Introducing subscription week!
/About 5 months ago, I left my job in New England to move to the upper Midwest, where I've been happily plugging away on this blog and grinding out a living as a travel hacking enthusiast. I've enjoyed posting more regularly, helping readers, and the freedom that comes from having no one but my readers to answer to.
A snapshot of the Free-quent Flyer empire
After almost 2 years blogging, today this site has an average of 3,519 unique visitors per week, plus around 1,000 more who subscribe to my RSS feed or receive posts by e-mail.
Meanwhile, there are 3 main ways readers financially support the site. First is the use of my referral links, all conveniently assembled on my "Support the Site!" page. The two best performing links so far are my BeFrugal and TopCashBack referral links. Both have long delays between referrals and payouts, but enough people have signed up that I end up hitting BeFrugal's $25 redemption threshold about once a month:
On the other hand, about one TopCashBack referral goes from "pending" to "payable" status each month. You can see this month's hasn't quite reached that status yet:
The second way readers support the site is by bookmarking or clicking through my Amazon.com referral link, which kicks back a small percentage of each purchase to me. Many readers have done so, and I've been earning roughly $10 to $20 per month, for which I'm incredibly grateful to my loyal readers!
The third and most important way readers financially support the site is by signing up for weekly or monthly PayPal subscriptions. In total, I have 120 active PayPal subscribers, most of whom contribute $2 monthly, of which I receive $1.64, after PayPal takes their cut. Others contribute $5 weekly or monthly, which I earn $4.55 on, and a few heroes have signed up for $10 monthly subscriptions, of which I get $9.41. PayPal doesn't have any convenient way of displaying this kind of information, but here's the dashboard:
Last month those subscriptions added up to $309.23 after fees.
Introducing Subscription Week!
As you can see, PayPal subscriptions provide the overwhelming majority of this site's revenue, but 120 active subscriptions means that just 2.6% of my weekly readership, or roughly 0.8% of my monthly readers, have signed up!
That's why this week, I'll be re-running 5 "classic" Free-quent Flyer Blog posts, which I think illustrate the different kinds of content that I hope make this blog worth paying (a nominal sum) for.
If you're a regular reader, I do hope you'll consider subscribing.
And if you're already a subscriber, why not take the opportunity to move from a $2 to $5 subscription, or from a monthly to weekly one?
No matter what, I hope you enjoy this week's classic posts from the archive, starting tomorrow. There are a lot of gems in there – picking out just 5 was the toughest part!
