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Business With Content: The Need of Expertise

This is the eight article of the series “Business with content“. To read the previous one, click here.

As discussed yet in the article about membership subscription sites you can’t make business with mediocre content. This was possible 5-10 years ago but that’s no more. Sure, you can get a few subscribers even of a site with cheap rehashed content but most of them will quickly unsubscribe, some will ask for refund, and none of them will recommend your site to others. The web is now full of all kind of content and a lot of it is free and high quality.

Expert Whiteout

So, what you need in order to be able to charge for your content:

  • It must be unique or at least hard to find elsewhere.
  • It must be expert content. If you are building a site giving career advice you can’t go with the stuff that you can find on every blog online. You need real expert advice and insights that work.
  • It must be rich. This means ideally not just text but also media like audios and videos, charts, info-graphics, tools.

For these purposes web scraping, rewriting existing articles, copying content from a book or (why am I even saying it) auto-generating content is out of the game. None of this will work. You need to invest human hours into creating very high quality content before you can even think about making business with it.

So, how? The options are mainly two:

Option One: Create Your Content Yourself

This is the most obvious one and it is the best. I know this does not sound like what a business owner does but with paid content sites it is the most viable path. You, or at least someone within your company (maybe several persons) should be knowledgeable in the subject you plan to build business around. The best content is created in-house and you as an owner of the site should be very well into the matters you charge for.

So how do you go about this if just starting? Focus on expertise you already have. Maybe it’s your job, maybe it’s a hobby or interest. But it should be something that you really know well, have experience with, or have inside information that can be shared. Gaining expertise along the way will not work: the quality of content required nowadays is too high for this. You can’t pretend to have expertise.

Now, if you are not good in writing for example, you can hire someone to rewrite or edit your articles. You definitely need to hire someone to create videos or audios unless you are expert in that. Don’t do cheap home made webcam videos unless you know what you are doing.

You will probably hire a website designer and someone to create charts, tools etc. This is OK. But the expertise must be coming from you, from your knowledge and experience. Not from stuff you just read online last few months.

Option Two: Get The Expertise From Someone Else

The second option to use someone else’s expertise. You can join forces with an expert in a given area and handle the marketing, sales and / or technical side of running a site. You can even take interviews and write the articles yourself. You can do this with multiple persons. Or you can just hire an expert to create the whole thing for you: videos, audios, texts, tools, etc. Either of these options are fine as long as you really have an expert.

And expertise comes from experience… so you get the idea.

What Not To Do

A sure way to fail your paid content site is to do any of the following:

  • Rewrite, copy, or rehash articles from other sites. This was already said but worth to repeat and remember.
  • Create lame content without having real expertise. This is just as bad as the above. It won’t get you anywhere.
  • Try to gain expertise along the way. No, you won’t become an expert in anything just by reading about it. Don’t try to create a premium content site on a subject you know nothing about.
  • Hire freelance writes to research and write articles. No matter cheap or expensive. Writing for a premium content site requires much less expertise in writing than in the subject of the site. So even a great writer won’t get you anywhere if they don’t know the matter. You are far better hiring someone who knows what they are talking about, even if they can’t write well.
  • Auto-generate content of any kind unless we talk about generating charts or reports in some unique useful way or based on private data that you have.

I wish I could tell you it was easy as in “hire writes for $5 per article and get 100 articles done” but it’s not. If you don’t have access to real top-notch expertise do not even try to start business with content of any kind.

So if you are just about to start, knowing where to find the expertise is going to be your main worry. And creating the content is your main expense. But not only. The next article in this series will discuss the costs of running a paid content site. Read it here.

WatuPRO 5.2

WatuPRO version 5.2 is out with a new set of improvements and bug fixes:

