Subscriptions on the site have been happening. There are things about it that just aren't making the grade. Now after Paypal takes there cut of 2.9% and 30 cents per transaction.

 

SUBSCRIPTIONS ------

Current prices are a month... Total profit monthly -$19.53 (Including inactive total $206.45) 

Silver $1.99 ($1.63) - Currently 7 active 80 inactive - $11.41 profit. (Total $141.81 including inactive)

Gold $2.99 ($2.60)  - Currently 1 active 9 inactive - $2.60 profit. (Total $26.00 including inactive)

Platinum $5.99 ($5.52) - Currently 1 active 6 inactive - $5.52 profit. (Total $38.64 including inactive)

($x.xx) numbers are the paypal adjusted profit.

Just the monthly total will not pay for the main software license fees and update fees. ($360 a year!)

 

Current prices are a year... Total profit yearly -$3,224.28 

Silver $20.00 ($19.12) - Currently 52 active 23 inactive - $994.24 profit.

Gold $25.00 ($23.98)  - Currently 28 active 16 inactive - $671.44 profit.

Platinum $45.00 ($43.40) - Currently 29 active 16 inactive - $1,258.60 profit. (Just close to paying the hosting bill!)

($x.xx) numbers are the paypal adjusted profit.

 

Total yearly --- $3,430.73 (Basically $9.39 a day in subscriptions)

 

 Sorry to say this barely is paying the bills. For just the web site and I need to be paid as well for my time. Just in hosting alone for just the server is $1,300 a year. Then you start adding up everything. Cellphone, phone/internet here at home, keeping my computer in good repair. The bad part is that people are skipping in on the test drive or 1.99 monthly raiding the members and bailing out quickly not to return. So say member X creates a month silver account then calls me up burns my ear for over 3 to 4 hours it doesn't pay for my time at all. The whole low price monthly will have to raised in price. 

 

I'm considering raising the monthly to... Still pretty cheap per month.

Silver for 30 days - $10.49

Gold for 30 days - $16.69

Platinum for 30 days - $25.39

 

Now on the monthly side I adjust the price to include all the paypal processing fees. I shouldn't have to pay for your card fees. for such a low price. Then make it at least profitable to keep the doors open. 

 

Several people have mention to me in phone calls that the yearly is rather low. I've considered raising them as well to give more bonus on the year plans. Then I know my knowledge and all the data here has value. My time has value to doing phone support hours on end. We need to come to agreement on a fair pricing. Then looking at the yearly prices are going to have to raise too. 

 

I'm considering raising the yearly to... 

Silver for 365 days - $50.00

Gold for 365 days - $75.00 

Platinum for 365 days - $100.00 

 

I'm willing to put more into the site and give certain member group free phone support. (Discussion requested) But these long hours helping people on the phone. I know I'm worth much more than 40 cents an hour. This is part of the problem I want to fix here so everyone gets a fair shake. Let work this out so we build a website that gives the best support to Cummins owners but also is fair in paying me for my hard work and efforts. I'm sorry I'm not going to work hours 2 to 3 hours for $1.63...  

 

I'm planning on expanding the store as well. Currently all product purchases automatically give a free year to the site for customer warranty. All members with the group of Customer are in this automatically and will expire after the year is up. Back to the store the I'm already been talking to several vendors about selling products. I will been expanding my store very soon. 

 

One thing I must say... We cannot block view of the site to the free public. If this is done I will loose all Google rank I do have. So all pages and articles must remain available to the free public. Never can be blocked. So any ideas to limit viewing or reading of articles and forums can't be done. 

 

This will become the pricing for the subscriptions, We plan on honoring current subscription prices till your next renewal comes. I want to reconsider which groups are going to get phone support any longer. My thought is only the Yearly Platinum members will get phone support. Because looking at monthly for $10.49 wouldn't even pay 2 hours at minimum wage. Even when I do turn a wrench I do charge $85 an hour for working on a Cummins trucks. I just want a fair shake for my work supporting you guys here and not get short changed. 

 

So then we can discuss how the permissions per each group will work out. Which members can see what. This is not set in gold yet and in discuss mode right now to let the members feed into this with suggestions. 

 

 

7 hours ago, dripley said:

I will right something up my brain is thinkinng and send it to you. Bit it will be tomorrow.

I did some work on this this evening.  Take a look and let me know if it makes sense or needs any more info in it.

