August « 2010 « Paywall Times

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After a year in development, I’m happy to announce that we’ve officially Beta-Launched the new Subscription Site Insider Research Center.

Insider’s research team of four (and counting) has put together an enormous number of practical resources — ranging from how-to reports, to videos, to downloadable checklists, to vendor guides, to PowerPoint presentations, and even financial model spreadsheets. Plus collections of real-life marketing samples and legal contracts. The topics covered include:

1. How to optimize your paywalls.

2. How to drive more site traffic — cost effectively.

3. How to increase renewals and customer lifetime value.

4. R&D to launch new online membership services. (Includes how to pick pricing.)

5. M&As

6. Technology – including Buyer’s Guides and a list by site name of which subscription sites use which vendors.

7. New Q&A Webinars monthly

Everything is geared toward professionally run membership sites and subscription site businesses. (Sorry, we won’t tell consumers how to make millions on the Internet — we specialize in practical research to help existing and about-to-launch membership sites grow profitably and sustainably.)

Now, it’s back to redesign of our own public pages for greater optimization. The word “Beta” just means you get to improve it over and over again.

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Both this blog and our other free publication WhichTestWon.com are built in WordPress. However, I can say categorically that I would NEVER build a subscription site or membership site on this platform.

Because when people are paying for content, it shouldn’t crash on them. Ever if humanly possible.

WordPress is great because it’s (a) free, (b) relatively easy for your editorial staff to use without loads of training, (c) lots of free and cheap apps are available for it, so your site can be cooler without heavy custom dev costs, and (d) there are tons of experienced WordPress designers and developers for hire. Oh, and it’s relatively SEO-friendly.

In my experience personal though, it’s prone to crashing or to being crashed. The problem seems to lie in three things.

WordPress frequently issues upgrades. There’s a tech staff cost to going along with all the upgrades – you have to put the site on a dev server, try out the new version, see if it screws up any of your custom programming or works badly with any of your 3rd party apps… and then you move over to the main site. I’ll pay for my staff to do that once a year or so. But, WordPress’s last upgrade launched just 42 days after the the launch of the prior one.

Most of those free third party apps also issue upgrades. On their own whimsical schedules. Which you probably won’t know about until after part of your site is broken, and your customer service department is fending the calls off.

Lastly, your hosting company may throttle your traffic (ie. stop most people from getting in) when you have a spike in traffic due to, oh say, sending your weekly newsletter. Then they’ll try to point the blame at the fact that you did not comply with the most recent WordPress upgrade. Actually I’ve found often it’s just the fact their automated scripts noticed the spike in traffic and freaked out suspecting a DDoS attack or just fussing about you using too much of their precious bandwidth. Most blogs don’t have such sudden spikes, so it makes the hosting cos nervous. Yes, you can upgrade to a better account… which I’m about to do for the third time and counting.

That’s why I strongly recommend that all paid content sites be developed on a more stable content management platform. You do not need the aggravation.