hi, Nic,

it's hard to say without more details, but monthly gives you a bit more flexibility to play around with pricing & see what works. Why not start off with something like:

• £x monthly after that
• reduction for annual sign-up

that allows you to play with various things to find out what gets most signups/brings you the most income. eg:

• play with monthly price points
• play with trial period (first week/two weeks/month free)
• reduction for annual sign-up
• play with annual price point

Is that any use?

daniel

I assume you've looked at the competition / comparable sites to see what they are charging? And I assume you know what your business model means you can/need to charge and what impact this has on your financial viability?

I think monthly/annual depends on the nature of the service. If it is low cost, potentially huge scale (the classic 'web 2.0' service type play) then I'd be tempted to go monthly; if you can go annual then go annual as it's better for cashflow and less time consuming on customer service etc.

I'd avoid free trials (too fiddly to manage) unless you have a well-oiled up-sell machine (processes, people, analytics etc.) to make it work. Instead have plenty of free samples.

Ashley Friedlein
CEO
E-consultancy.com

Thank you all for your feedback!

My site shall be offering members a platform to show case their talents within the world of sport where I am heavily connected, using my contacts I shall be looking to get young talented sportsmen professional contracts within their desired field of expertise.

I was thinking of charging members a small yearly fee? But how much? £10.99? £29.99? £69.99? £100? how can I decide how much people will pay?

Hi

I've recently done some work revitalising a user experience consultancy's website. And one of the things they do is run user trials for clients. This means that you give a certain number of people a couple of weeks to try using your product and you ask them to keep a diary of how it went. Often they do this online. And then you invite them in for a workshop to feed back on how it went and how much money they're prepared to pay for it.

My client New Experience does this big companies such as Orange - so obviously you're working at a smaller scale. But I wonder if you could apply this idea to your business? Here's the bit of their site that talks about this 'service trial' approach:

http://www.new-experience.com/services/service-trials/

You can see that they applied this approach to Total Jobs and Metro newspapers.

Good luck with your launch

Kath Burke (web copywriter)

Some simple tips based on a few years in online subs businesses:

* Free samples - vital to encourage trial
* Free Trial - if you can do it, go for it. Make sure you do some serious CRM on the back of it, otherwise you are flushing money down the lav. On a plus point, this gives you a very handy marketing database even for those that try and don't buy. Think very carefully about whether you do the "gimme payment details upfront then cancel" or "hey, just have it, then decide if you want to pay" model. The first will get rid of a lot of tyre-kickers. And some good prospective customers
*Payment periods - offer a range (1 month, 3/6 month, 12 months) with discounts for buying the longer packages. For 1 and 3/6 month packages, recurring billing is must if you don'rt want *vast* churn.
*Setting a price point. Do some user research first. Take it with a huge dose of salt but use it as a ballpark. Then test & learn. Pick a highish price point, and start using a free trial / newsletter / other value add to generate a decent size email list. Once it is big enough, segment and offer discounts, and analyse the proportion of people that subscribe at a lower price point. You can very easily calculate whether dropping the price by x% will increase the conversion and give you greater overall revenue. Remember it is easier to price high then discount than underprice then raise prices. Also remember that to a certain extent you have to peg it to your cashflow requirements....and that if your product is a dog, nobody will buy it even if you give it away...
*Consider making it free for first x months. Yes, really. Critical mass and all. If it's good enough, they will pay at the end. Be very clear that they will pay at some point.
* Provide a free value add to gather either just emails or more detailed registration. Newsletter or something else. As a startup, you need to build a community before you can charge for anything. This database becomes your testbed.
* Keep registration mega-simple and only collect what you will *definitely* use. Do you really need to know their surname vs preferred form of address?? Behavioral data from your backend is much better for segmentation anyhow.

HTH.