5 Reasons to Sell Some of Your Content
Posted on October 26, 2007 by
Adie 
General 
7 Comments
I want to start a new income stream. I’m choosing between a paid content site and PPC affiliate marketing. I’ve been thinking a lot about the paid content business model. It seems like a good idea. Now I don’t plan on charging for all my content. I would still produce quality free content to draw readers in and build my brand. But here are a couple reasons why I think you should sell some of your content.
Make more money. You’re reading this blog because you want to make more money. It’s called Net Business Blog not Net Hobby Blog. And if you’re building a business, you need to sell something. Some of you are saying, “I sell advertising.” That’s fine and you should continue selling ads. But if you sell some of your content, you’ll make more money.
Raise your perceived value. Perception is reality. If you’re selling a quality product, you automatically look more credible. You look like an expert. You look like you know what you’re talking about. You look like an online business rather than a hobby site. And people are more likely to buy from an online business rather than a hobby site. Why? Because they’re used to buying from businesses and getting free content from hobby sites.
Marketers have done tests where they raise the price of a product and the sales increase. Think about that. Some people will not give you money unless you raise the price! So if you only have free content, you are leaving a lot of money on the table ;) Now you may not like what I’m saying, but it’s probably because you’ve been hanging out with people who only want free stuff. The general public that surfs the web has credit cards and likes to use them.
Also, you’ll get more quality traffic. Wouldn’t you rather visit a site where the webmaster has published a book, ebook, or DVD over a webmaster who only has a free blog?
The big players are doing it. SEO Book sells an ebook. SEOMoz sells premium membership content. SEO Black Hat sells private forum access. Seth Godin sells small conferences and physical books (check out his sidebar). These are popular blogs that sell some of their content. Some of you may be saying, “But I have a news site. You can’t sell news.” I point you to ESPN. ESPN is sports news site in the top 100 of Alexa. It gets a ton of traffic. Yet ESPN sells content.
I think the paid content model is the future. More people will get on the web. The web will become a bigger part of their lives. More people will build websites. The web will become “noiser” as these websites get built. As these things happen, internet users will want to pay for content just like they pay for hardcopy magazines. Don’t get left out. Be an early adopter. Right now, there is a small group of webmasters you don’t know about who have paid membership sites. You don’t know about them because they have relatively low traffic. However, they make great money because they extract a lot more profit from each visitor than free content webmasters.
More profit per visitor. The less number of visitors, the less headache and work. You don’t have to keep trying to get massive amounts of traffic. You just need the right kind of traffic even if your traffic volume is relatively low. There’s a lot of talk about being more efficient in business. I can’t think of anything that increases efficiency as much as increasing your earnings per visitor.
Finally, people don’t like to be sold but they like to shop. If you create quality content that meets a need and you market it well, you can sell it and make money. It’s that simple. It’s how good business has been done for years.
Is it harder to execute the paid content model over the free content model? Yes. But mostly because of the paradigm shift many of us have to make. We’ve been web users and the web has been 99% free. But you don’t have to follow the crowd.
Yes, it takes more effort to separate your content into free content and paid content, but think of the monetary rewards. You can spend a little bit of effort creating a paid content section for your site. This effort will lead to much higher profits than if you only have free content. Also, stick to one site and you won’t get overwhelmed.
What do you think of the paid content model?
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While the paid content model is certainly a more sustainable source of income than what you have to deal with when you offer content for free, I’m not sure the paradigm shift is as close as you predict though.
The New York Times for instance recently abandoned the paid content model, presumably because they see a greater revenue potential in the free for all model.
You bring up good points however, and I have to admit that I’ve been toying with the idea of starting something based on the paid content model. I don’t have any experience with it, but I do believe there’s great revenue potential for it, especially for small publishers.
I have heard of the New York Times example. I’m not sure why they abandoned the paid content model, but it could be harder to charge for content when your niche is really broad.
In this day and age you could probably take your top 20 or so posts - rewrite them and update them a bit - put them together in an e-book format and sell it for $15 a pop.
Nice example. Formatting and being up to date is crucial when selling content.
[...] 5 Reasons to Sell Some of Your Content [...]
RE: the NY Times I think you’re right in that paid content works better in a narrow niche or there is some real value being added to the content, such as along the Teaching Sells approach. One could take the best 10 articles from the Times archive on a specific topic, summarize those so that it’s easily understandable, then link back to the full articles in Times. Most people just get lost with big archives and don’t know how to filter. Performing the filtering role has value.
I don’t think paid content in the ESPN sense is really future - it’s more like the past. Ebooks and such are around to stay, but no one wants to pay to read web pages. Free content plus advertising wins vs paid content, any day of the week. It will continue to do so for as long as advertisers are shelling out the bucks.