Cashing-In on Your Content

Time and again, you come across an advice from an internet marketing expert stating that submitting articles is an effective way of bringing traffic to our sites. Articles published in another newsletter and other sites not only establishes your reputation as an expert but also allows you to reach new and wider audience for your own business.

So you write, and write articles and submit it for free to various publications on the Web (PowerHomeBiz included). In your own site, you post these articles with a notice that these articles can be used for free provided that the resource box remains intact.

But have you ever thought of making money from your articles, beyond compiling them into an e-book and selling them for $9.99?

The all free, all the time Internet era is drawing to a close. While providing free content is beneficial to consumers, it does not provide any revenue nor viable long-term business model to publishers and merchants. What’s more, there’s not much incentive to continuously generate online content. No wonder there are legions of sites out there whose last update was made in January 1998. Even if you love your site, you have to developing fresh content regularly ­ without getting a single cent from it -- can be tiring!

More and more publishers are seeing that people will pay for content that is valuable to them. Content can be an MP3 file, your commentaries, tips on Internet marketing, videos or photographs. Think of it as a pay-per-view system ­ users have to pay first before they can peruse your content.

The growing prominence of micropayment systems now allows content providers to engage in the pay-per-view model on the Web. With micropayment, online writers and content publishers can now collect small payments from users of content, like $2.50 for an article, $0.35 for a song or $5 for a video clip. Credit card payments, with their high processing costs, are not suitable for products that are $10 or less. More so for products that are priced at $1 or $2.

Micropayment allows publishers and content producers to sell content quickly and easily. Some of the leading micropayment companies include:

Qpass ( http://www.qpass.com ). The leading company in micropayment, Qpass.com counts Web notables such as Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Los Angeles Times as some of its clients. If you use their service, your visitors need to register first with Qpass and provide a credit card. As they download your MP3 or read your article, they will incur charges. What Qpass does is to aggregate these charges, and once a month submits the total charge to Visa or Mastercard. Out of the payment that you will receive from Qpass, they will get anywhere from 5% to 40% in transaction fees.

Microcreditcard.com ( http://www.microcreditcard.com ). Operating like Qpass, Microcreditcard combines multiple small transactions into a single credit card charge. If the article you are selling costs $1, 84 cents will go to you while 16 cents will go to Microcreditcard, hence allowing you to still profit from your content.

Amazon Honor System ( http://www.amazon.com ). The granddaddy of e-tailing has spread its wings and now offers a system for selling digital content. You will set-up a PayPage, although Amazon requires that your content be priced between $1 to $50. Amazon charges $0.15 plus 15% of the total transaction amount.

The pay-per-view model is still underutilized on the Web today. But as web site owners continue to look for ways to earn revenues, this might just be the model that will work on the Web.

About the Author

Jenny Fulbright is a Staff Writer for powerhomebiz.com/

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