add my personal YAY! :)
I am the first Free Pro Member so I deserve a thumb down :D
A Pro thumb down?...
Great news, I hope this drives some quality leads to SEO MOZ =) I am sure we will see 20,000 SEO MOZ pro users in the near distant future ;)
Its all smart marketing to give every one a free taste of the product but then let them take a look at the Goodies and hopefully get them hooked on the product.
Great to see that you are offering a trial, I am sure that will get more people signing up!
How every single user of SEOmoz is not taking advantage of this is beyond me. I was expecting to see every comment from this announcement onwards, with the 'PRO Member' title under their profile pic.
It amused me that you say this, yet are not a pro member.
Hi Rand,
So when do we hear who won the free for life PRO account?
I'm excited y'all are finally offering a trial. This is great news!
At the same time, I've been a free user for so long, I came back wondering why I hadn't already bit the bullet. Then I looked at your pricing tiers and remembered why. Your pricing from Pro to Pro Elite just doesn't seem to scale well. First the leap from $99 to $499 makes me wish you had something in between.
Then let's look at tracked campaigns. How does going from paying $20 per, to $50 per campaign when I upgrade make sense? That's the feature I most care about, the number of domains I can track. So with 5 separate Pro accounts, I'm paying the same but I can track 25 campaigns.
Can someone please explain?
Hi flowsimple,
Thanks for the feedback on the pricing tiers. The truth of the matter is that I agree with you. We have gotten a lot of great feedback since our current pricing went into place, and are working on some new pricing tiers that will improve the campaign balance dramatically and offer more and better upgrade options above PRO. Unfortunately these will probably not be in place for a couple of months.
As for rationale for the current Elite price point, the higher cost per campaign was put in place due primarily the significantly greater crawl sizes.
If you have any more questions or feedback, feel free to contact me directly.
I just bit the bullet on the trial. And I dug this post back up to suggets one more thing.
Agency pricing. I need to be able to share my data and campaigns with other employees. Hopefully you also have something in the works there.
We are working on a new agency SKU, but multi-login accounts, while on our backlog, are not scheduled at this point. If you have other specific needs in an agency package, please let me know (feel free to contact me directly). Thanks!
Will the drawing be done via livestream? If there is absolutely no chance at foul play, then as they say on woot.com, i'm in for one.
Now if only we could get some more membership levels...https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/433934-new-membership-level
I know it is something SEOmoz is seriously thinking about (probably we have the same bird as a source)
More than about pricing, I think they are reflecting about the impact of more campaign per Pro subscriber on a general performance basis.
And, this time I can cite the source (Rand himself in a previous post), I know they are thinking on the possibility to expand the keywords that you can track in the Web App as basic Pro Member.
DIsclaimer: these are all my hipothesis and I am not reporting any real SEOmoz decision.
Big Thumbs Up ElJauno for linking to our new help forums! And thanks for the feedback and suggestion.
Amazing job on the marketing front - the traffic and customer growth is really really impressive (and encouraging if you're selling SEO services :)) - congrats!
Great idea, and I'm looking forward to the resulting further development of the Pro tools.
Although the core tool, OSE, is worth the membership money alone, I find that most of the rest of them seem to act as filler. They have plenty of potential, but as they are they're of very limited or no use...and the way in which one or two are described is quite misleading. Having said that, I know you guys don't have endless resources and OSE must take a ton of work, so no disrespect there...just wish some of the other tools were at the same standard of OSE.
- Jenni
What a deal! You can't beat free with a stick!
Good news for those who are not pro yet!
enjoying the tools and reports, thanks so much, and thanks for the raffle, good luck everyone.
Awesome, thanks Seomozers!
This gave me a kick in the pants to remind me to re-sub again with a 1 year pro membership - I miss my stats :)
is it christmas morning?
Thanks!
Are we going to be able to link to this using our affiliate program?
Aka: give me the money ;)
Sure, if SEOmoz is going to have an affiliate program, then offer a FREE program outside of that, how can we compete? Or how could that not be the best way to entice people to try SEOmoz, so why disallow your entire affiliate staff to not participate?
I have been, and will promote SEOmoz with or without the incentive, but being that it is there, we should be able to take full advantage of all offers.
I'm joking :) I'm affiliate too.
Edit. Deleted phrase for duplicated publication (ah! Chrome ;) )
Hey Richard! We got ya covered, I WILL be adding a free trial offer to affiliates in our affiliate program soon enough! We prioritized shipping the free trial, but this month or early next I will be uploading a new offer, new creatives, and a new payout (yet to be finalized) for every free trial signup an affiliate helps introduce to SEOmoz PRO :)
You make a great point, and we are on it!
Thank you : )
But when the headline is the question "Did SEOmoz PRO Just Become Free?" and the article answers with
"Yes. Yes it did."
That is deliberately misleading and, in my opinion, dishonest.
If it said "SEOmoz PRO is free for the first month and there is also a 1 in 10,000 chance that you might get it free for life" then we have some honesty.
Hey there! You have a good point and we're most definitely not trying to deceive anyone. :) We were just trying to have a little fun and get a little "mozzy" with that intro. That said, I changed the first paragraph to make clear that it's only free for 30 days. We definitely don't want confusion on that front.