  • New option lets you not display questions already answered (or only correctly answered) by the user in previous quiz attempts. More info here: https://blog.calendarscripts.info/watupro-dont-display-already-answered-questions-to-logged-in-user/
  • New button “Save & Reuse as New” on Add / Edit Question page lets you reuse the question as a template for the next one. This can save you a lot of time if you are creating similar questions.
  • A simple snapshot on the admin dashboard (the homepage of your blog admin) will show you the number of quizzes taken today, last 7 days, this month and the percentage up / down accordingly to the previous period + some more stats. The snapshot disappears if you switch WatuPRO to low memory mode.
  • The optional progress bar on paginated quizzes can now also show the percentage of completeness
  • The basic bar chart now accepts “overview” argument which allows you to show previous attempts for the same user. See the blog post for more details: https://blog.calendarscripts.info/watupro-basic-bar-chart/
  • Information about the achieved points & grade per question category will now show in the “View results” page. Note that these stats will be recorded from now on, so you won’t see them for quiz takings completed before applying the new version.
  • New option lets you use default points for incorrect / correct answers across the whole system. The setting can be overridden at quiz level. The option does this: when initially loading the form with an answer to a question, the “points” field is prefilled with the default incorrect points. If you click on the “correct” checkbox/radio it auto-fills the default correct number of points, and vice-versus when you uncheck the box. Of course the box content then can be edited and this number can be changed. This can save a lot of time when creating many questions.
  • When the “My Quizzes” page is shown with the watupro-myexams shortcode, the “view details” link goes to regular page instead of popup to keep the layout mobile-friendly
  • Single-choice and multiple-choice questions now can have their answers arranged in 1, 2, 3, or 4 columns. This is suitable when choices are short or contain only images.
  • In the shortcode watupro-myexams you can pass a named argument “reorder_by_latest_taking” to reorder the completed quizzes by latest completed on top. This works together with the sorting argument because the quizzes to complete will remain sorted by it.
  • A bridge between WatuPRO and EDD is available: https://blog.calendarscripts.info/watupro-bridge-for-easy-digital-downloads/
  • [Intelligence module] New attributes “rank” and “personality” let you limit the expand-personality-result shortcode to only a given result. This lets you manually craft the output if you wish.
  • [Intelligence module] Added question category in Edit and Manually Grade Test Results page.
  • [Intelligence module] In Manually edit quiz taking -> Configure email section you can use the user info shortcodes with argument user_id=”quiz-taker”
  • [Reporting Module] When the tests page is shown with shortcode, the “view details” link goes to regular page instead of popup to keep the layout mobile-friendly
  • [Reporting module] The Skills chart can now be sorted by proficiency or alphabetic, and be displayed horizontally or vertically
  • [Reporting module]. The shortcode watupror-user-cat-chart now accepts two more options for the “from” parameter: “points” (will show the number of points earned per category), and “percent_max_points” (displays the % points achieved from the maximum points in each category). You can also decide to include survey questions in the chart by passing “include_survey_questions=1”. By default they are not included.
  • [Reporting module] The Tests page is optimized, paginated, and made sure to include even tests composed entirely of survey questions.
  • Integration with Namaste! LMS now allows filtering students by WatuPRO user group
  • Minor improvements to the colors of the buttons in the built-in design themes
  • Fixed bug: when “Save and reuse” was used on Match/Matrix questions the old answers were not saved in the new question.
  • Fixed bug: when contact details were requested at the end of the quiz the page did not automatically scroll up to reveal the contact fields (the problem occurred only on some installations and on long quiz pages)
  • Fixed bug: Survey questions should also return maximum possible points for all the reports that use them
  • Fixed bug: when importing questions with tags extra | were added around tags even if those already existed

As always, the updated version is sent out via newsletter to eligible customers. If you did not receive your newsletter, feel free to contact us.

If your free upgrades subscription has expired, you are eligible for renewal with 60% discount. The discount code is sent by newsletter but you can also request it by email.

Business WIth Content: Mixes (Be a Little Creative!)

This is the seventh post of the series “Business with content“. To read the previous one click here.

This is going to be short. I just want you to get used to the idea of mixing and marrying different types of business models. You don’t have to stick to any of the models discussed in these series. You can mix two or more of them together. You can mix them with free content models. You can mix them with something invented entirely on your own.

Heck, you can even switch models from time to time to figure out what works best. For example you can start with an info-product like e-book and later turn it into a subscription site just like Aaron Wall at SEOBook did few yours ago.

Here are just some ideas:

  • Subscription membership site with e-learning. Have most of your stuff accessible based on monthly fee, but also offer a paid course that issues a certificate of completion. Presumingly the course would be next level of knowledge over the random material in the subscription area.
  • Create LMS with courses but charge for monthly access. Thus instead of selling courses as products let users follow the material by their own pace (but in the order defined by you), while paying a fee every month.
  • Free content with some premium content. Instead of partially protecting articles, have a lot of stuff for free in a blog or so. Then charge for access to the most advanced stuff only – either as monthly subscription, as paid courses, or as info product (or all the three).
  • Run a membership site and also sell info products. Nothing stops you to do both together. Of course, ideally the content in the different products should not be the same.
  • Sell info product and have people who buy it join to a subscription site or sell them e-courses. This is the typical upsell method where a $39 e-book is used to promote a $399 course.
  • Give all the stuff for free but charge for access to tools and community. This was already discussed to some extent in the article about partially public membership sites.
  • Create an entirely free LMS with lots of excellent courses. Charge only for final exam that issues certificate.

I’m sure you can add some ideas on your own. Don’t stick to a particular business model just because that’s what you have seen. You can combine different software solutions as long as you have premium content to sell.

This leads us to the next article in the series, which is also very important: The need of expertise to run a paid content site.