Mommie Dearest was on HBO Signature a little earlier. Thank God for cable or I’d be bored out of my mind working from home some days.
Not that my work isn’t fun-filled and interesting. The bulk of the job I created for myself is writing or traffic-generating, two activities I love.
But one of the key benefits of creating yourself a career you can do on the computer from home is watching TV during your down time. Guilt-free couch potato-ism is where it’s at, baby.
And that ramble takes us to content type number three- Paid Content.
I pay you $20, and for a year, you’ll give me all the information I would need on some subject. Or I give you $200 one time and you give me a crash course on my favorite subject.
Neat trick. So how do you do it?
For this example, we’ll use HBO and one of my favorite sites, SnapFiles.com
To get my money, HBO does one simple thing. I don’t think they do it well enough, but it’s on a fair enough level to get my money again the next month, and that’s really a long ramble that I don’t have the muscle to type about today.
To get my money, SnapFiles.com does one simple thing. They do it better than everywhere else, and I think they’re really the only ones doing it.
For both HBO and SnapFiles.com, it’s the same thing, even though it’s not.
Can you guess what it is? Here’s a hint.
Still stumped?
Alright already, I’ll tell you. You’re no fun to play with, you know that? (Kidding!)
HBO and SnapFiles.com did some research to find out what I was missing from the free version of TV and freeware sites respectively, then charged me a fee below my threshold to access it.
That’s it.
Why would I pay for TV? It’s free. At least that was what ABC, CBS and NBC said to HBO, after they were done rolling on the floor in laughter, and pointing in mockery.
Who’s laughing now? HBO, and they’re doing it at the bank.
Why would I pay for freeware? Free software is, well, free. Because SnapFiles.com saves me time and money, not to mention hard drive space. I get deals on shareware, and if some piece of freeware is suddenly no longer offered, I know they have an archive of it at their site.
The second part of that is most important though – they charge me a price below my threshold.
I’d probably pay $300 a year just to have all the HBO channels if it didn’t come with my cable systems. Why? I’m a film junkie. I love films. Movies are my hobby. I like to watch them, discuss them, be inspired by them for my art (I really AM a poet. Seriously. Won a few minor awards and everything).
If my only choices were signing up with a DVD site for $30 a month, and worry about returning the films I get to see 8 at a time, or knowing I could pay for 8 channels playing movies 24 hours a day, the math is easy. $360 a year for limited volume but predictable, or $300 a year for easy access to more volume of less predictable titles.
Same thing with SnapFilesPro.com (the paid version of SnapFiles.com).
For free, I can hunt down the freeware I want, one at a time, or for $20 a year I have all kinds of neat features. Please – I spend $50 ordering take-out. $20 for service and flexibility is right on the money for me.
You can have a paid content site even with information that’s available freely on the Net. What you’ll have to do is dedicate your time to finding what information is best, testing it for validity, keeping your updates fresh, and providing excellent service.
Maybe not with sunglasses, but who said you could only have one site?
Find out what people want to know more about. Pack your site with 100 page of Original Content that is hard to find, that they can’t get anywhere else, that goes beyond what’s in a free article… you get the idea. Invite 20 peers over with the bribe of free membership and get the discussions going. Make sure the area is sufficiently password protected, then start selling access to the site.
Harder than it sounds, but possible.
Well it’s definitely nap time for me. I’m going to have myself a bidi and hit the hay for a few hours. Happy Friday to you.
