Tracking Progress in Money and Dollars Per Subscriber

There are two other thoughts that flow into this.

First, maybe you’re not tracking it in time, but you’re tracking it in money. So, for under articles, or for guest blogging, you can also put in hours and dollars. For example: I spent $100 and 200 minutes on articles. I spent $200 and 300 minutes on guest blogging. It’s going to be a little bit more difficult to parse out what’s most valuable.

If you spend $200 on something and get 20 leads, a) it’s $10 a lead, but you still have to put the time in. You could say “Okay, my average lead is costing me $2 and 15 minutes.” So, $2 and 15 minutes to be able to perform. And this allows you to say “Okay, maybe I can hire someone for $10 an hour to do this work for me.” So if something takes me 10 minutes to do that’s a sixth of an hour. I pay them $10 an hour then it costs me $1.60 in labor, plus it costs me $2 in money, so $3.60 is my lead cost.

Secondly, you also have to determine how much revenue you’re generating per subscriber. This really confuses things, and that’s why I left it for last, and that’s also why I’m not going to go deep into it.

Let’s say you discover that one traffic source costs you $3 per subscriber but another traffic source costs you $6 per subscriber. You’d probably think you should go with the cheapest traffic source, but what I really should have done is qualified that with the words “all other things being equal.”

Let’s just say that the $3 traffic source generates me $20 in revenue. But the $6 traffic source generates me $100 in revenue. Then I’m probably better generating the leads that cost me $6 apiece because they generate me $100 in revenue.

The big questions in all of this is, “Where do I start?” When you’re starting, the only thing that you know is how many subscribers you’re getting. You don’t know how much money those individuals are going to spend in the long run. As your business grows, and you begin to get those numbers, then you can begin to plug those numbers into kind of the back end of things. Start with number of subscribers, and as your business grows, you can use these other two metrics to analyze things.