To charge or not to Charge

[asphalt]

Hey all,
Little help here. I just had some printable fitness logs built that will be integrated into the fitness logs application of my site I will charge for this because of the demands it will put on the server, but now I have printable ones that people could use. I am still working on building a strong user base and finishing up the software side of my site.
So my question is should I give these away to people to hopefully build a stronger user base or sell them for a couple of dollars.

I do get searches everyday for people looking for Printable Fitness Logs? I know these could be built by anyone with a couple hours of free time on their hand and I have no idea what the need for these are? I am still way under on my bandwidth charge. So any suggestions what would be a better choice for the long run?

Here they are (http://www.strengthnow.com/downloads/fitness_logs_noprint.pdf) if you are interested 4 mb download these don't allow printing and the password is strengthnow.

Any suggestions would be helpful, am I thinking too much into this?

[chromate]

I wouldn't charge for them. I don't think anyone would pay to be honest. May be wrong though.

[Chris]

IF you only charged a couple of bucks most of the fee would be eaten by payment processing costs. Its not worth it.

If you made them part of a larger package sold on CD, that might work.

[asphalt]

Yeah I am agreeing with you but people pay like $15.00 for fitness logs that are bound and suck. I am a little worried about bandwidth but I guess I could probably deal with that when the time comes??

I will probably wait until they are integrated into the site and charge as more of a package deal..

[chromate]

Yeah, it may be worth it if you're selling stuff as more of a package.

As Chris says, you're going to be paying $0.50 at least in card processing fees. So not worth it unless you're making 50+ sales a day or something.

[asphalt]

Yeah, plus then I would have to support questions about why it won't open etc. Probably wouldn't be worth the cost and time to market it. So I put it out for free.

[paul]

I think the idea of making more by giving it away is under appreciated and very hard for would be website publishers to understand. It only makes sense if you truely believe that non sales tools like Adsense will actually make money.

[asphalt]

Paul I agree with you the more I have been thinkng about what everyone has said. These take no maintenance so why not keep them as free content, add some adsense to a page where users can download it. Also add a URL in the PDF document back to my site, allow people to post them anywhere they want kind of like very cheap advertising. A few people "might" buy them but it wouldn't be worth the hassle. I guess while I am in the building stage of my site the more I can do to get and keep people the better.

[Westech]

Great idea about putting your URL in the pdf. Also make sure that you use Acrobat's "protection" feature to prevent people from editing the document and changing or removing your URL.

[asphalt]

Westech, Thanks for the reminder.. I forgot to encrypt and give it a password. DOH!!

[paul]

I am going to have to think about the idea of putting a link into a PDF. That might be interesting to try with a number of sites I have.

Which once again shows that all the time I "waste" reading and responding to posts may have some value. (Or is a great rationalization :)