Today I had Mastermind, I was able to ask the group how I could use my plugin to make more money specifically, increase my sales or whatever. This is what the outcome was.
As a reminder, I write these journey blog posts (currently twice a week) to keep my readership up to date on my thought processes. The stimulus for regular blogging was the book “Traffic Secrets” by Russell Brunson who wrote to do it daily. I don’t have that much time, so it’s limited to twice a week for me, which I think is cool.
Anyway, I wanted to share with my readership what my mastermind buddies said. I’ve been planning for weeks to ask what the tiny group thinks of my idea (SNIP as SaaS, or SNIP as a subscription model).
No subscription model for SNIP
In general, there is nothing against the subscription model. Of course you have to pay 12% to Envato but you get back some traffic as well. I would have to leave Envato completely, run my own store or use another payment service provider. Stripe is quite cheap, but all the others charge 7% and more even though they don’t generate any additional traffic.
My numbers show that 50% of the sales come through my own affiliate link, but the rest comes from somewhere else. A revenue source I can’t afford giving up at the moment.
To make it short: A subscription model is out of the question for me at the moment, even though it would bring in more revenue, but the bottom line is that I don’t know how many people would actually buy. There are too many open questions for me. In addition, the cost of running my own store is too high for me in the end. Leaving Envato is not a solution for now, although there’s a lot about it that bugs me (because the platform also has a lot of disadvantages).
Other ideas
Additional SaaS model
This would be an alternative, would have many advantages for me (and possibly also for the customer) but is of course very much associated with effort. I still have to think about whether I want to go this way.
Own sales funnel
The idea also came up in my mastermind. I have already started with my first Sales Funnel and will continue working on it the next days.
Other Plugins
I had this before: Over 10 plugins were in my portfolio at WP-Buddy. Most of them had reached the end of their usefulness at some point or were no longer profitable for me. It’s a lot of work to develop a plugin. But that is not the end of the game. You have to actually sell it. If you take my numbers from CodeCanyon for comparison, you still have to (be able to) make 50% of the sales yourself to generate a reasonably good income.
My spontaneous answer to new plugins was first a clear: No! But I also have to think about that again.
Falling sales despite traffic increase
In January I could increase the traffic by 9%. In February it was still 5%. But now in March the sales are going down again. This is absolutely mysterious to me and slowly I really believe that it comes either from Covid-19 or from spring feelings.
It’s really annoying when you do a) but don’t end up with b) like it works for all the others. It’s annoying because you invest a lot of time and end up with nothing. Of course, the life of a self-employed person isn’t always easy: Sometimes it goes up, and sometimes it goes down.
Conclusion
Let’s summarize once again:
- No subscription model because I can not or do not want to leave Envato. The effort would be way beyond what I want to do and it is not guaranteed that I could generate more income afterwards.
- Programming other plugins is currently out of the question for me, but is of course what I am good at and tI need to think about it more.
- I wonder if my strategy of increasing traffic will work at all, because I currently can not see that an increase would produce the desired effect at all.
- Only the sales funnel idea is quite nice. And that’s in the works.
Amen. And good night!