Blog Subscriptions And Special Insider Reports
Blog Subscriptions and Special Insider Reports
Most people are willing to pay for information they find valuable. They buy newspapers, magazines, and books, so why wouldnt they pay for your information? The first reason is that you are giving it away for free. While some readers will voluntarily make a donation to keep you warmed and fed, the vast majority will not.
But if the information you provide is valuable, especially if it is of a financial nature, you may consider holding some back, offering special insider or in-depth coverage for those who wish to learn more.
One way to do so is to set up a special, secure website to archive your individual special reports. When readers send you a subscription payment, you email them a password that will expire after a certain period of time. A good example of this is George Ures Urban Survival, a blog dedicated to unusual and unorthodox economic trends. Ure publishes a special weekly report, known as Peoplenomics, which lays out a weekly examination of one or more issues discussed in Urban Survival during the week. Back issues are cataloged on the site, so any subscriber has the right to go back into prior years, even when such reports are outside the bounds of their subscription period. When readers passwords expire, they are simply removed from the master database. Setting up and maintaining a separate list of passwords will not take a lot of time until you have dozens of subscribers. By that time, your revenue will certainly cover one of the many commercial database management tools on the market.
The second way is to provide the reports through an autoresponder or via email. With email, you simply create a list of email addresses and send your reports to them as they are written. While this is easier at first than establishing a completely separate site, eventually your readers are going to request back issues or are going to lose emails, necessitating you spend a lot of time re-sending information This manual process, if established, ought to be quickly transferred over to a dedicated site. Its a good beginning, however, if youre just testing the market to see how your readers respond to the offer.
There are two caveats to consider, however, before offering special reports and information. The first is that the commitment you are making must be kept, even if you have only one subscriber (and you will, at some point, only have one). You must decide if the extra time and effort to make a special weekly report is worthwhile. That subscriber is entrusting you with his money and expects that you will keep your end of the bargain by fulfilling your promises. Theres no easier way to alienate your most faithful readers than by not giving them what they pay for.
Other than the time you spend providing the information, the most important consideration is whether the content is really valuable enough to demand a subscription. If you have proven and useful insight thats worth paying for, giving your readers access to it can be a paying proposition. If you give the same information away on your blog two weeks later, or if your insider information is readily available elsewhere, your reader will rightly conclude that you have tricked them.
Remember, the long-term success of your Blog Empire relies on your integrity. Keeping your promises, especially when they are directly tied to a financial contribution on the part of your readers, can make or break your reputation and your bank account.
Blog Traffic Exchanges
Blog Traffic Exchanges
How would you like to have hundreds, even thousands, of visitors to your site, each of whom is guaranteed to spend 20 or 30 seconds looking over your content? Would you like them to review your blog? Rate your blog? How about if they voted for your blog in a head-to-head competition with the blogs of others? If it sounds great, thats because it is.
Blog traffic exchanges are sites that guarantee visitors will visit your blog and spend a pre-determined amount of time there. But theres a price: for each visitor that views your blog, you have to view the blog of another in the same manner.
Heres how it works. When you register your blog on a traffic exchange, you create an account specific to your blog. You earn credits to your account by visiting the sites of others, which are displayed inside a frame with a timer that measures how long you must remain at that site. After an amount of time determined by the site, you enter a code into the frame (this ensures that individuals are actually at their computers) and move to the next site. For each site you visit, you receive credit which is spent by your blog being viewed by others. The more blogs you visit, the more visitors you will receive in return.
Most traffic exchanges do not give 1-for-1 credits, meaning youll have to visit more than 10 blogs to receive 10 visitors. In fact, the ratio is usually only a half-credit per visit, meaning youll visit 20 sites to receive those visitors, but free, bonus, or mystery credits may be awarded randomly to keep your ratio a little better than one visitor for two visits. The excess credits are generally sold by the traffic exchanges to advertisers who pay for visitors and save themselves the time of waiting at the various sites.
Youll get traffic in proportion to how much time you spend surfing (and dont tell anyone, but you can often have separate browsers open to separate traffic exchanges for simultaneous surfing), but its important to realize what kind of traffic youre receiving. To learn the thoughts of your visitors, take a look inside your own head: youre visiting, not to read the blogs, but to get visitors in return…and so it everyone else. Does that mean the traffic is worthless? Not at all. When you look at hundreds of blogs, youll find a lot of them with features worth emulating and content worth a link or two. Youll also receive visitors who are looking for the kind of content you present. Like-minded and even opposite-minded readers will leave comments, link to you, and may eventually become regular readers. However, its important to understand that the vast majority are only visiting to get visitors in return and are probably filing their nails while they wait for the allotted time to expire. Then they move on to the next blog.
If you lack the time to sit at your PC manually generating traffic, many traffic exchanges will sell you their surplus visitors for as little as a penny apiece. Five bucks will earn you 500 visitors, a fair price since those visitors are in no way targeted to your content; they are bloggers who are trying to earn your visit in return. You can also purchase banners on many traffic exchanges, which will give you fewer visitors (they are sold by impressions, not clicks) but they will be more interested visitors.
Many traffic exchanges, like the blog directories and blog rings discussed below, will require you to place a small banner on your site, which may limit the number of traffic exchanges you join unless you have room on your page for 15 or 20 tiny banners all in a pile.
One final note: before you join a traffic exchange, try to get a feel for how established it is, i.e. how many blogs it features. A brand new traffic exchange may only have a few dozen blogs. That means not only will you to look at the same 20 blogs over and over, youll have the same 20 bloggers visiting you. Unique traffic is valuable traffic, so stick with those traffic exchanges that can deliver hundreds of unique hits to your blog.
Here are a few of the more popular traffic exchanges:
Blog-a-Zoo
BlogXchange
Blog Clicker
Blog Explosion
Blog Soldiers