5 Reasons to Sell Some of Your Content

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?