How To Use The Paid Subscription Model On My Website?

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. If you want to ask a question just send it via the contact form.

Edgar asks:

Can you talk about paid subscriptions? Do you own any membership sites? I had my boxing website for several years with lots of readers, and just now I have decided to convert it to a paid subscription site. I going to charge $5.95 a month and wanted any tips you suggestions before I go live.

I do own a couple of membership sites, but they don’t use a monthly subscription model. Instead they have a fixed fee that members must pay to join, and after that they receive lifetime access to all the content. I’ll explain why I use this model below.

First of all I don’t like the idea of putting a whole website behind a pay wall. For example, I could make all the content on Daily Blog Tips private, and charge $2 monthly for people who wanted to access it. I don’t like this model first and foremost because it makes the website less useful and lot more selfish. Sharing what you know free of charge is a great thing to do, and if other people didn’t do this extensively in the past we wouldn’t have the open source movement of the Internet as we know it. Even if you are just concerned with your own gains, though, putting the whole website behind a pay wall is probably not the wisest of the business models. Giving away free content and information allows you to attract search engine traffic and readers, which you’ll be able to leverage to launch other products/projects.

A more viable model is to have a lot of content freely available, and then to launch a premium section of your website where readers need to pay to get access. In order to make this model work you need to ensure you have a big enough audience before launching your premium section (e.g., 100,000 monthly uniques or 10,000 subscribers), and you also need to make sure your audience will get value from your premium section. One way to do this is to create a learning environment. If you have a photography blog, for example, you could launch a premium section with advanced tutorials, or even with a complete photography course.

For content based membership sites, however, I don’t think the monthly subscription model is optimal. You could make it work by keeping the site updated with new content every month, but that takes a heck lot of work, and the value that members get will diminish over time anyway. A better model in my opinion is to charge a one-time fee (breaking it up in small installments if you want).

If you want a real subscription model (i.e., one where your clients keep paying you month after month), you need to have a slightly different approach. You can make it based on content, but your content must be time-relevant. That is, your members must gain benefit from accessing your content exactly on the time you release it, and after a while (days or weeks) the content loses its value. One example of this model are stock alerts. There are many websites where you can subscribe to receive daily or weekly alerts about what stocks you should buy and/or sell. This type of content works perfectly with a subscription model because the member has the incentive to keep paying month after month, as long as the alerts are actually helping him make money.

Another way to structure a real subscription based website is to offer a service. Email marketing providers, for example, charge a monthly subscription because you use their services on a ongoing basis.

So yeah I think subscription based business models are solid, but you need to have the right product/service and the right structure in place to pull it off.

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Are Trackbaks and Pingbacks Still Useful?

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. If you want to ask a question just send it via the contact form.

Michelle asks:

Should I approve trackbacks and pingbacks? Do allowing trackbacks and pingbacks help SEO or add value to my blog/website?

Trackbacks and pingbacks were very popular some years ago, but lately fewer and fewer blogs are using them, so I suspect some of our readers don’t even know what those terms mean. They are pretty much interchangeable, and refer to a network ping that your blogging platform (e.g., WordPress or Blogger) will send to other blogs whenever you link to them. Once the other blog receives the ping it will create a link to your post on the comment section (or on a special “Trackbaks” section).

The purpose of having trackbacks and pingbacks is to foster conversations among bloggers. By inter-linking the posts that are referencing each other it becomes easier to follow the different opinions and takes on specific issues.

Initially it worked fine, and I had listed trackbacks on this blog for a long time. A couple of years ago, however, content scrapers and spammers discovered that trackbacks could be used to build backlinks. That is, they would write a post linking to hundreds of other posts around the blogosphere, and would receive a backlink from the trackback generated on each of those blogs (most links were nofollowed, but this didn’t seem to act as a deterrent).

The result was a lot of spam coming via trackbacks, and moderating it became a pain. That is why I decided to remove them from all my blogs, and most people did the same. You can still find some sites with trackbaks (sometimes called “Who’s linking here”), but they are definitely the minority.

Answering the original question now: I think having trackbacks and pingbacks does add value to your visitors, but most of that value is lost if most of your trackbacks are coming from spam and scraper sites. Given that this is probably what’s going to happen today, I would simply turn them off.

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When Should I Quit My Job To Work Full Time Online?

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. If you want to ask a question just send it via the contact form.

Sharninder Khera asks:

I have a tech tutorials blog and would want to make working on it my full time job. My question is when (and how) should I decide to do this? The blog makes me about 1/12th of my income right now, so what should be the level when I decide that I should leave my current job and work on the blog only and grow that?

