Tweaking and geeking + statistics

I wonder what this does to me, all this close-in work on computer screen, the late nights, the “read me” files that were all written by geeks?

Makes life amusing.

Bare with me, I’m thinking on paper again.

75% of the astrofish.net traffic comes from bookmarks. Or users typing it straight into their browsers. The other portion is from a couple of “horoscope sites” but that traffic is rather limited.

Search engine traffic is even less.

So how’s this going to work?

A couple of folks immediately “PayPal’ed” over some cash, including one note about “this is for the server’s rent,” which makes me wonder if “paypaled” is going to become a verb like “google.”

My goal is to have a 100 subscribers per month. That would just about cover the raw cost of a virtual server, net access, and the phone bill. Or most of it, anyway.

And that just covers the bare essentials of getting this stuff up. That doesn’t cover the incidental expenses like time spent writing and posting the material.

See: the closest business model that I’ve seen that is successful involves a 900# phone line. Those scopes themselves run between 60 and 100 words per sign, averaging an even 75 most of the time. That column runs at 1,000 words each week, almost dead even. For that extra kick, the user has to make arrangements to pay an additional six bucks each week. That’s where the money’s made.

Now, my weekly Fishing Guide to the Stars weighs in at twice that. Not a trick of the camera. The scales haven’t been rigged. Minimum word count for the last couple of years has been at least 2K, and sometime close to the 3K.

I had to have a point to this, so I figured $2.95 per 30 days. The numbers work out pretty well, then. Only 98 to go.

I’ve drawn the templates, sketched out the flow chart, got it all worked out. If I weren’t working part-time these days, I would’ve implemented this a while back.

Only 98 to go.

Ever feel like some comics are written just for yourself?

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