What is the best way to attract new customers into your fold? It can be a challenge convincing customers to open up their wallets, so one of the most effective strategies to employ is to give it away for free. This has quickly become one of the most popular business models in the last couple of years.

If Facebook or Twitter charged for the basic service, neither site would have become anywhere near as big as they are today. In like manner, can you imagine if you had to pay for YouTube or Gmail? It would be much more difficult for those sites to get to their current level of popularity.

Going forward, more and more businesses are adopting a similar model, looking for monetization and revenue for alternate sources. Even where the conventional model still applies, companies are using free giveaways as a great marketing tactic. You can download Peggle Nights for free from Popcap Games if you sign up for an account. From there, you might be swayed to purchase more games from Popcap. Similarly, classic Command & Conquer games are now available as a free download. The hope is that you will buy the new game when it comes out.

Going to the mobile platform, the same is holding true too. The most popular apps on the iPhone are the free ones. For a mobile coupon app, the download for the consumer is free; the revenue comes by charging the advertisers to host their coupons in the app. By making the app free, more people are likely to download and try it.

Have you tried using something for free as part of your marketing plans? Did it work?

The great thing about WordPress is that while it makes a fantastic blog platform, it is also versatile enough to tackle other applications as well. There are many people who use WordPress as a content management system (CMS) for a seemingly static website, largely because it is so good at managing all of that content.

For instance, you will notice that my freelance writing site is actually powered by WordPress, even though it is not a blog. I don’t have too many pages on there, so managing the different pages is a relatively straightforward process. However, this isn’t the case if you have a website with lots of pages in a multi-tier hierarchal configuration. How can you better manage those pages?

A simple WordPress plugin has been designed that allows you to easily navigate pages from within the WordPress dashboard system. This plugin will insert a widget in your dashboard that lets you navigate through your pages as if it were a Windows Explorer. This maintains the hierarchal structure, not unlike the folder system you have on your PC.

For more information and to download the free plugin, head on over to the official WordPress plugin directory.

When your name is your brand and you’ve come to be known for one or more specific projects, it can be difficult to reach a little outside of this niche and expand your brand. HGTV is a television channel that focuses on all sorts of home-related matters, from buying houses to renovating them. Peter Fallico is one of the more popular on-screen personalities.

He is the current host of Home to Stay, a television show where a homeowner needs some help with renovations and home decor. They may have lived in their current house for a few years, thinking that they would move on sooner rather than later, but they have later decided to make it a forever home. As such, they turn to Peter and his team to make it a home to stay.

This is the branding that Peter Fallico has attached to his name, so what can he do when he wants to expand this brand? Well, over at HGTV, they are launching a new television show called Home to Flip and, yes, Peter is the host. This plays off the name of his other show and it tackles similar subject matter, but it is an entirely different show.

Rather than renovating a house so the homeowner can live there for years to come, Home to Flip aims to renovate a home so that it can attract the most money on the open market. This is a different mentality, but Peter Fallico and his team can still capitalize on their existing skillset.

If you have a business of your own and you’re looking to expand, consider how you can take advantage of your current branding and expertise.

Being able to play your range of media files on your television can be a very liberating experience, especially since so many of us consume our content through digital downloads these days. You don’t need to have a DVD, because you can just have a movie file on a USB flash drive.

Catering to this market are a new generation of media players that connect directly to your HDTV, but many of these are $100 or more. While Western Digital already has the WD TV and WD TV Live, the hard drive manufacturer is also looking at the more entry-level end of the market with the Western Digital WD TV Mini Media Player. As you can imagine, this is smaller and cheaper.

There are some features missing from the WD TV Mini, but it still has the main function of playing a wide range of video, music, and picture files on your HDTV. There is only one USB port and it does not have the Internet connectivity of the WD TV Live, but the WD TV Mini is still a solid choice for people who want to share video files simply and easily.

For more information and to purchase, direct your browsers over to Amazon.ca where the WD TV Mini is currently listed at just $70.10 with free shipping. That represents a 42% savings over the regular price.

Every week, we take a look at the one of many satisfied BlueFur customers, giving them an opportunity to shine (and hopefully get some more traffic too). Today, we turn our attention over to Allan Schroeder of Allan Schroeder Photography. He is an award-winning photographer who specializes in commercial, editorial, and destination photography.

It’s not like he’s sticking to his own backyard for some of his best shots either. If you go through the portfolio on his website, you’ll find that he has produced stunning images from five different continents around the world. His images have been featured in such places as National Post, Time Magazine, Architectural Digest, and The Vancouver Sun.

He also happens to be very active in the social media sphere as well. You may or may not already be familiar with the Allan Schroeder name, but you may know him on Twitter as @IcemanYVR. He is indeed a Vancouverite at heart, but Allan can be found traveling all around the world as well. Naturally, his camera is always close at hand.

If you are a BlueFur customer and would like to be featured in a future blog post, send an email to blogfeature@bluefur.com with your name, website, and a brief description of what you’d like to see highlighted.