Thanks!
Nice one.
This is one of the many reasons you rock Jennita
I wish I could give you 10 thumbs up for your response Jen. You are the total queen of TAGFEE
I completely agree with you buono. The only surprising thing about this post is that SeoMoz were not already letting people test the service free before commiting to pro membership.
It's more than slightly irritating that even the most dissapointing and misleading posts are met with such hyperbolic enthusiasm by so many members. It sometimes feels that if Rand announced he had ran over his dog, there would be blog comments praising him for his "awesome driving skills, Rand!!!".
Rand, in future I suggest you send these messages in an email marketing campaign to lapsed members and registered users who haven't yet signed up for pro membership. I also suggest that when doing so, you try to avoid using such misleading statements as "FREE SeoMoz membership!" when you actually just mean a free 30 day trial.
Is the statement literally false? no. Is it deliberalitely misleading and patronising? yes.
Aside from some of the wording come on this post isn't that bad.. It is giving every one a shot at testing some of the top SEO tools in the world for 30 days.
I mean look at example 3 they have even used a competitors website hehe =)
Dan
I'm in agreement with you here. I realise that's I'm risking a few thumbs down by voicing an opinion that's at odds with the majority of the community, or at least the majority of the commenting members.
My first thought when I read the headline was "I hope it isn't, I pay for this'. After realising it was a trial, I was obviously placated; but then had the same thought as you did, namely 'why don't they do this anyway'? I understand the need to attract new paying members. I also understand that this message is largely aimed at the non-pro users, who are the vast majority (97.3% according to Jennita's 'State of The Community' post). But this does impact current pro members. What happens to the response time for Q&A when 200,000 trial members start asking questions for example?
Lastly, in regard to entering the pro members into the draw. Perhaps it would have been nice to offer 3 pro-members a prize instead of one, or at least guarantee to give one pro member the prize alongside a free member.
Just my thoughts. I shall brace myself for the thumbs down for daring to swim against the tide.
(Sorry about the paragraph size, I can't get it to format!)
Hi,
i hear you and I cannot deny that i had same thoughts you had... Q&A overload for the staff and associates, crawling time for the Web App...
But then I started to think about the strategy SEOmoz probably is following and its tactics.
So, on a more pure business view, it seems as a way to "indirectly" say: "If Venture Capitals don't come to us, we will be our own Venture Capital"... and, from a romantic & idealistic independence perspective, I like it.
*even though, somehow, the total number Q&As could diminish... now they are at least 2*7,500= 15,000/months (not all subscribers use them). In the future they are going to be 1 "private" Q&A. ProMembers and the others will be answered by the Community; that means that this Trial campaign should have to double the number of the Pro Subscriber to have the same Q&As as today.
@richdan, chill out. Every company should promote their business. It's all a matter of perspective. Did you really think for 1 second Rand was going to 'give' away SeoMoz for free to everyone in the world? Let's say he did. Wouldn't all the ProMembers just sign up for a new account and save the monthly subscription? How would the staff get paid, donations? Try out the webapp rankings report. That's my favorite one. 2nd is OSE. Those two alone are worth 'paying' the monthly subscription.
Thanks for the advice Francisco. I am feeling perfectly chilled thanks
Of course, every company should promote their business. Did I say SeoMoz shouldn't?
I didn't think for a moment SeoMoz would be giving away free membership. However promoting your business using cheap and misleading stunts is perhaps not the smartest way to go.
Yes, SeoMoz may make a few extra bucks in the short term but using this type of language as a regular marketing tactic will destroy all of the reputation and goodwill Rand has built up. It's the kind of thing you would do if you were planning to sell the company for the highest price and needed to ramp up your figures quickly at any cost. Unless Rand is looking for an imminent exit strategy, he really should know better.
Hello richdan!
Just to clarify, we actually do give customers the opportunity to try it out free before commiting! We had and still have a 30-Day Money Back Guarantee: if, in the first 30 days of membership, there's any reason that PRO isn't working out for someone, we give a full refund - no questions asked. All a customer needs to do is cancel within 30 days of starting and email us to let us know they want a refund (a customer can do that at [email protected]). We at the SEOmoz Help Team just wanted to make sure you knew that this was an option before and will continue to be in the future - we don't want anyone locked into paying for something that doesn't fit their needs. That's why we created the free trial! Let me know if you have any questions about anything. Have a great day!
that was one small bug-bear with me too, seomoz has always had a "Try it Free" deal, but you have to pay upfront then claim the money back...which im not keen on and never took up..
but i found a banner ad on searchengineland, i think, which too my surprise actually was completely free! 8 days into Pro, and I dont wanna leave!
If I win free lifetime membership, (pah! i should be so lucky), I would set seomoz as my Homepage!
Great deal SEOmoz! Love the call for new peeps while still sharing the love with the already loyal fans! Can't wait to see how things progress over time.
Wow! Great! Amazing!
I wanted to try for those 30 days, but I don't have a creditcard! Damn... Anyway, I've tweeted the message so hopefully I will win the free membership for a lifetime with that, so I can use all those nice tools!
Keep up the good work people!