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.
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