I've got a PM where a new member wants to volunteer. But no idea who he is...

4 hours ago, Mopar1973Man said:

I've got a PM where a new member wants to volunteer. But no idea who he is...

What's the member's ID?

 

I can try to vet him and see if he can be of any use to the staff.

5 hours ago, Mopar1973Man said:

I've got a PM where a new member wants to volunteer. But no idea who he is...

 

52 minutes ago, leety said:

What's the member's ID?

 

I can try to vet him and see if he can be of any use to the staff.

That'd be me. 

11 minutes ago, Mason The Dev said:

 

That'd be me. 

Sent you a message :-)

I know I've brought this up before and didn't get a response, so maybe the idea is just THAT bad, but what would it take to set up being an Amazon Associate?  https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/welcome/getstarted

We all post links to things we buy and/or recommend, and this monetizes those non-paying visitors to the site.

 

Also, for all the talk of PayPal, what about the Amazon checkout "thing"? I hardly ever use my PayPal account, but add things to my Amazon cart several times per week, so I actually remember the password! I imagine other visitors would fall in the same boat and be more apt to donate.

6 minutes ago, LorenS said:

I know I've brought this up before and didn't get a response, so maybe the idea is just THAT bad, but what would it take to set up being an Amazon Associate?  https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/welcome/getstarted

We all post links to things we buy and/or recommend, and this monetizes those non-paying visitors to the site.

 

Also, for all the talk of PayPal, what about the Amazon checkout "thing"? I hardly ever use my PayPal account, but add things to my Amazon cart several times per week, so I actually remember the password! I imagine other visitors would fall in the same boat and be more apt to donate.

Not a bad idea.  The thing is from what I understand the adminsitrative overhead (time) for Mopar1973Man is rediculously high.  Adding another thing for him to administer at this point is probably not realistic.

 

That's a good idea once we get past the nutty upgrade stuff and trying to teach people how to pick up some of the slack, I'm trying to learn some of that stuff now to help out.

4.5% commission on Automotive stuff seems pretty good and may be worth the effort. $150 headlights would yield $6.75. Not enough to retire, but maybe buy fuel for the day!

1 minute ago, LorenS said:

4.5% commission on Automotive stuff seems pretty good and may be worth the effort. $150 headlights would yield $6.75. Not enough to retire, but maybe buy fuel for the day!

I totally agree but there are only so many hours in the day and the back end issues have to come first.  MM has been working tirelessly on those issues in the wee hours of the morning.  I have set up those accounts before and it take a bit of time to organize it and then the tracking/bokeeping can be very time consuming as well.

10 hours ago, LorenS said:

4.5% commission on Automotive stuff seems pretty good and may be worth the effort. $150 headlights would yield $6.75. Not enough to retire, but maybe buy fuel for the day!

 

Problem. If I go to selling parts that I'm already prepared out for doing I've got agreements with both DAP and Vulcan Performance in place. My problem is I'm the one stuck taking the phone calls of the upset of people that screwed up and need to return products or whatever. My problem is trying to build a system that all the staff can work from the back end of the software so if there is a problem them they can submit a support ticket and one of the staff can jump in and help this spreads the workload out. Not all focus on me directly which is right now. 

 

My thought on it is to anyone with a product problem can leave a support ticket and then one of the staff members can use the phone number on file and call the person back and discuss this issue with parts. Again this takes me out of the focus and allows all staff to handle. I can't be at the phone 100% of the time, I still got to work my other jobs too, and sometimes I would like to take a day or two off as well. Hence why it's important to have your profile filled in and correct. 

 

Hence why I didn't want to do the Paypal donation link again if some go wrong I'm the only one that can log into Paypal and fix the issue. If we keep everything to the website and staff, not a problem. It can become a security problem. Hence why the website has a huge permission mask that can limit all these functions for a particular task. 

 

Like @leety said we are building the system up to do these functions. My biggest problem I've got to face very soon is the server move. The current server is no longer updating already and software is going to be unprotected soon to hackers. 

 

 

Edited October 13, 20204 yr by Mopar1973Man

a proper affliate program redirects to the user to site that has the product.  Nothing should be done on our side to support the transaction or the product.  

 

We ran Viglink for affliate for a long time and I am not aware of anyone that came back to us to support whatever they bought.   Same thing as Adsense in a sort of way that is an affliate program.  We have never had someone come to us about what they bought in an ad. 

