I just thought I’d let everyone know that some parts of this blog will become “paid content” sections.

To keep things fair (those who know me, will know that I’m a big fan of being fair, honest and open), it will only be selected posts… probably less than 10% of the overall blog.

The way I’d like it to work (this part is not finalised yet), is that paid posts will be split into 2 parts:

• The first part will be free and contain background information
• The second part will need to be paid for by paypal (I’m thinking around $4 – $8 per post), and it will contain the real interesting/vital information.

To be even more fair to my loyal readers, all new posts will be free, and a post might become a pay post only once it drops off the front page, and it shows a certain amount of long-term popularity.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and by looking at the stats on my website, I’ve noticed that certain posts are a lot more popular than others (even some posts from 2006 show up in my top 10 posts).

So I figured that if someone is looking for a solution to a specific problem, then paying $5 for the solution is a lot better than spending 10 or 20 times as much to have a professional tech fix the problem.

The stats also show that I get between 10,000 and 20,000 unique visitors per month, but only 1% will click on the google ads… each ad earns me an average of $0.23, with about an average of about 6 ad clicks per day, I’m getting about $40 per month.

I can easily see that most visitors to my site are looking for a specific solution… They read a relevant post, fix their problem, and then leave (rarely leaving any feedback, and rarely looking at other parts of the website).

I started thinking: If I could just earn $1 from each visitor, then my website would earn much more than Computer Aid!

So, I thought about how to increase my income from the Computer Aid website. Most solutions seemed to revolve around changing my website into a hard-sell site, with up-sells and continuity programs and all sorts of marketing stuff that I really didn’t like much…

So, I came up with a more subtle approach.

I’m not sure how well it will work, but its worth a try.

What are your thoughts? Do you think its a good/bad idea?