May 2016 marks six years of girodilento. In that time this site has grown from a few views on posts about the cycling I was doing to around 10,000 visitors a month.
The challenge has always been how I can I write more content that I believe people will want to read. In simple terms the more content posted on the site, the more for you to read, the more visitors and everything goes forwards.
I considered adding advertising several years ago and discussed it with a number of people who’s opinions I value.
Every single one of them said don’t do it. I was told that as soon as you run ads on the site there will be people who stop trusting your reviews as much. With advertising on this site, I was told, there will always be a small doubt as to why that product got such a great review when there’s also an ad for the company on the site.
The catch is, producing content costs. You can’t do it for free, someone always has to pay. If it’s good/useful content, my belief is that many of us are ok with paying a reasonable price to support the continued creation of that content.
As it’s my site, I’ve been fine with paying for the cost of producing the content to date. However, this means that I write when I have the time and when I can fit it around my work and family.
I’m a freelancer, so I don’t have a salary to cover my time writing content for the blog or to use to pay other writers to contribute. In fact you can tell when I’ve been busy as the posts dry up, while I focus on getting the work done that’s paying my bills.
I want to be able to ask writers like Suze Clemitson who wrote the recent Amstel Gold, Leige-Bastogne-Leige and Giro race stories to do more. I have a number of other writers, I’m itching to ask to write for you all too but I need money coming into the blog to make this work.
So how will this work and what will change?
I’ll continue to post all of the review content I do now for free. Yes, girodilento will still offer the majority of the review content for no charge as before – but there will now be additional content like the race reporting and a range of other topics I believe you’ll enjoy that will be for subscribers only.
So all of the stuff you can read for free now will continue but there will be extra content for subscribers.
I can’t bring this new content onto the site without a subscription model. I can’t expand the writing quantities of my own either without money coming in from subscribers to pay for my time to write and prepare it, whilst still keeping my bills paid and my family fed.
Without subscriber support, this site can only grow when I have gaps in my schedule to write and that feels like it would be a big missed opportunity. Girodilento can provide a lot more great writing for you to enjoy, be entertained and learn from but only with subscriber support.
If you agree, then please take out a subscription so we can prove it to you.
For those who do subscribe you’ll also get the opportunity to help guide us on what you’d like to read about.
We’re never hoping to publish 10 stories a day though. The editorial goal is to write quality content about the things you want to know about. As a subscriber we’ll ask you for you input at least every quarter to give you the chance to say more or less of something or have you thought of this? As a subscriber you’ll get some editorial input, as we want you to be able to make sure what we’re writing is working for you.
To start that off, if you could please take the time to fill in the 4 question survey below, that’d be very much appreciated. Even if you don’t want to subscribe, please fill out the survey if you’d like to give some input on what we write about.
We’ve begun our Giro d’Italia coverage, so I hope you can jump in and subscribe so we can keep it coming. Suze is standing by to crack on!
I’ve set the price at £10 per year, which works out less than 3p per day.
If you’ve ever read a post on this site that was helpful, please do consider subscribing. With your support we can create more content that helps either tell you about products or a range of other topics.
You can subscribe to girodilento premium here and I hope you’ll choose to, please click on the green button below to set up your subscription:
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Thanks for reading and for your support
