In 2017, I introduced Value-Added-Services. I thought since there is a clear imbalance between supply of answers and the demand of answers, a user should pay to get an answer within 24hours.
I signed with a full-time retired judge to take care of the paid questions for 50% of the price and occasionally answer some questions pro-bono.
I started getting some revenues but nothing to brag about ~ around $1K/month. Ads were making extra $600/mo but I ditched them because they make the site slower and hurt SEO.
Traffic kept growing steadily and we're getting almost 500K visits/month. Then I thought that this is where the real monetization is, so I introduced a service where the answers from the experts are locked and you have to pay $2 to unlock it and read it all.
I was seeing around 12 ~ 20 conversions per day. So I thought maybe that $2 should give you access to all unlocked answers on the site for 24H.
I implemented that but the conversions did not change. I did a lot of A/B testing, I even decreased the prices to $0.1 but did not see a substantial change so I confirmed this thing is not working.
So I left it as is for a couple of years and now I'm back with a similar idea but a bit different:
What we're about to launch is the following: The expert will answer a few free questions, then lock the answer and we email OP to pay to read the full answer.
The key difference here is that the answer is YOUR answer and not another answer for a similar question.
I'm finalizing the Frontend now, I'm expecting to make $500/day out of this feature. I will keep you guys posted about how it goes.
Morocco is a tough market. generally in MENA content should be free and feel free to use our data to advertise.
Also, there is a law in Morocco that prohibits lawyers from running any kind of ads. That's a big L for my business as well.
But as it opens doors to business, it also opens them to unfiltered noise that might become a hindrance to your productive time.
There are many schools of thought to maximize productivity, and I want to share a couple that works for me:
*1- Zero-Inbox Email:*
This ensures you're converting all incoming emails to actions on your to-do list.
*2- Gmail shortcuts:*
E for archive, M for mute, X for select, etc.. are crucial to my productivity by allowing me to reach 0 inboxes faster.
*3- Prioritizing emails from your contact list:*
This is something that a few people realize is important. When you hit the ground and have a business running, you'd give more attention to emails from people on your contact list rather than outsiders reaching out to you with cold emails.
Unfortunately, Gmail doesn't offer such a filter, but there are a few tools that help you clean your inbox from outsiders' emails and label them for later check.
[Emailgurus.xyz] is my favorite as it's open source and solves that problem.
Emailgurus clearly states that they don’t record any of your Gmail data. All contact data is hashed, so only the user owns it. No one else. They prove that by opening the source of their code.
Another tool is Gated. Gated is free and hides outsiders’ emails from your inbox unless they pay for a charity of your choice. While the idea sounds fun, it is unclear what they are doing / will do with the data collected from your emails.
Success starts with a clean & organized inbox.