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. 

 

 

40 minutes ago, Me78569 said:

@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.

Thank you for that info.  I was working off of theory and some things Mike seems to be concerned with, but you know that history.  

 

I personally think this is a great idea.

Viglink just paid us nearly nothing so we need a better program.  I was pitching DAP if we could get it setup or amazon would be good too, but that takes time to setup. Without a direction to advance in it got left to the side.   Took much going on.    

 

I think if we could setup a DAP program it would fit nice as we have a lot of articles that point right to diesel products.  however I dont think DAP has a program yet.  so what we are left with is Amazon.

 

 

 

2 minutes ago, Me78569 said:

Viglink just paid us nearly nothing so we need a better program.  I was pitching DAP if we could get it setup or amazon would be good too, but that takes time to setup. Without a direction to advance in it got left to the side.   Took much going on.    

 

I think if we could setup a DAP program it would fit nice as we have a lot of articles that point right to diesel products.  however I dont think DAP has a program yet.  so what we are left with is Amazon.

 

 

 

The Amazon set up is time consuming to set up.  And Amazon product links are always changing so it would present an ongoing maintenance overhead to keep the links up to date.  That’s a process which could not be automated.

32 minutes ago, leety said:

That’s a process which could not be automated.

Is this something that a non-computer person, such as myself, could volunteer to update?  If one of the links one of my posts gets outdated, I could 'edit' the post later and update the link, but can a admin permission be made that allows for just updating links in another member's post?  Or if we find the links that are outdated and send the thread AND updated link to 'site maintenance' for an existing admin to fix, that would at least eliminate the time consuming portion of FINDING the old links!  Either way, if it takes a person to Amazon and they then search for the part number and buy it, the money comes in, though obviously updated links make it more likely a sale is made.

The task of keeping articles up to date with links to amazon would be huge.    we have somewhere around 500 articles and having to search and update links as you find them would be a fulltime job.

Edited October 14, 20204 yr by Me78569

Just now, Me78569 said:

The task of keeping articles up to date with links to amazon would be huge.    

No doubt!

48 minutes ago, LorenS said:

Is this something that a non-computer person, such as myself, could volunteer to update?  If one of the links one of my posts gets outdated, I could 'edit' the post later and update the link, but can a admin permission be made that allows for just updating links in another member's post?  Or if we find the links that are outdated and send the thread AND updated link to 'site maintenance' for an existing admin to fix, that would at least eliminate the time consuming portion of FINDING the old links!  Either way, if it takes a person to Amazon and they then search for the part number and buy it, the money comes in, though obviously updated links make it more likely a sale is made.

A broken link will lead to either a frustraed user who now perceives the site as out-of-date and obsolete. That could lead to bad article reviews.  It can also lead to a support ticket.

 

None of those are favorable outcomes.

Anything can be automated with enough effort

I don't really know how often the amazon links change, the few I've tested recently have worked.  Ebay is a COMPLETELY different story.

I don't know if this is allowed by the Affiliate Rules, but maybe providing a link to the "search results" of a particular part number would be less likely to get outdated.  And, let's be honest that once a thread is dated, no one really expects the links to work 100%.  This is why I try to post part numbers and manufacturer when I also post a link to an item, so people can copy and paste the part number if/when the link is broken or reassigned.  If we're worried about broken links degrading the impression of this site, then all links need to be removed - we already have dead links, but NONE of them are sending commissions to this site!

By becoming an affiliate, I see two changes:

1. It does cause some labor for an Admin to setup the Affiliate Account and update any changes to bank account number, addresses, 'general paperwork' for maintaining affiliation.
2. Money starts coming in.

We already have links recommending products, for instance Mike's headlight article.  @Me78569's article about projector headlights ALSO recommends a certain headlight housing; if you get questions about those housings you'll continue to get questions but at least some money might roll in when we buy those housings - and also when we add completely unrelated items to the cart for Christmas!

 

If it becomes a huge hassle, then cancel it.  What is there to lose in trying?  Also, it doesn't have to be Amazon, but surely that's the most likely to net the most money due to the size of the pie (the number of Amazon shoppers).

I agree it is worth a shot.  I am willing to manage it on a trial level but I see mike to setup the affliate stuff so I can link into it.  

I'm not tech savvy, but if there are some low-level, time consuming tasks (like manually finding threads with links and making a database for future 'link-checks'), let me know how I can help.

You can have a bot check for dead links, then have it remove those links, log what links it removed, then manually update them or do whatever you want from there.

 

Edited October 14, 20204 yr by Mason The Dev

https://pypi.org/project/LinkChecker/
 

there’s a Python thing that does pretty much just that, I haven’t looked into it really but looks promising. 

EDIT: So I'm testing the link checker right now, and it's just crawling the entire website for dead links related to this website.

I'll have to do some more digging to see if I can make it only crawl for posted links or what have you.

 

Edited October 15, 20204 yr by Mason The Dev

I'm happy to pay for the membership yearly.

 

I'll also endorse the Amazon link idea - that has been known to be a strong revenue driver. A couple of years ago when I looked at the program, those links paid out on anything the user bought within a set time of following the link, and people were happy with it.

3 minutes ago, grib said:

I'm happy to pay for the membership yearly.

 

I'll also endorse the Amazon link idea - that has been known to be a strong revenue driver. A couple of years ago when I looked at the program, those links paid out on anything the user bought within a set time of following the link, and people were happy with it.

Thank you!

 

If you have any spare time it would be awesome if you could write some reviews on articles you found helpful in the past. 

 

https://mopar1973man.com/cummins/articles.html/

 

It helps bump our search engine rating and in turn our revenue from the google adds goes up bit by bit.

Edited October 19, 20204 yr by leety