Interesting question, and one that I think many people share.

The answer depends on your current situation. If you are young (e.g., up to 30 years old) and don’t have many financial responsibilities (e.g., no wife, no kids, no mortgages) then you could consider switching as soon as your website starts making half of your current income. Perhaps even less if you already know the ropes of Internet marketing and know your site has potential.

When I quit my full time job I was 22, and my sites were making only 10% of my salary, but I was completely sure the income would grow if I started putting more work on them. And in fact within the first year my sites were already making more than what I earned with my previous job.

If you have a wife, kids and other financial responsibilities, however, the picture changes. In this case I would recommend to wait until your website is making close to what you make with your regular job. On top of that I would also encourage you to diversify your income sources on the web.

For example, consider launching a new website on a different niche and with a different business model, or launch an email list and promote affiliate offers to your subscribers. Making money from a single website is a risky situation because things change very fast on the Internet. One day your traffic is booming, the other it might be gone.

Finally, it’s also a good idea to create a financial cushion before you make the switch. That is, save money to cover around one year of your expenses, so even if things go really wrong you’ll have one year to figure it out.

What about you guys, how much were you making when you jumped to work full time on the Internet (or how much are you planning to if you still need to do it)?

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How Many Backlinks Do I Need for a PageRank 2?

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. If you want to ask a question just send it via the contact form.

OneBlogTips asks:

How many backlinks should I get per day if i want to get PR2 in next PageRank update (approximately 3 months)?

It always amazes me the amount of interest and confusion that Google’s PageRank (both the algorithm and the toolbar number) attracts from webmasters.

The confusion in this question comes from the assumption that all backlinks are equally considered by Google. If this was the case then indeed it would be possible to quantify how many backlinks you need to obtain a (nominal or real) PR1, a PR2, a PR3 and so on.

However, this is not how the PageRank algorithm works.

Suppose there is a link from page A to page B. The amount of “PageRank value” (also called link juice) that this link will pass depends on the PageRank of page A (i.e., the total value coming from the links pointing to page A), divided by the number of outgoing links on Page A.

As you can see, the total number of backlinks your site has only tells half of the story. The PageRank it will have will depend, in turn, on the PageRank of each page that is linking to you (and on the number of outgoing links on each of those pages).

In practical terms this means that getting a few backlinks from very authoritative sites will improve your PageRank much faster then getting hundreds of backlinks from low quality sites.

In fact I have experiences with both situations. I had some sites that I just promoted with links from low quality web directories, and despite having hundreds of backlinks some of these sites never got a PR1. On the other hand I also had a website that had only 10 backlinks and got a PR3 on an update. That’s because one of those links was coming from TechCrunch.

Moral of the story: focus on getting high quality backlinks.

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When Choosing a Domain Name, Think About the Future

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. If you want to ask a question just send it via the contact form.

Kaitlin asks:

I thought of a great blog name, but the .com is already taken by a pizza business. For clarity’s sake, let’s say the domain is BigSlice.com, and I want to start a blog that has nothing to do with pizza (a lifestyle blog) that’s called “Big Slice.” My question is: Would you ever buy a domain like BigSliceBlog.com if BigSlice.com isn’t available, or would you give up on the name?

The answer is no. I probably wouldn’t buy a domain like BigSliceBlog.com for one single reason: it limits the scope of what you can do with that site, and it also limits how far and wide you can expand it in the future.

Let me illustrate this point with a different example. Suppose you want to start a blog about funny and humorous T-shirts. You decide you want to call it “T-shirt Spot”. That domain, however, is already taken, so you end up going with TshirtSpotBlog.com. Fast forward a couple of years and your blog is really popular, and every time you write about a specific T-shirt a lot of people end up buying it.

You figure it would be a good idea to transform the blog into an online store to sell the T-shirts, moving the blog itself to a sub-folder (e.g., domain.com/blog). It’s a great idea indeed, but you would have some problems branding the store because your domain is TshirtSpotBlog.com. In other words, you got trapped by your domain, which is limiting the scope of your site. Had you decided to use something more generic like TshirtSpot.com, you would now be able to expand the site in any direction.

If the domain you want is already registered, therefore, keep looking until you find something you are really happy with, because the domain is one of the few factors you won’t be able to change on your website.

Finally, remember that it’s also possible to buy registered domain names. You just need to contact the current owner and make an offer. Sometimes with as few as $200 you can buy great domain names, and this will be one of the best investments you can make.

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