 

We get paid for the traffic to the vendor, the vendor gets paid by selling and supporting.   Mopar1973man.com is not a online store it is information repository.  

Already running a program with Quadzilla. 

https://quadzillapower.com/?ref=woderkreaee

 

There are links over in the Quadzilla forum already. 

As for this has been up for months now... Nothing. I made the link and kept them here for the chance if some one wanted to buy I would either copy the link for them or send them to the page either way. 

Edited October 13, 20204 yr by Mopar1973Man

we need more than a few items.  

 

If you look at the model that the site runs on it is all about traffic to 1000's of articles only a few are vastly more popular than others.  On average the most popular pages are the 2nd gen subpage with ~%4 traffic, then following that the  main page at %2 then from that point it is random pages and articles with a faction of a %.   The most popular pages below #2 never get even close to %.05 of the the total traffic per month.

 

 

That's the power of the site, the traffic landing page is so diverse,  any 1 article could be taken down without a major inpact on traffic.   

 

Viglink worked well but the Return $$ was factions of a penny on the dollar never paid worth a darn.   If we could have something similar like viglink but direct to amazon it would be a different ballgame.   

 

It's all about the sheer number of articles the site has, need to leverage that.

Missing on major factor. 

 

Majority of the traffic is on a mobile device with small screens. 

 

Then when you look at how Google rating the pages. I need to lighten them up. I've managed to shed some of the weight off the mobile devices. But I cannot really add more without tipping the Google ranking into the red. Just in stripping the sidebar off the mobile group light the page for them huge and at least brought us back to needs improvement mode. 

As for desktop was left with the sidebar... And you can see the difference. I've got to be careful of the page load and try to reduce times. 

 

 

I cant do much about this being that I could most likely gain a bunch on the new server when I get there unknown as of yet. 

Edited October 13, 20204 yr by Mopar1973Man

I guess I don't understand what Mobile versus Desktop has to do with being an "affiliate".  I'm not a lawyer but the way I read the very small amount of description they give, along with some other articles I found written by "influencers" and bloggers and their experiences, it seems like just having the links we members post in the forums are good enough.  If someone clicks that link I posted long ago about the different headlight housings I used to do the Projector retrofit, and they buy those lights (apparently within 24 hours for Amazon, so that sucks) then you would get 4.5% not just on the housings, but also the assigned percentage on anything else they buy during that trip - if they buy a hairdryer or dog food, you get a commission on that, too!  That's a SUPER easy way for us members to help out and feed money your way. 

 

Let's say I need a torque wrench. I follow ANY Amazon link on this site, then ignore that item and go buy my torque wrench - you get a percentage of the torque wrench sale.  You don't answer a phone, you don't do much of anything beyond what you do now, most important of which is make a website I want to visit and support!

 

With Christmas shopping starting soon, if there's ANY way someone can help get this set up in the next couple of weeks to get the bugs worked out by Thanksgiving - and the spreading of the word to site visitors - it SEEMS to me like it could really be a good payday.  I admit I don't know that for certain.

2 minutes ago, LorenS said:

I guess I don't understand what Mobile versus Desktop has to do with being an "affiliate".  I'm not a lawyer but the way I read the very small amount of description they give, along with some other articles I found written by "influencers" and bloggers and their experiences, it seems like just having the links we members post in the forums are good enough.  If someone clicks that link I posted long ago about the different headlight housings I used to do the Projector retrofit, and they buy those lights (apparently within 24 hours for Amazon, so that sucks) then you would get 4.5% not just on the housings, but also the assigned percentage on anything else they buy during that trip - if they buy a hairdryer or dog food, you get a commission on that, too!  That's a SUPER easy way for us members to help out and feed money your way. 

 

Let's say I need a torque wrench. I follow ANY Amazon link on this site, then ignore that item and go buy my torque wrench - you get a percentage of the torque wrench sale.  You don't answer a phone, you don't do much of anything beyond what you do now, most important of which is make a website I want to visit and support!

 

With Christmas shopping starting soon, if there's ANY way someone can help get this set up in the next couple of weeks to get the bugs worked out by Thanksgiving - and the spreading of the word to site visitors - it SEEMS to me like it could really be a good payday.  I admit I don't know that for certain.

