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Graduation season has matriculated for yours portly. Indeed, college graduations have already been rolling on for a few weeks now, with a flurry of graduation photos and heartfelt Facebook posts accompanying the accomplishments of young people across the land. My school observed a graduation ceremony for our eighth graders last night, continuing the long-standing tradition of watering down “graduation” to apply to any milestone. Never mind kindergarten graduation ceremonies; pretty soon we’ll be having graduation ceremonies for when youngsters leave the house to head to school for the first time.
Regardless, it is a season of joy and celebration, and there is something to be said for all of that pomp and circumstance (and the constant playing of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance No. 1,” which is echoing across the land even as I write, I’d wager). Nowadays graduations are largely an opportunity for mothers to take thousands of pictures of their children (which likely explains the explosion of “graduations” referenced earlier), but they still hold certain symbolic and cultural importance.
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The Portly Politico 
Cool with a subscription. How does that work for you? I’m curious since I’d like to make money somehow by writing.
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It works okay. I don’t have a huge following, so right now I gross about $17 per month in subscriptions. I only have seven subscribers (at one point, I had around twelve!), and they are mostly people I know. The conversion rate from the blog is probably less than 0.01%—ha!
My thought is that if I keep at it and grow a larger audience, a few people will spring for a $1 or $5 subscription. If I could bring in $50 a month, I’d be quite pleased.
I’ve been using SubscribeStar, which is a very easy service, but not very feature-rich. Substack is the hot commodity now, and their sites are way cleaner and user-friendly (one quibble I have with SubscribeStar is that the only way to find older posts is to keep scrolling until they pop up, and as I have hundreds of posts on there, it makes it difficult to find older ones). I’ve contemplated setting up a Substack and dual-posting to there and SubscribeStar for my subscriber-only content, but I just haven’t gotten around to doing it yet.
My current WP plan also allows me to setup subscriber-only posts via WordPress, but I mainly want to drive folks to the SubscribeStar page, since I already have that setup and going. I do occasionally include the “donation” block at the end of my posts (I need to get back into the habit of including it), and I have one reader in the UK who will donate once a year or so.
My SubscribeStar page is here: https://www.subscribestar.com/the-portly-politico
I also try to use the blog to drive some traffic to my Bandcamp page, where I sell digital downloads of my music: https://tjcookmusic.bandcamp.com/
Again, the conversion rate is very, very low, but I can roughly cover the costs of my WordPress plan through my current subscriptions.
If you or anyone you know is interested in subscribing (or listening to and/or purchasing my enigmatic original music), let me know!
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Thank you for explaining all of it. I’d probably do a paid subscription inside WordPress or (in time) have a member thing for the future YouTube channel. For the current blog a paid subscription is probably pointless.
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It’s definitely worth exploring! It’s rare that I pick up new paid subscribers, but it’s fun when it happens.
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