Woodworking Magazine Index

[rvscreations]

Many woodworkers on this forum have used this index in the past to find 'lost' articles buried in several years of woodworking and DIY magazines they subscribe to. The index now boasts over 20,000 indexed articles to help you find the topic you are looking for in your library of magazines all in a matter of seconds. The results can be printed, and the search parameters are very flexible, allowing searches by category, issues, phrases and keywords. If it's been a while since you last used the index, it's only larger now, so check it out and see if it makes sense for you. You can find the index at

Let me know what you think or if you have ideas for improving the index.

Happy sawdustin' Rick

[Garage_Woodworks]

Have you considered making it free and selling advertisement space? (google ads etc.)

I just can't see paying for that service.

[rvscreations]

Advertising is so often overrated I think. There is so much of it that people are being conditioned to just ignore the ads. I have another site I have Google ads on, however it only generates $400 a year with about 600 visitors a day. This index takes a lot of time to compile, and if you only subscribe to one or two magazines and don't keep a lot of back issues, it's probably not worth it to you which is okay. But if you have a large library, believe me that a lot of people find the service worth $2 per YEAR. I mean, talk about a bargain . . . again, for the right customer.

[SonomaProducts.com]

Hello and welcome to the 21st century. You are living in the age of AOL my friend. The age of paid services on the web never was and never will be. How much is it that you pay for Google each year? How often do you use it? How rich are Sergey and the other guy? As a marketer myself, who is currently riding a big wave of success myself in my day job using the market share approach, I can tell you the market share model is what works today. This index is a fantastic idea but you'll need to find some way to make dollars on the back-end if you you expect lot's o' folks to come in the front door. If you try to scale it up from $2 a year, it is dead at the outset.

Consider what you have learned so far on your other site. Who cares if Google ads are not great for the advertisers paying for them. You start by taking the $400 a year you can get from your 600 a day users and build it up from there.

Assume your 600 per day users visit once a week. That means you have a total user base of (600 x 7 =3D 4,200). So you are already collecting about 10 cents per user already and have a big potential to attract a lot more, to a free service.

Good luck. This is something would potentially use every week but seeing that even the "sample" searches bring up a dead page of teaser links, I won't bother returning even once.

rkingmagazineindex.com. Let me know what you think or if you

[SonomaProducts.com]

Actually, the free list of links to magazines is an important resource and I have add that to my favorites.

Thanks.

workingmagazineindex.com. Let me know what you think or if you

[Leon]

Rick, $10 for 5 years? That certainly sounds reasonable. Using your service, is there a way to filter out the magazines that one does not have or subscribe to? A search filter so to speak?

[daryl1138]

rkingmagazineindex.com. Let me know what you think or if you

Rick,

Yes, two bucks ain't much until you look at the big picture. I'm hitting dozens to hundreds of sites on a regular basis. Even at two bucks a year the ol tool budget grows thin awfully quick. Great idea but there is just too much for free out there to justify any user cost (other than dealing with ads). Fine Woodworking is still number two or three in the quality of its magazine plans but I will not pay extra to be able to visit their website.

Each of the mags have their own e-index. Yours does have the benefit of searching all at once and if you can get more subscribers than revenue from an ad supported site then I can't blame you. There is a down side however to your comprehensive search. How many hundreds of hits does a search for book case bring up? To then pull all the issues and look each plan up to see if I like the style is a bit overwhelming. What I do is scan the index of each mag when I get it and crop to the picture of each project. Name the file with the mags name and date and you have a graphic thumbnail index of projects. Not keyworded and crossref'd but functional when one wants to build a project. I don't know if copyright prevents you from doing this but it might make that $2 more justifiable. Good luck with it anyway.

Daryl

[rvscreations]

Hi Leon. You can just choose those magazines you want to search on by clicking on the titles in the drop down while holding down the CTRL key. This will keep these titles for the duration of your session until you log out. I've toyed with the idea of creating a means of updating your library and keeping that value in a cookie. I might just do that over the next couple of weeks.

Yes, I agree, I think it is reasonable. The other poster that proposed an advertising model isn't working with all of the facts that I am working with, so I'll just not bother to respond except to say that my preference is clear after having tried different methods of offering the index to those that would have an interest. As to the comment about the sample searches bringing up teaser links, I have no idea where that statement came from. They're just sample searches. What else can be said? Anyway, this index has been maintained for 7 years, and the closest free index on the web has 1/10th the entries, and it takes a lot of time. So, thanks Leon for recognizing that $10 for 5 years is really not that bad for a niche product.

Rick

Le> > Many woodworkers on this forum have used this index in the past to

[rvscreations]

workingmagazineindex.com. Let me know what you think or if you

Thanks Daryl. Yes, copyright becomes a problem. And the index isn't for everyone. But if you do have a large library and are looking for bookcase plans, well, there aren't too many alternatives except to go to each mag's site, search and hope they have a link to the plan or at least a picture, which for most they won't. So you're back to pulling the articles from the individual mags . . . It's a pain sometimes; I've done it enough, but it beats not having a list at all. I generally avoid looking up plans for common items that are more than

6-7 years old; I generally find that they are dated in their design and that more recent issues have plans that my better half would find more attractive and current.

Rick

[rvscreations]

odworkingmagazineindex.com. Let me know what you think or if you

Maybe I should put a Google ad on that page :-) I'm glad you find the site useful at least to some degree.

Rick

[SonomaProducts.com]

The sample searches just return an image of a page that shows how many links it found but they aren't active links, that's all I meant by teaser.

Like always, it is easy to be a dick online and I am a bit guilty of that here. I was just in "Marketer" mode and this is how I would have pushed one of my managers.

Nice work really and I hope you are making a go of it but I think if you could find some other model for revenue it could grow much bigger if users had free access to the rich data (but that's just a maybe).

Sorry for any offense. Life is hard enough without some a-hole giving you shit for a job well done.

Bill Wallace

[Phisherman]

I like the magazine links. No ads?

[rvscreations]

Nope, no ads. I know anymore you expect ads everywhere, because they are, I even use the model on my other site. However it is a tad refreshing, for a couple bucks a year, not to be inundated with ads everytime you come into a site for info. Take a deep breath and enjoy the fresh ad-free aire :-)

Rick

[stevenmoonerusher]

williamsandcleal.co.uk