Selling access to my content

And what's the best way to let SEs index it anyway

[sven1977]

Hi all, I'm originally from the AdSense forum, but I'm currently in the process of changing my website's income from AdSense-only to partly-paid-for-
content. Thus, users that pay a certain amount will get a password to access the content online.

My questions are now:
1) Do you have any experience with such a revenue model?
2) How would you let your users/customers preview the content?
3) How would you have google and other SEs index your restricted content?

Thanks a lot for your help, Sven

[Dootch]

1) Only as a user
2) abstracts if its text based, samples if it's movies or other
3) I wouldn't let SE's index it. Letting Google index it gives everyone access to your content for free by looking through Google's cache of your site. I wouldn't use this model except for movies/audio though.

[Romeo]

Sven,

2) additionally to what Dootch already said, you could give out free test accounts valid for a day or two, if the user base is small enough to handle that
3) definitely let the SEs index, how else would the users find you and know that you have interesting stuff.
Do an IP-based check for google/yahoo/msn and let them in as if they are users. There should be no cache-problem if you use the NOARCHIVE tag, all 3 SEs seem to respect this. With google, you may additionally experiment with the NOSNIPPET tag.

Kind regards,
R.

[aspdaddy]

1) As a user, several - learning resources are common, so is business data and certain news.
2) preview and also have public articles
3) cloak & expire content as above

[sven1977]

Thanks a lot for your helpful answers. I'll definitely try the NOARCHIVE tag. I think google already allows webmasters to let the google bot into restricted areas by providing a username and login. However I think I'll simply do it via a simple IP check as one of you suggested.

I'll also provide a preview area, where users can see what the content round about looks like (e.g. abstracts, but no pictures, etc...).

[Lovejoy]

I'd chuck all of your "paid for" content in a password protected database. There is software available that will email off your customers password/username and allow a hook up with paypal for access or subscription.

Lovejoy

[sven1977]

Thanks for the advice. I think I'll write my own user ID/passwd-based access system, though. I'm too much of a control freak and like to have everything absolutely customized.

I'm also thinking of using paypals "payment-pro". It seems nice to have the ability to charge credit cards without the user leaving our website. That usually leaves a professional overall impression with the user.
Also if users want, they can pay with paypal directly, which is a nice advantage over other payment gateway providers. But I'll see. I'm not there yet. I still have months ahead of me producing tons of quality content. :)