With at least one blogger thinking about trying to monetize in a different way than banner advertisements, I thought I should point to a great post from Bootstrapper about launching a revenue producing membership website.

Here is a snippet from the post:

The pessimist might think this is a nice ploy, because now hundreds of people are going to try, and they’ll flood the market with services – obscuring the few truly good subscription services that might follow Yaro’s Blog Mastermind. The optimist will note the one clue Yaro gave that will clear all the competitors away: establishing your presence online, which is the first step, and takes the blogger “with potential” six months to two years.

My own opinion on the matter is that if you haven’t built at least one PR (Google PageRank) 6 site on your own (or are not associated with having done so), you haven’t established enough presence for a subscription service to succeed. PR is a much reviled measure of a website/ blog’s success, but it’s a ballpark measure of how much linkage you’re getting from elsewhere and thus recognition.

I agree that it can be difficult to build up a level of authority that would allow a person to make a revenue producing membership site, but I think that the level of difficulty is a good thing, and will hopefully help people decide which program, or website is right for them.

Check out the full post on Bootstrapper.

Originally posted on September 24, 2007 @ 6:52 pm