I must admit I am not a huge fan of linking to articles from Associated Press, simply because it is extremely difficult to determine the original source when these stories “go over the wire”.

A great example of the reasons why is when I reported about the appropriated story last year from the Museum of Hoaxes – that was Agence France-Presse to blame, a different organization.

Readers might also remember my run-in with The Guardian where I was a major source for an article, but didn’t receive a link. The author and editor of The Guardian explained their viewpoint in the comments, but it still wrankles a little.

That being said, there is a huge amount of PROFIT being made online in the form of online membership sites which is a paid content business model.

Highly successful examples include:-

• Strategic Profits – $10m+ business
• Stompernet – $25m+ business
• Success Chef (prelaunch)
• Double Your Dating – $20m+ business

I could the continue the list with the likes of Armand Morin, Mike Filsaime, Jeff Walker, Yanik Silver, John Reese, Ray Edwards, Jim Edwards, Frank Kern, Jason Postash and many many more. Among bloggers Brain Clark with Teaching Sells and Yaro Starak with Blog Mastermind immediately come to mind.

Then of course there are the mega information marketers such as Agora Publishing with multiple content channels such as Early to Rise

I should include affiliate links to all of them, but that isn’t the point – most of these guys are pulling in million dollar earnings on a yearly basis, and whilst they have diversified into physical products, exclusive coaching and seminars.

Agora might even be pulling in $1m a day by now, I don’t have recent figures.

Agora might be making more money than Facebook

Paid content certainly isn’t a dying business model

This was especially significant for me at the time, because I was struggling with a problem which I couldn’t solve.

A few days later 5ubliminal posted, “If I Told You… I’d Have To Kill You” – a simlar idea, again specific to SEO techniques but with a few hints to how you can work out what others are up to… without them telling you.

My End Of year Problem

Lots of sites were publishing their year end stats, showing which were their most popular posts for the year, traffic numbers etc, and many of them were missing one, and in many cases many important statistics that can be used to determine the success of a particular post.

I didn’t post a yearly roundup – it would have been a lie

I know which are my most successful posts based upon various metrics, and the metrics I use are in many cases different to the metrics other people use, and I can use them for competitive intelligence

I wasn’t prepared to write a post highlighting my most popular posts for the year, or the ones I wanted to highlight, if I couldn’t be 100% honest about my methods.

Scribd

The changes Scribd made after the revealing Stompernet videos were really the straw that broke the camel’s back. If you release information without a great deal of restraint on how that information should be used, it can cause problems, and sometimes various tactics and methods stop working, or are prevented from working.

Release The Information In Private?

This is one option I have considered – it would be easy to set up a membership site, or use a report such as this just for list building, or even give it to a number of membership sites I am a member of as a bonus, but that introduces secondary problems.

I am not a programmer

I have worked with programming teams for years, but I can only tinker with code these days. If I released the information to just a few hundred, or possibly a few thousand, there would be 2 very specific problems.

• Only about 10% of the people receiving the information would be able to do anything useful with it – this stuff is a little bit technical, and even once I have all my data together it takes time playing around in excel to really benefit from it, and realise the significance.
• My limited use of these methods flies under the radar – if you have a few 100, or 1000 people mining the same data, it would throw up a huge red flag, quite needlessly, as many would be looking for data on exactly the same websites.

If I make the information available, the ideal solution would be

• A 20 page report
• A viable proxy based extraction and storage system for compiling data
• Various tools, possibly in Excel, to make manipulating the data relatively easy for less technical folk

Oh, Andy Is Going To Sell An Ebook?

Ebooks work for newbie stuff and basic training, or techniques that get hyped but are not necessarily for your average users (even if they are effective)

This isn’t something I want to hype about, and it certainly isn’t basic training

The financial model just wouldn’t cover the development costs

I could also include it in a membership site of my own, but it isn’t something that would stand on its own, I need a lot more time to get together complimentary materials.

With the new year people are planning their course of action for 2008, and this would prove a benefit for their content planning strategy.

Content For Your Membership Site or Agency

Do you remember the days before the junk peddlers of private label rights and bundled master resale rights products when content really had value?

These days the people who create exceptional content only provide it via higher end membership sites, and most, but not all of the ebooks are beginners guides – they can still be good value, but that isn’t the kind of content I want to create.

Over the last year writing this blog I have received a number of proposals of various kinds from membership site owners looking for specialist content, which is why I am considering a slight return to the old ways of providing content to a limited number of partners for a fee that is just a “drop in the ocean” compared to the fees members pay for access to great content, and certainly much better value than retaining me on a permanent basis.

Price – contact me by email for details – I expect to spend up to $5000 on development of the scripts and tools, though depending on the way they are designed, I might also have to provide hosting. I would much prefer to have a comfortable budget for development than to be scraping the barrel.
On top of that I will also be offering support if you provide me access to your member area – there is certainly some 2-way benefit

Initially I am not going to set a specific limit on numbers, but ideally I would like to have the report and tools made available to between 10 and 20 membership sites or agencies

I am including search marketing agencies, because they often have lots of people working with clients with whom they want to share tools and reports. Hopefully a few of the more popular SEO membership sites will pick this up anyway, so small agencies can benefit from their existing memberships, but for larger corporations it would probably be best to purchase your own license.

For further details and possibly a few examples those who have my email can just email me, or you can just use my contact form

I am going to be selective about where this information and tools will be made available

To finish, just one example:-

Which one post was my most successful in 2007? This isn’t 100% accurate because like with all statistical measures there can be extenuating circumstances that mess with the data, and using this method there are frequent occurances within the top10, in much the same way a front page Digg can make a blog seem more popular than it really is.

The Tale of Little Linkalot and Some Blogging Thoughts where I actually linked through to another one of Donna’s posts, “The Tale of Little Linkalot”

If you can work out why I regard that (based on this method) as my most successful post, a “cornerstone” or in some ways “tipping point”, bully for you, but don’t go spreading it around too much ;)
Even if you can work it out, you are going to appreciate a 20 page report on how to use this method to share with your members or clients, and the tools to go with it.

I could have just written a short blog post with my top 50 stories of 2007, provided details for compiling the data, and a very rough excel spreadsheet and a few charts, but it would not be very usable for the majority of non-programming geeks, and the method would be burned or limited within a few hours or days.

Why burn a great method just for a few links?