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Jake Ludington
Turning Passion into Profits
Jake Ludington
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[runtime: 01:01:19, 28.1 mb, recorded 2006-09-30]
Building a successful publishing venture requires you to be passionate about what you do. Jake Ludington, who successfully turned two free subscription services into sustainable businesses, covers the basics of attracting a dedicated following. Ludington shares his experience on how you can make podcasting pay the bills, and how to make a connection with your audience.
Ludington started turning his passion into profit by re-branding free content into pay-to-download e-books. What most people will run into early on is that a part of your audience just does not like paying for anything. Moving beyond that audience is challenging, but If you want to have a successful business you need to treat it like one.
Before adding a paid subscription model to a free service you need to build an audience which has a certain amount of trust vested in you and your service. Simple things like keeping people up-to-date via mailing lists, answering people's e-mails and having respect for your audience help to build a connection. Only then can you add a paid subscription model – with features such as advertisement-free content and umbrella subscriptions to all of your products.
Jake Ludington turned an obsession with digital entertainment into a sustainable business, building first a newsletter subscriber base of 50,000 avid readers and then growing an RSS subscription list to go with it at MediaBlab.com. Ludington writes about how to do everything you were never supposed to do with audio and video at home, in addition to all the things you might have been afraid to ask.
In 2005, Ludington launched a fee-subscription offering alongside his free newsletter and RSS feed and continues to nurture the growing community of paid subscribers. As Producer of The Chris Pirillo Show, he helped build on the most financially profitable podcasts using a sponsorship model.
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