Getting Started for Site Owners

How the Medallion works

The Medallion is a small javascript widget you place on your pages, blog posts, or apps so your visitors will be able to support your content financially, just by visting. (See Medallions in action.)

When a Kachingler wants to start contributing to your site, blog, app — or even to individual writers if you so choose have Medallions for each — they just mouseover the Medallion so it expands, then click Start kachingling.

The Medallion coin turns green, and your Kachingler count goes up. Now, the Medallion will recognize them and count their visits whenever they return. (No additional clicks required.)

At the end of each month, the money they Pay-In to their Kachingle account will get distributed proportionally among the sites they kachingle — including yours — based on the frequency of their visits to each.

(FAQ: How are Kachingler's visits calculated and turned into Payments to my sites?)

What else?

• Visitors to your site who are not yet Kachinglers can sign up for Kachingle through your Medallion. You'll want to turn your visitors onto the idea of supporting your site through "social cents." (More details below on promoting your Medallion.)

• When visitors mouse-over the Medallion, they can see who else is kachingling your site and to learn what other sites they have in common, building a community that drives more kachingling. (See a live example of "Who's kachingling here.")

• Kachinglers often tweet their kachingling to show off their support of their favorite stuff, which helps promote your site! (See live examples on Twitter.)

Creating a Medallion takes less than two minutes. Ready to start?
Sign up for Kachingle then click on your Sites I Own tab.

Placement of the Medallion

Kachingle recommends placing the Medallion high on each page ("above the fold") in a conspicuous spot to draw Kachinglers' attention. You can also use the Jazz Medallion pictured here in conjunction with other social-medeia buttons on your site — like at the end of each blog post.

There are currently three Medallion designs...


Which one is best for your site will depend on where you want to place it. Classical goes best in a wide sidebar, Neo-Classical fits better in narrow sidebars, and Jazz fits just about anywhere!

(FAQ: What are the specs of the Kachingle Medallion?)

DIFFERENT MEDALLIONS FOR DIFFERENT SECTIONS OF YOUR SITE?

If you have multiple independent contributors or very distinct sections to your site, you may be interested in creating independent Medallions for each, instead of using the same Medallion site-wide.

Per-Author or Per-Section Medallions

Having multiple, distinct Medallions could potentially generate more revenue, or allow your contributors to make money directly from their posts on your site. When each blog or author has a separate Medallion, a Kachingler who reads multiple blogs is counted separately by each one — and could end up contributing to each one independently, meaning multiple streams of revenue from each Kachingler.

A possible disadvantage is that a Kachingler must "turn kachingling on" individually for each blog, and this may require specialized marketing of your Medallions to your visitors.

(FAQ: See the Kachingle Blog for an example of Per-Author Medallions)

Site-Wide Medallions

Having one Medallion that appears on every page of the site means once a Kachingler clicks to support, any visit will be counted regardless of where the Kachingler enters your site.

How to decide

If you're considering both approaches, the question to ask yourself is this:

Does the typical reader on my site consider its blogs (or sections) to be part of a group, or distinctly separate? A good example of the latter might be the highly-read blog of a famous newspaper film critic, may be supported mostly by out-of-towners who have no interest in the rest of that newspaper's site.

Questions? Visit our Community Forum staffed by the Kachingle Team

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Launching & Marketing your Medallion

STAGE ONE - add marketing text on your site

First, place 1-2 lines of explanatory text above the Kachingle Medallion on all pages.

You can see good examples of text above Medallions at Center for Investigative Reporting and SteveOuting.com.

As seen on these two sites, the text above the Medallion should be linked to a blog post or feature article about adding the Kachingle Medallion to your site. With linked text, your users can easily click through to read what you have to say about Kachingle, then easily join as a Kachingler.

Some example text that could be placed above your Medallion include:

• Regular Visitor? Kachingle is a simple way to monetarily support [Your Site Name] and other sites you love.

• Support this site! Kachingle is a simple way to support [Your Site Name] and other sites you love

• Support [Your Site Name] via Kachingle

• Regular reader? Kachingle is a simple way to monetarily support [Your Site Name] and other sites you love

Then, write a blog post or feature article about why your site is using Kachingle.

At the end of the blog post or article, encourage users to join by mousing over the medallion on your blog page. (Note: Having them join by mousing over your Medallion is a better option than pointing them the Kachingle home page because 1) your branding is shown, and 2) after joining as a Kachingler they will be directed back to your site.

Here's an example of the kind of article you could post. Feel free to borrow concepts or entire text.

Support [Your Site Name] through micropayments with Kachingle!

Here at [Your Site Name] we want to produce quality content that continues to be valuable for you. To do this, continued funding is important, and after looking at different funding sources we recently chose Kachingle. Kachingle is an innovative social micropayment service that enables readers to easily make ongoing, voluntary micropayments to sites like ours.

Kachingle is simple, user-centric, and a user-controlled alternative to cumbersome subscriptions, paywalls, and pay-per-article plans that some media outlets are considering. It requires virtually no effort on your part - you just become a Kachingler, giving $5 a month through PayPal, and then click once on the Kachingle medallion on our site. No credit cards, no passwords, no separate accounts for every site you visit. Kachingle will keep track of your monthly visits to each of the sites you've selected, and at the end of the month, your monthly pay-in to Kachingle will be distributed proportionally among those sites.

We hope you will become a Kachingler, helping to support online journalism's future, including the time and resource intensive reporting that [Your Site Name] produces. After you become a Kachingler, you'll also be able to share the sites you support with colleagues, friends, and family, and turn them on to the sites you visit. You can join as a Kachingler by "mousing" over the Kachingle Medallion on this page and clicking on "Join Kachingle".

