Just What IS a “Premium Subscriber” ?

Just a quick post explaining exactly what I mean when I refer to “Premium Subscriptions”, “Premium Content”, ect (because I’ve gotten the question more than once).

Simply put, Premium means “paid“. So when I refer to premium subscriptions or premium content, it means that people are paying for it.

At the forums section of GrownUpGeek.com we have a section known as the “private” or “restricted” forums - aka, the Premium Membership forums. To get into the “Restricted Forums” members must do one of the following:

So, Premium Subscribers are simply paying members.

Premium Subscriptions Now Earning 3x More Than Adsense

So far for the month of December, premium subscriptions have earned nearly 3x Adsense and nearly 4x more than Kontera. If I extrapolate the first 13 days of this month at this rate, I will easily break $10,000, with over $6,000 coming from premimum subscriptions. Of course with the holidays coming up, I expect a downturn, but it’s still looking like it will be another very good month. But the worst part about this high income from my premium subscriptions is that it is giving me an anxiety fit!

Why would earning so much from subscriptions cause me stress and anxiety?

One of the problems is that Adsense earnings are low this month. Seeing what has always been my largest source of income drop is a bit unnerving - what would you think if your biggest earner was at an all time (or near-all time) low?

“But you’re making four-times that amount with premium subscriptions, why the stress?” Even though I have made changes in the last two weeks that appear to more than double my daily new-subscriber count, and I’ve been toying with the idea of giving away some great prizes to premium subscribers, like iPods, iPhones, etc - in an attempt to make it worth it to subscribers to continue their subscriptions, and to generate new subscriptions. (I promise, more posts about that in the near future), my fear is that I will not be able to sustain this new subscriber growth or maintain current subscribers. That little voice nagging at the back of my head keeps telling me it just won’t continue. It’s convincing me that subscription earnings will drop, Adsense will continue to drop, and oh, BTW, traffic will drop too. Maybe I’m just a pessimist, and I’m sure that the line of anxiety disorder that runs through my family isnt helping any. But as the reality of quitting the day job gets closer and closer, fear and doubts of failure like this fill my head.

I guess this is as close to a “rant” that I’ll ever have here in the blog.. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I hated writing it.

How To Make Money With Subscriptions

Find the hidden money at your website

Is it possible to make money with subscriptions? Jeremy Schoemaker says that subscriptions are one of the best ways to generate income from a website, and since January of this year GrownUpGeek.com has generated over $16,000 in subscriptions - so the answer is a profound YES!

How I did it:

Back in the days when GrownUpGeek.com was young we had a problem: Members would send us “secret” codes that would allow people to view information on Myspace profiles/pages that were supposed to be private. We would post these codes, but once they were made public they would quickly become obsolete because Myspace would ‘fix’ them. In order to prevent the general public from seeing these codes we created a premium “special” section in our forums. We use these ‘private’ forums to post these codes, and discuss things that we would not allow to be discussed in public. We also assign badges (or bling as we like to call it) to members that get access to these forum areas, so everybody knows who does and does not have access. By creating these premium forum areas and letting everybody know about them we were marketing a product of value - a product that many visitors to the website wanted.

Initially I did not want money for the private forums, I wanted content - So to motivate members to make posts (content) we offered free access to the premium forums if they made several posts. At the same time I offered access to anyone that donated what I felt was the outrageous amount of $20. To my surprise, over 100 members made that $20 donation in the first month - totaling over $2,300.

After the first month or two of allowing donating members access to the premium forums, donations started to taper-off. We were still getting several hundred dollars per month in donations, but nothing like the first month. At this point I learned a few things:

I figured that if i lowered the up-front cost I could get more subscribers - and even if the monthly payment was lower the fact that income was passively generated each month had the potential for even greater earnings.

When I first implemented subscriptions for our premium content the first month was $5.99, and $4.99 per month. After only a few weeks and only a few subscribers I could easily see that this was the wrong price-point. I then lowered the monthly fee from $4.99 to $1.99 and marketed it as “less than the price of lunch“, and the number of new subscribers exploded, resulting over $16,000 so far this year.

Currently we have over 1,000 active subscribers, although the number fluctuates. The average subscription length is only 4 months, and this tells me that we need to work harder to add-value for those subscribers. We have added a few things like free email accounts, free blogs, more little “bling” (badges), and relaxed rules for posting in the premium forums - but I am always looking for more. It’s not enough to just start taking someone’s money and forget about them.

To implement subscriptions and premium forums, I’ve used the following Drupal modules: