This blog post is important and contains timely information which may not be available at a later date -- see below. You might want to read it from start to finish in one sitting. If you need to, save it for reading later when you can focus.
This is the first in a two-part series on how to earn income in a world where information is flowing faster.
In a world with an over-abundance of free information, there are a few ways of exploring how information is priced.
The most obvious is to create a package of information in a curated way, so as to produce a enough value that trading money for the information is seen in the mind of your customer as beneficial.
For example: you could create a business e-book which concisely teaches you how to launch and operate a business that returns more value than the price of the e-book.
For those who need it, this decentralizes the cost of production and supports the writer while educating peers.
It's necessary to be clear with the functionality of the product to make the value transfer worthwhile for both parties involved.
You can find anything for free if you search long enough and hard enough for it out on the Internet. The question I ask myself, when I'm investing in informational resources, is: what is the better return on investment?
Just because it's a better deal to live on the outskirts of town doesn't mean that it's going to save you money in the long run. You'll end up paying for a car, driving 45 minutes for groceries, an hour to work, and maybe you'll stay in watching TV at night instead of meeting up with a friend for beer. Oh, and you won't be able to sell your house because no one wants to live so far away from the best coffee shop.
Increasingly the investment in my mind has been focused on flowing information. Solid state packaging (such as e-books) is for timeless content -- which has one value. Another value (in some ways a greater one) is flowing content. This is paying for the immediacy of access.
I've shifted most of the content on this blog to a paid flow in the form of a Letter.ly. This is a big change for me, but one that is already offering many people access to the deeper, intimate, and immediate elements of my work.
You can communicate stronger with a small group of dedicate peers than you can with the open web. This year, I've chosen to shift the focus of my business to a group of highly intelligent and invested people who are willing to go deep.
You can work towards doing this as well, but it's more challenging than it looks...
Finding balance in our lives is a continual tradeoff. We aspire to be as authentic as possible, we want to give away everything. However, we also live in a capitalist society where currency is necessary for continuing the exploration of our worlds.
In order to make a living working on the Internet, you have to give your peers a way to support your work.
Money is kind of like dating. It's awkward -- for most people. But sometimes it's necessary in order to get what you desire in life. You probably never got rejected by that girl you really wanted to date in high school, but you also never asked her out. Now you need a time machine to get back to that perfect moment. Oh well.
I see a lot of people launching Letter.lys now. A few of us demonstrated that we could earn a living wage on a subscription model, and suddenly everyone has a Letter.ly.
I didn't launch my Letter.ly because I saw a lot of other people doing it. Instead, I experimented with the form first by subscribing to a few other Letter.lys myself.
It's important to do market research before embarking on a long-term commitment. Which is what a Letter.ly is, because once you've signed up hundreds of subscribers signed up at $25 a month, you'll need to keep your value level high or your attrition will skyrocket.
I asked myself a few questions, before I jumped into the business model for my writing:
- How did it feel to pay a subscription for information? (The only way to feel this is to subscribe to a few Letter.lys first.)
- How valuable did the information need to be for me to feel like I was getting worth?
- Did the scarcity of this information I was subscribed to accelerate my own personal evolution within the collective? -- When information is only available to a few exclusive people, they learn things the open web won't have access to.
Before I switched, I had to also measure my own self-worth. Did I feel that I had enough to offer readers? It can be paralyzing to price your Letter.ly too high if you feel like you don't invest enough time on research and development for your subscribers.
When you think about it, we'll pay outrageous amounts of money for educational experiences at a university -- where we're learning the same things that have been taught to hordes of students enrolled in the class with, before, and after us.
Once I balanced the price-point against all of those student loans I took out attending NYU, the price-per-month started to look much more acceptable.
I could have gone to community college, but truthfully, would I be here now? The same is true for information on the Net. You can't expect to get the best things for free. Comparatively, we can't be expected to give away our best stuff for free.
This is why I don't give away my best work for free anymore. Maybe you shouldn't either?
I learned a lot about blogging during my year+ building Far Beyond The Stars from zero subscribers to 8,700+ at the height of it's popularity slightly before I pulled the plug in February.
The only other example that I can think of within our blogging circles that grew that quickly is G.A.'s Viperchill (and he writes a marketing blog about marketing!) It's not easy growing an audience of this size.
It's kind of an all-or-nothing game, once you're invested in building an audience.
I know that I could do it again, in a heartbeat. The question is, do I want or need to? Do you want to?
In 2011, subscriber stats matter less. Our audiences are on mobile devices, flowing through Twitter, saving to Readability and flipping through Flipboard on the iPad. These are major changes in reader involvement.
I'm always suspicious of Feedburner subscriber counters as measurements for reader involvement. Over long periods of time, it's pretty easy to scoop up a large amount of people. If you've been blogging since 2003, of course you have 12,000 subscribers! Do they actually turn on Google Reader? When was the last time you read anything in a feed reader? The count is how many people are subscribed, not how many are actually reading the words.
Crowd favorite blogs about blogging with large subscriber counts don't actually have 171k readers -- they've just been around forever.
Far Beyond The Stars wasn't around forever. It grew rapidly for a little over a year, then I killed it when the time was right to move on.
Evbogue.com has around 2,300+ subscribers now. A more accurate count of how many people are following the blog, since it's a newer one...and I blanked the slate on February 15th. Evbogue.com currently getting 40,000+ in-bound unique readers per month.
I've been working in the blogging world for 6+ years and blogging actively since 1999. Over that time I've learned a lot about how to build and grow an audience.
A lot has changed in blogging since my beginnings as an underpaid intern at Gawker Media in New York, to photo editing ASME award-winning blogs at New York Magazine.
Here are are few things that I've learned:
- Audiences are getting smaller.
I had a 80,000 visitors per month at the height of Far Beyond The Stars. Since, I've been consciously scaling DOWN the number of people that I want reading my blog. I do this by writing more specific information for intuitive and intelligent readers. The benefit of writing for smarter people is they make more money, so they can afford to pay you. When you write for readers who would settle for community college in bumble-frak nowhere, don't expect to be paid for your work. Conversely, a crew of high-earning readers who trust and learn from you will go a long way towards supporting your work for an extended period of time.
- There are two types of bloggers.
The first writes for larger groups of readers by simplifying (dumbing down?) information so that the majority can consume it. The second type of blogger dives deep into the subject covered in order to get to the heart of the matter.
When I started working in blogging six years ago, I worked on blogs with millions of readers -- but was paid very little. Over time I've focused on scaling down the number of readers, but raised the bar for how intelligent/intuitive they needed to be to understand the content -- thus raising my income at the same time. Honestly, I believe that blogging is trending more towards high paying smaller audiences.
- Alignment is key.
Increasingly your success online comes from aligning your second self with your physical self. This element is intertwined with the size of audience that you need to support your work. As you move closer to the center of yourself in your work, the bigger the value, the more you can charge for the value exchange, thus needing less people to support your work.
You only need 333 Letter.ly subscribers at $25 a month to be making six figures, as an example of how the Internet allows us all to charge for information.
- The future of blogging is paid content.
J.S., the co-author of Trust Agents, wrote recently that the future of blogging is paid access.
The question is, can you craft valuable enough work that you can charge this much in an online space?
The numbers can of course change. However, keep in mind you'd need 100,000 subscribers at $1 to be making six-figures. $1 is simply a barrier of entry, it's not a way to support your work (unless you're a 6'1" brazilian blond marketing guru living with less than 15 things or something.)
Alternatively, if you set up a monthly subscription at $97, you'd only need 85 subscribers to pull six-figures.
It's a big world out there. The more you specialize in delving in, the more it's possible to support your work this way.
For now my Letter.ly is staying at $25 per month, but I'm not opposed to raising the price in the future as the content becomes more valuable.
So here's the deal. I wrote this blog post for two reasons:
- To show you what is possible -- but also let you know how much work it actually is.
- To invite you to sign up for the Letter.ly. Why?
I'm releasing a 15,000+ word post-mortem next Monday the 28th on how I built Far Beyond The Stars into a 8,700 subscriber blog.
It's going to be a collection of many of the most important strategies that I used to promote reader involvement in order to grow the blog during last year. Also: the work will explore some of the lessons I learned at Gawker Media and working for three years at New York Magazine.
Also, you'll find out the real reason why I decided to can Far Beyond The Stars on February 15th -- and why my traffic didn't dip too much when I switched domains.
It'll ship next Monday March 28th, for Letter.ly subscribers only.
Now, this Far Beyond The Stars post-mortem isn't for everyone. It's for an exclusive group of readers who make their income online, or are interested in exploring this edge. If you're not interested in committing to working close with me, you can go look at the kittens at popular blogging sites with overinflated subscriber counts.
I'll have more information later in the week on what will be included. You're welcome to subscribe now to preview some of the content that will be in the final version of the post-mortem, as well as all of my other deep, intimate, and immediate writing.
Sign up for the Letter.ly here, so you don't miss the e-book on March 28th. You can always unsubscribe from the Letter.ly at any time if you feel that the value doesn't match up. The writing isn't for everyone -- I write for a focused group of intelligent/intuitive individuals who want to evolve and align their digital work. You might not be that person, that's okay.