1. How do you get people to pay to subscribe to your site? How good does the content need to be? ...and does anyone have an example of a site that people pay for to read? Cheers
Check out : http://www.experts-exchange.com/ - they offer solutions to different computer related problems and they charge for subscripion. You need to have **damn** good content or at least unique content to start charging people for subscribing!
Yeah people will have to know how good your content will be on the other side of signing up. If they don't think it will be that great then they won't sign up. The Experts Exchange is a good one to look at, as previously mentioned by kmofo
I made 2 sections of the forum for paid members only. Besides that, paid members can: Edit their public profile Have a picture gallery Have unlimited downloads from the downloads section Create Social Groups Post pictures to the social groups Get a VIP tag under their name I might limit animated avatars to paid members only - I am still thinking about that one. My site is running Vbulletin 3.7
Difficult to say. I'd say you just start building a good reputation for your website, try to make it close to an authority in your specific niche and THEN think about charging for subscription...
There is a lot of membership sites software available do a search on Google. You content had to be of top quality for people to want to subscribe to your site. But more importantly it how you market/promote the site.
Have absolutely useful content. You can't fill a site up with just articles they can find all over the web for free anyway. If you're selling content to others on how to help them make money from art, for example, you need quality resources and tools that will be valuable to them, that has also helped many others find success. Interview artists, record the interview, and have the interview transcribed. When they recommend a resource, check it out and add it to your list of resources. Write down strategies that seem to be reoccuring. Share your information with your buyers. Give popular artists free access to your content and ask them what they think, what to add, and how you can improve. Then ask them for a testimonial you can put on your sales page. It's a lot of work, but if you want to sell something, you have to show them you are worth it. If you want them to stay subscribed, you have to keep them coming back. I'm part of a writer's forum that I pay $70-something a year to be apart of. I like it because they hold interviews with top writers, editors and agents. Those editors and agents will also pop in once in a while and answer questions for people. There's so much valuable information there that as a writer it is valuable to me to become a part of their community.
If your website is about computer based, then hire a proffesional and share your income with those content writers. Your content must be first hand content, not from other websites, even if you will take it from a website in different language
The content has to be good because there is so much freely available content on the web already. So I guess it would have to be something like recipes, game cheats, hardcore p*rn, etc.