 

As I see it there are several issues that make this a possibly good idea for later, in which some serous thought bandwidth would have to be invested to set it up in a way that is not a detriment.

 

 

1) This is a support site so people are in the headspace of wanting support, so if we have a product page where they pruchase so even though they would have to seek Amazon to get refuds etc, the will still contact this site about it as well and those requests would still have to be responded to.

2) Tou still have to set up a product website page with the links to Amazon, that represents more work for the already overworked.  In this case you would need a seppearte store front for that, outside of the products soldy by Mopar1973Man

3) There is another thing to keep track of and people from here could easily have expectations that we know who purchased what through our Amazon afilliate store page.

 

It's not as simple as you might think.  I have another client that is having a pile of issues from doing this.  At a certain point this can just become a loss leader with the time it could spunge up.

 

 

11 minutes ago, leety said:

Tou still have to set up a product website page with the links to Amazon

Why?  Do bloggers and "influencers" have these?  The first I heard of this program years ago was on www.amazingribs.com  He sure didn't have product website pages, he had links in his recipes, reviews, science-based cooking articles, etc.  He was VERY up front about asking us to route through his webpage to get to Amazon, and also WHY - it was "free" money for him to help keep up the site!

Maybe they are needed, but unless this is known for a fact I wouldn't assume these special product pages are needed.  If your neighbor received a $50 referral fee for getting you to use the same house painter, would you call your neighbor about warranty work?  You may toss a side-eye the next time you meet, but not demand he or she fix any problems!

13 minutes ago, LorenS said:

Why?  Do bloggers and "influencers" have these?  The first I heard of this program years ago was on www.amazingribs.com  He sure didn't have product website pages, he had links in his recipes, reviews, science-based cooking articles, etc.  He was VERY up front about asking us to route through his webpage to get to Amazon, and also WHY - it was "free" money for him to help keep up the site!

Maybe they are needed, but unless this is known for a fact I wouldn't assume these special product pages are needed.  If your neighbor received a $50 referral fee for getting you to use the same house painter, would you call your neighbor about warranty work?  You may toss a side-eye the next time you meet, but not demand he or she fix any problems!

That's a fair and good question.

 

Generally speaking bloggers don't offer technical support for a fee.

 

It's all about context.  So you dude on Youtube doing a review for his favorite generator is not provideing service for generators on a website like this. 

 

You're house painting commpairson is a false comparison. 

 

I was a service writer at several auto shops and car dealers.  I also wrote custom corporate software and did IT support for years.  Tech support space is a completely different head space from what you are talking about.  Unless you've worked in a support service industry you won't know about it.  People become verry different when they are trying to solve techincal problems that they don't really understand.  The people providing the tech suport have to be therapists and teachers at the same time.  Pluse they have to be the target of people's frustrations with their situations.  It's not always fun yo.

 

This is a tech support website.  And it's a subscription and for fee based service.  It's just not the same environment nor are there the same expectations from the end users here as bloggers "influencers" or youtubers.  That's a horse of a different color.

 

11 minutes ago, leety said:

And it's a subscription and for fee based service. 

Well it is now, but does it need to be, as long as the bills - including staff - is paid?  Does it matter where the money comes from?  I feel your service writer comparison is a false equivalency - when I directly pay someone to diagnose my kid's cough, my transmission, etc., you better believe I expect follow up support, to a degree, from them!  But if Mike or ANYONE recommends some seat covers and posts a link to said seat covers, what nincompoop is going to want follow up support from the member - or Admin - who recommended some seat covers?  Or a tablet mount, purple Loc-Tite for APPS screw, or military-style battery terminals?  This isn't the same as calling and talking to Mike's 1-900 number at $40/hr (or whatever it costs).  A simple "Thank you for visiting the site, but we didn't sell that to you.  We didn't even recommend something we do not use or would not try. So, take it up with Amazon or the seller" - [click] - should suffice!

 

There may be some reasons to not go the affiliate route, but I think that making decisions based on the reactions of the lowest common denominators that visit the site is the wrong approach.  Proverbial 2-cents.

@leety

 

we had viglink running for years to automatically put links into articles based on keywords.  We have had 0 support requests from people that bought something through the links.  

 

Affliate programs don't create user level  support for us.  even if someone did buy something and asks us for help with it, then it is not our place to support them.  They should go to the manufacturer, that should be our policy.