Combining many of the strengths of a magazine-style layout with a traditional blog-style layout is the Light Folio Theme for WordPress. This free download is a great match for many professional blogs and sites focusing on niche products.

Above the fold, you get a dynamic scrolling feature image that swipes across horizontally every few seconds. Next to it is an accompanying text box that swipes vertically to match with the feature image, ensuring that the picture suits the text.

Underneath this are three boxes for three more featured articles, including thumbnail images and post excerpts. And then below that is space for a more traditional reverse chronological blog layout, featuring post excerpts and thumbnails as well.

Other highlights include the metallic grey color scheme, a theme option panel, easy logo change utility, Gravatar support, a widget-ready design, and the separation of trackbacks from comments.

For more information on Light Folio Theme, check out DynamicWP.net. There is also a live demo for you to try.

We’ve reached the end of another work week, so it’s time to take another tour of the blogosphere. Here are some great blog posts to keep you entertained over the weekend.

Ho Yummy takes us on a little culinary adventure. Vancouver is known for having some of the best food on the planet, but you don’t have to go to a fancy restaurant to enjoy it. Something as simple as a viet sub can be incredibly satisfying without breaking the bank. Positively delicious!

Clint Osterholz of All Freelance Writing comes forward with quite the amusing piece on his experience as an entrepreneur. Can you identify with some of these freelance clients he hates? Have you had the talker, the first-timer, the dinosaur, or the mom?

Tyler Cruz makes his living online, so he’s always on the lookout for new money-making opportunities. In one of his most recent posts, he provides an in-depth review of InfoLinks including a full case study. How do you feel about in-text advertising? Has it been successful for your sites?

Scott Young, you could say, is at a crossroads in his life. Seeing how he is able to further his career from just about anywhere on the planet, he is faced with quite the decision. Should he wander the world or build up a home base? There are certainly pros and cons to both approaches, so I think it ultimately comes down to a personal decision specific to the individual.

Justine Ezarik is known for making some funny videos on the Internet and this week is no exception. She takes her skills to spoofing Taylor Swift’s Fairy Tale, writing and performing a song about how today is a “total fail.” She has a “behind the scenes” video to accompany her music video too!

Whether you are new to the business world or you are a veteran of the arena, it is in your best interest to get as many people as possible to know about your company, your products, and what you can do for them. You want them to be actively engaged with your brand, so that they will be more inclined to send business your way.

There are naturally many different strategies that you can employ as part of your marketing strategy. You may take out newspaper ads and Google ads, or maybe you try developing a company blog like this one. Another area that many businesses consider is social media, like Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well as email marketing to a targeting mailing list.

When developing these avenues, it is easy to slip over that fine line between active engagement and spam. You want to reach out to a new audience and get them interested, but at the same time, you don’t want to be perceived as spam. That’s a negative relationship that you definitely do not want to foster. At the same time, you want your brand to be at the forefront.

At what point, in your opinion, does a company Twitter or Facebook account cross over from legitimate branding and marketing into spam territory? How do you decide whether you become a fan of a Facebook page or a follower of a Twitter account?

Want to foster more of a conversation with the readers on your blog? Finding that the comment system is getting overwhelmed and it’s far too hard to follow a discussion? Maybe you want some live feedback from the audience, allowing them to interact with one another in a free and open manner?

It may have been quite some time since you last stepped your virtual foot into a chat room, but you can now integrate the same idea into your WordPress blog with 123 Flash Chat. Rather than directing visitors to a separate site altogether, you can run a full-fledged chat client on your own website. The Internet chat room is back!

There are two main options for using this plug-in. First, you can choose to have a lite chat client embedded into the sidebar on your blog. By using this, readers can continue to chat while reading the different content on your site. Second, you can provide a link to a standard chat client, which would then appear as a pop-up window. For both, you can define the width and height of the client, as well as its skin and language.

More information, including the download link, can be found at 123flashchat.com. Note that there is an attribution link that comes along with this free WordPress plug-in.

More so than ever, the business environment has changed in regards to how companies communicate with their customers. In the past, we would only see commercials on television and press releases blasted out to news outlets. It was a one-way form of communication. As Internet preferences shift, so have the means of communication.

Take this blog, for example. If this was a traditional company website, it would host the company information, the products and services available for sale, and perhaps a contact page of some kind. With the blog, however, readers have the opportunity to leave their mark via the comment form. This creates a conversation rather than a simple soapbox. The same can be said about having Facebook and Twitter pages.

The reward is that customers and consumers can feel more connected to your company, giving a more personal connection that can result in a long-lasting relationship. They get to know the people behind the brand and the reverse is true as well. Fostering these kinds of relationships can be positively critical to your company’s success.

On the downside, there is a significant risk that people may not always have positive things to say. They can have negative feedback and this becomes public in a very immediate way. The key, then, is to address these concerns in as timely a fashion as possible, putting out any fires before they get out of hand. Every company can improve in some way; you just have to listen to your customers.