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I think the biggest pay off may be from the membership site, but you'll have to keep it updated. You should update it with a lot of content like once every 6 months. And you should probably do big launches that day with a limited number of seats (but "leak" information about what's coming during the 6 month period). When doing the launches you should also partner with other big sites in your niche to bring you traffic, and so you can let a lot of people know about it at once. This model comes from http://teachingsells.com. He also owns http://copyblogger.com which has over 100k subscribers, but he also partnered with others, and in the 2 launch days they managed to make $800,000. They have a in-depth course on how to make membership sites, but it's pretty expensive. It was $1600 lifetime membership fee then. However, they also have a forum where all those members can partner up for other projects and so on. So you could go this route, too - charging a pretty high fee if you're content is very good, but it will be very hard to grow it from the ground up if you don't partner with some big sites. As for the e-book idea, you might have a chance to make a lot of money if you make it a Kindle e-book and sell it for $0.99 or $1.99, which is the limit for impulse buy. If you're market is not that big, it might not be wise to price it so low. Either way, I think it's best to partner with some sites that can let a lot of people know about it at once. If it's really good content, and it's good for their readers, and they also stand to make some money from it, I don't see why it wouldn't work. It's probably best to coordinate this so you have a "launch day" where everyone writes about it in the same day or so. If you can make your e-book sell a lot at once, you might get picked up into Amazon's best sellers, and then you'll get even higher volume. Again, one of the ways you can manage that is by making the e-book very cheap so it sells in bigger volume. I would prefer the membership route because it has bigger potential for growth in the long term and more "stickiness". But it's probably not a bad idea to start off with an e-book, become a "renowned" author, and then get some of your readers to join your new membership site. |