Should you offer to remove branding as a paid feature?
I'd love some advice from you fellow makers!
I've recently launched Cove and have purposefully left in a "Powered by Cove" message whenever Cove-powered comments are shown on a site. You can see this in action on the demo site.
I did this as a marketing tool; it's a very simple way to passively get more people to know about the product. I've had a similar link on Subsail's hosted pages and have had no complaints during the past three years.
Today I have had a trialling user say they will not use (i.e. pay for) Cove unless they can remove this message. I replied saying that for now I have no plans to offer a setting to remove the marketing message. Their opinion is that as soon as you start charging for a service, you have to offer this feature. For me, this kind of setting is like any other feature of the product and totally the choice of the maker.
Having this interaction, I'm now having second thoughts about my stance and would love some input! I'm aware I could be totally wrong about this and just being stubborn 😅
Do you have "Powered by X" messages? Do you have an option to remove them? Should I offer paying customers the option to remove the message? Should I be allowed to keep the message for all customers?
Thanks a lot! All feedback is much appreciated ❤️
It sounds like you're open to the possibility of removing the links, but you're not excited about it. I'd like to propose that you're not planning on charging enough.
It's great that you're getting some perceived marketing value from those links, but there is no shortage of marketing channels in the world. What would it cost for you to get similar results using, say, paid ads? Hypothetically, if this customer is willing to pay you 5x that figure to disable your links, then it's an easy decision to take that extra money and invest it.
If it's too early to know what that figure is, then you can plan to run a few experiments, and build that extra cost into your cost estimates. Plus there's the cost of your time spent developing this feature. So, aim high with this number.
It's better to ask for too much money and let the customer say no, than for you to say no to the customer. In both cases, you wind up back where you started, but in the first case you've at least learned something! Plus, in the first case you might get a yes, which is a good thing as long as you've charged enough.
Thanks for your feedback Matt!
For me, these links are more like referrals and word-of-mouth, which should bring in much better traffic than ads. They are right next to the product in use. I currently don't have an ad budget, which is why I had originally planned to leave these links in.
I may have an option to remove branding on my Pro plan, which is 2.5x more than my standard plan ($25 and $10).
I run a website monitoring service, and one of the features I offer is status pages. While I thought about including the "Powered by X" link on status pages, I chose a slightly different approach. On the status page, where the uptime percentage for the website is displayed, I link to the calculator (hosted on my site) that shows how much downtime corresponds to that percentage. Here's the example (see underlined links): https://www.hexadecimalstatus.com
By doing that, I provide value to the visitor/website operator (as it is hard to wrap your head around the uptime percentage alone), and still get some benefit of the "Powered by X" type link. I doubt that someone will complain about this kind of setup.
PSA: "Powered by X" type links might trigger a manual penalty from some search engines ("unnatural links" is the term-of-art). While a lot of websites get away with it and use these (dofollow) backlinks for the SEO benefit, tread carefully.
Interesting tactic! A clever idea to drive extra traffic.
I've been reading about these links and SEO but keep seeing different opinions about their effect. I'm not 100% sure what to think about the pros and cons for me as the service.
They aren't paying for anything, so you don't owe them anything. Having the branding will increase the size of your funnel so you can potentially get thousands of new customers, which will make one user's opinion insignificant.
I would recommend against doing that.
This is what I've been thinking. I think the trade-off of losing some potential customers in return for Cove being visible on thousands of pages across the web (2,500+ at the moment) is worth it.