Part 2: Building subscribers, daily aphorisms and site revenue

Tell us about building your subscriber base, and offering a weekly and daily aphorism.
When I created what was then called the "Aphorisms Galore! Personal Edition," in which visitors could create their own user profiles and select their favorite categories, I felt that one of the most obvious personalized services would be the ability to subscribe to a daily aphorism, picked from the user's favorite categories.

I never really thought that a large number of users would want a daily aphorism email message. I thought most people were like me in feeling that they needed a further increased flow of email about as much as they needed a third arm. But it seemed like a fun thing to do, and besides, I figured that I could also offer a weekly subscription alternative.

So I set to work and created the Aphorism of the Day and the Aphorism of the Week. And, much to my surprise, a large majority of the users who created user profiles also chose to subscribe to the Aphorism of the Day. Many even complained when technical problems prevented me from operating the subscription feature.

What were some of the problems you had with the subscription feature?
The subscription feature was down for several months, actually, more than a year, with only brief periods of operation when I thought I had straightened everything out. But each time, something else broke, and I was forced to turn the feature back off and go back to rewriting, testing and debugging.

I've had problems with process lifetime restrictions and load sharing mechanisms that made it difficult to make sure that I only sent one aphorism each day to each subscriber. I've had problems with one of my web hosts simply turning off the scheduling mechanism, with no prior notice and with no apparent reaction when I asked why it had been turned off.

And I've had database problems: I eventually outgrew the really simple database manager I had written myself and needed to upgrade to a "real" database.

How did you solve the problems and what lessons did you learn in doing so?
The most important part of the solution was the database upgrade. But, since many of my problems were, in a sense, caused by the web hosting companies and their policies (which I fully recognize as necessary in a shared environment), an alternative solution would have been to run the subscription feature on a separate computer that I could control fully. I would gladly have done that if I had had a computer with a permanent Internet connection at the time.

The best piece of advice I can give to someone who wishes to start a subscription service is not to do what I did. I stubbornly insisted on doing it myself, even though there are ready-made subscription services on the Internet, like ListBot and (formerly known as eGroups).

I have never used them myself, so I don't know exactly what you can and can't do with them, but I'm sure they work just fine, at least for reasonably simple things like weekly or monthly newsletters.

How do you collect and collate the aphorisms and do people submit them to you daily?
In the "Contributions" section, people can submit their own favorite sayings, which immediately become visible for other visitors. I plan to review them regularly and include the best ones in my collection, but I haven't yet started to do this because I only recently finished the new and improved version of this section. I also have a large number of "legacy" contributions from an earlier and less convenient system, and even more ones that people have sent in via email.

A typical week sees about three or four new contributions, but there are exceptions; one visitor once sent me a file containing several hundred aphorisms. I estimate that I have about 2,000 contributions to review in all, and it bothers me that I don't have more time to spend on the review process.

You have the aphorisms linked to the author, and then many are linked to books that can be purchased. Is this a big source of revenue for the site?
Commissions on books are currently the site's main source of revenue, and they have been for the last couple of years. On the drawing board are several ideas for how to make it easier and more fun to shop for books on the site, and I will try to implement the best ones over the coming months.

Are banner ads a source of revenue on your site as well?
Currently, I don't sell any of my advertising space myself; all banner ads come from advertising networks like ValueClick and Advertising.com. If this weren't the case, I wouldn't bother with banner ads at all. Jakob Nielsen has said that "advertising doesn't work on the Web," and I think he's right. (Editor's note: See our Interview with Jakob Nielsen.)

Banner ads generate very little revenue, and the only reason I keep them is because they don't cost any money either. I have long since stopped even trying to use banner ads to generate traffic to my own site.

What are your future plans for the site's growth?
Some ideas have begun to grow in my mind for what may one day become Aphorisms Galore! 3.0. I would like to take user interactivity and what you might call site democracy to a level that I haven't yet seen on any site with "real content," but I have seen a couple of experimental sites exploring similar ideas.

In a shorter perspective, I will work on improvements, mostly in the "Forums" and "Shopping" sections. And, of course, I will try to do something about those 2,000 contributions!

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "The reward of a thing well done is to have done it." Good luck on sorting those 2000 and thanks for the interview!