Just Business notes (to self)
A client sent me an e-card, and when I clicked through to the website, what I looked at wasn’t the flash-based animation cards, but the structure of the business.
[/style] One thing led to another, and I clicked over to a different site, gladly, this one has an Austin P.O. Box, and again, I hit a point in the site with “stuff for sale.” Since it’s a graphically heavy site, I can easily understand the cost of bandwidth.
Which turned my attention away from the site and towards the payment gateway as well as its structure.
Again, I looked at various points, and this brings me back to properly monetizing what I’ve got. Content in the subscription section is the updated scopes with no advertising whatsoever. Then there’s also the weekly audio, now video, “podcast,” if you will, and I won’t.
So that’s a Monday and Thursday update, twice a week, audio/video, as well as the extended text, plus answers to questions in e-mail, for the subscribers.
What I toyed with, as an idea, and following Apple’s lead on this, was switching it up to a weekly fee, of say, 99 cents.
It’s an idea with some merit, but the way I see it, and the way I tend to work, in as much as I understand my own process, I figure that at least once in a 30-day period, I’ll post a scope that is so far off the mark, so removed from consensual reality, possibly even offensive to the subscriber, that the weekly fee doesn’t work. Taken as a whole, week-in and week-out, the overall tenor of it works, it’s just that I’ll sometimes miss the mark. By a long shot. Like, not even in the ball park, to dredge up some sports metaphors.
Not that it ever bothers me, either. if I was 100% right all the time, I’d scare me.
A note cycled through Monday morning, and it got me thinking. The note was from the developer of the software I use for the back-end of this web log, . I can’t speak highly enough of the product, love it, use it, like the development process. I’m not too worried about the change in licensing that the company is doing, either. Makes sense. Got me thinking, though, though, a yearly license for here? That’s what the monthly fee is. works out to costing less than $36 per annum.
Perks? I got ’em. Weekly audio and video. Not much in advertising – at all. Again, a cool deal. I thought about running the current scopes out to the free side again, since that seems to work for some. But I’ve had such hit-and-miss luck with advertising revenue, it’s not worth it. Plus, that audio is starting to eat into the bandwidth. Which is a cost factor. And video, too, that’s a big bandwidth burner, as well.
Changes for the foreseeable future? Trying to figure out how to make the video longer and better while making it shorter and smaller. But that’s a perk saved for the paying customer.
Bigger push for subscription services as those have ramped up some.
The other item that caught my attention over the last year? Price point.
People in California are more willing to pay, and pay more, for what they get here. Means it has added value for those folks who are more astrologically aware, I’m guessing.
I cruised around on a couple of free astrology sights, and I was appalled at the lack of good, current information. I’m not talking about material that is out-of-date for a day, or week, or anything like that, I was seeing material that was dated from years ago.
My internal critic has reminded me that I mis-read the ephemeris one time, and I posted the various moments of retrograde planets off by a day or two. Insistent fact-checkers questioned this, but so far, it’s only really happened once, and I do tend to use three sources for planet data. None of which seems to agree about the minute, but then, who said this was a precise science?
