Most online trading websites and blogs (the ones that offer trading charts,ideas and stock picks) are priced in the range of $30 dollars per month up to $150 dollars per month. these types of sites usually offer daily stock market analysis with maybe a few stock picks per week or sometimes every day. I was wondering what you guys think of an experimental membership pricing I could offer: A. 97 dollars per year recurring membership for trading picks, stock market index analysis on an ongoing basis per year (special membership section) and email notifications B. 97 dollars one time fee for LIFETIME access to the above. I guess the risk of offering B is the customer would wonder why I am offering my service so cheap relative to other trading membership sites (30 to 150 per month = 300 to 1500 per year) But the concept is that I would be getting a group of customers who do NOT want to pay an arm and a leg for this type of service and would differentiate me from other greedy trading sub sites. 10,000 subcribers at the 97 dollar one time fee rate = 1,000,000 dollars in revenue, but then I would have 10,000 subscribers to deal with.... I was wondering if anyone has any other thoughts on trading subscription type sites or any other type of membership type sites with either recurring or one time LIFETIME fee and the marketing dynamics of it all... Is it too great a risk to offer a one time 97 dollar fee for this type of service? Or is it a winning marketing model?
$97/ year isn't too bad in my opinion if you are providing them with quality info. You don't want to undersell your product either, like you said you don't want your customers thinking you got some cheap stuff. If your competition is offering 30-150/ month, then 97 per year is definitely a good place to start. Later on down the line, when you are making 1 million in revenue with 10000 subscribers you can definitely put some of that money to use by outsourcing or paying an employee to help you out. Hope this helps.
If you have a choice between a single price, and a reoccurring price, there's really no contest... go for the reoccurring... When you have a one time price - yet you still have to provide content for months and years into the future, where's the profit? On the other hand, if you have additional monitization strategies in place... so that you get $97 up front, but have additional opportunities for more sales... then it's more of an even game - and you could go either way. Another way to go is $97/mo - or lifetime membership for $497. I seem to recall that the average membership is only 3 months (my memory could be faulty - so feel free to correct me if you run a membership site). So by getting over 5 months pay for lifetime - you're probably ahead of the game...