If you have questions check the FAQ, visit our Ask a Question in our Community Forum staffed by the Kachingle Team, or Email Customer Care.


STAGE TWO - outreach marketing

• Tweet about Kachingle from your corporate Twitter account.

For example: "You can now support [Your Site Name] with Kachingle micropayments! More 411 at [insert tiny URL to your blog post about Kachingle]

• If you send out an email newsletter, include information about your Kachingle partnership, and a link to your Kachingle blog post.

• Post info on your Kachingle partnership on your site Facebook page.

• If you have other methods of marketing new things about your site, use them to market your Medallion.

• Get employees to Tweet about Kachingle from their personal accounts.


STAGE THREE - "prime the pump" by recruiting Kachinglers

It is important that you "prime the pump" and recruit some Kachinglers.

Why?

Think of a crowded restaurant. If two restaurants are side-by-side, and one is jammed and the other empty, people still want to go to the crowded one because they figure that the crowd knows something about the quality of the food, service, etc.

Studies have actually proven this. For example...

In one social experiment, researchers placed a good musician in a New York City subway with a tip jar. When subway travelers saw an experimenter (posing as commuter) put money in the tip jar, the number of contributions increased by 800% over times when no one was seen tipping. The researchers' conclusion was that many people were inclined to contribute for a variety of reasons, but it was only when they saw the social signals -- "this is what people like me do" -- that they felt comfortable taking action. (From Applying (and Resisting) Peer Influence; V. Griskevicius, R.B. Cialdini, and N.J. Goldstein, Sloan Management Review (Winter 2008).

We believe that for individual blog sites, 25 Kachinglers is critical mass, and for larger sites, 100 Kachinglers are needed to jump-start Kachingle activity

You can prime the pump by recruiting Kachinglers in these categories:

• Recognizable people in your community. For example, if you are a local newspaper, it would greatly help if some of your Kachinglers were influential known community members, such as the mayor, city council members, the police chief, local well-known business people, educators, etc. If other people see that important people in the community have joined Kachingle to support your site, then they are more likely to also. This same strategy applies to a virtual "community", such as one focused on fractal designs, shedworking, photography, investigative journalism, etc.

• Employees. If you are uncomfortable suggesting your employees become Kachinglers on their own, consider setting up Kachingle accounts for them, using funds from your site's PayPal account (some of the money will come back to you when they kachingle your site).

• Colleagues & Friends. Recruit early Kachinglers from among the people you know best and can rely on for support. Below is an example email that you might customize and send out to potential Kachinglers:

Hello ______,

As you know, [Your Site Name] is an important contributor to the [Insert Name] community. To help it grow and continue to provide quality content, we have been exploring different sources of revenue generation. Recently we adopted the Kachingle service to enable readers and followers such as yourself to support our site. I am writing to encourage you to support [Your Site Name] by joining Kachingle.

[Your Site Name] chose Kachingle because it allows site visitors to view its content -- unlike subscriptions and pay-per-article schemes -- and then decide whether or not to contribute. The Kachingle service also enables readers to contribute in the same easy-to-use way to other online sites using Kachingle. Readers are able to reward quality content without signing up for a subscription at each and every site you visit.

Over 100 online content sites now use Kachingle. They are focused on topics ranging from news to investigative journalism to social justice, media analysis and trends, political commentary, environmental, and technology. A complete list is on Kachingle's web site.

I'd appreciate it if you joined Kachingle. You can do this by going to [link to Your Site] and placing your mouse over the Kachingle Medallion on the web page. In the drop down menu it will give you the option to "Join Now". Click on that to sign up on the Kachingle web site.

When you join Kachingle, you start a subscription, contributing $5 per month to your Kachingle account via PayPal. The first time you visit a Kachingle site that you want to support, you mouseover on that site's Kachingle Medallion and click on "Start kachingling". Your visits to that site are then recorded from that point on and at the end of each month, Kachingle proportionately distributes your $5 to all the sites you selected & viewed that month, based on the number of times you went to each.

Thanks for your support,

[your name]

STAGE FOUR - rewards programs

Consider developing a rewards program for frequent Kachinglers. (You can see who is kachingling your site by clicking See who's kachingling this site when you mouseover your medallion, or by visiting your Sites I Own page at Kachingle.com and clicking View Kachinglers.)

Think about what your frequent Kachinglers might value. Some ideas include:
• Blog or Tweet about frequent Kachinglers on your site
• Have someone important at your site, a famous supporter of the site, or a famous person in your virtual "community" thank your Kachinglers

We are developing a Kachingle.com rewards program, too. We'll let you know more as Kachingle evolves.

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Getting Paid

Here's how Kachinglers' Pay-Ins (their monthly deposits) become Payments to your site (based on their visits), which become Pay-Outs (Kachingle sending money to your PayPal account):

[1] Each Kachingler makes a monthly Pay-In (hardwired at $5 for now, but flexibility is coming soon!).

[2] At the end of each Kachingler's month, their Pay-In is distributed among the sites they've kachingled in proportional Payments based on Daily Visits.

[3] The Payments from your site's Kachinglers show up the Current Balance shown next to each Medallion on your Sites I Own page.

[4] At the end of each month for your Medallion (based on the date it was created), Kachingle transfers the balance to your PayPal account, which we call a Pay-Out, less 15% which Kachingle retains to cover the cost of processing payments (we pay all related PayPal fees) and our commission.

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Still have questions about earning money with a Kachingle Medallion?

Browse the Sites I Own FAQ — to see answers to common questions from Site Owners

Ask a Question — in our Community Forum staffed by the Kachingle Team

Email Customer Care — if your question requires privacy or you don't want to join the Community

(Community Forums are hosted by Google Groups and may require separate login)