Reply To: Requesting Your Thoughts On the Latest Tweaks to the Site

[peter]

On joegyork said

No worries! I never realised how complicated this stuff was! Added kudos to you for navigating it all!

It’s soooo much easier for a dime a dozen guys who create Facebook Groups, subreddits, and affiliate marketing price comparison sites like MSD to get tens of thousands of people to click on affiliate marketing links as a nice little side hustle or better. While I’m using affiliate marketing to try to help pay for the cost of running the site, at the volume that we have and they get clicked on for purchase — consider that a Ben Osterhouse libraries — which I love — have a 3% commission — while, I believe it was Steven Slate Drums, has a 7% commission. I thnk I’ve taken in around $25 US this year, which is less than the cost of one of the reaction plugins without the service contracts. With he size of our community plus the unregistered traffic, and considering that the affiliate links make up around 5% or less of all the links we have, it doesn’t come close to paying for the hosting, the email service provider, the plugins, the service contracts, etc. I put more than 1,000 hours into building and maintaining this site. I could create a Facebook Group in a minute and create the graphics for posts in minutes. But a site like this means having to constantly update the scripts (plugins), WordPress, deal with resource issues with the server, problems with conflicting scripts. It’s a ton of time, that’s why when Larry left, I had to handle the maintenance PLUS post deals to keep everyone coming back, which I set the site back around 4 months, as I didn’t have the time to do all of that work PLUS post deals. So, we’re getting there and we will finally open for public registration this month, but having to balance maintaining the site, handling people’s questions and issues, finishing building the functionality before the public release, handling the email service provider PLUS the web host, handling the technical issues that regularly occur on site this complex — it’s AT LEAST a part-time job.

My hope is that as we open to the public and grow, we’ll have more people posting deals so that I can take that off of my plate and focus on managing the site.

As usual, a TMI post! As my family will tell you, I’m not a very secretive person! Hmmm… except for the fact that I use my pseudonym, Peter Woods — from my working musician days — on this site! My desire has been to keep this out of search so my business clients can find my business related information when searching on my name, not my singing!

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

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