Build a free application that draws people in to the site. Not necessarily like the freemium model, just offer something cool for free. Either give away great

Build a free application that draws people in to the site. Not necessarily like the freemium model, just offer something cool for free. Either give away great software, or become an authoritative source of data, or both. This worked amazingly well for me with my fantasy football website. I made software to let people do free mock drafts. Over the last five years it's grown substantially with virtually zero advertising. I then sell premium fantasy football software to those visitors. Also, I aggregate data and have become a reliable source that people link to. Building the free app and becoming a source of data has led to my site becoming the #1 result in Google for just about any search term that I care about. It's sort of a twist on the freemium model. The conversion rate is very low, but the customer acquisition cost is virtually zero, so it is still profitable.