38 | Can a pay per article option actually boost subscriptions?

Welcome to the Paywall Podcast, where we discuss paywalls and paywall strategies for news and magazine publishers. This episode of the Paywall podcast is brought to you by Leaky Paywall. Leaky Paywall is the most flexible WordPress subscription platform. Find out more@leakypaywall.com where you can download Leaky Paywall for free. And now for today's episode.

In this episode, Tyler and I take a look at a YouTuber guitar instructor that is killing it with pay per article or pay per tab on his own website. So welcome to episode number 38 of the Paywall podcast. We're going to talk about how to enhance the relationship of your readers with single article or single content purchases. Let's dive in.

He's a podcast listener. He knows, he knows the Paywall podcast.

So, okay, here it is. Modern content for finger style guitar.

Yeah.

Okay, so what's he, what's, what's, what's he promoting? What's he selling?

Yes. So he essentially shows you how to play guitar. Certain, you know, arrangements. I don't know the specifics, I'm not a musician to that level. But he, he teaches you how to play complicated things. And he has a YouTube channel that's his main funnel into his site. So he's teaching people for free. That's his sort of. His free lead is through YouTube. People find him, they come back to the site and then they see all this content. And so he was running a different platform before moving to Leaky Paywall and that platform did not have the ability to do pay per post.

Gotcha.

And so he wanted to be able to offer people the ability to, you know, buy one post or subscribe on a monthly basis or a yearly basis. And the whole, the whole idea behind it is to like, if you go, if you go to one of the like premium songs.

Okay, let me go back.

Yeah, yeah. I think the Mandalorian one is this one. Yeah, I think that one's. Is that free to go to the bottom? He gives you a lot of free stuff here. And then at the very bottom there's like, there's more like enjoy the guitar tab. Yep, that's it. So you got two options. You can subscribe.

Okay. Or let me, let me go back.

Yeah.

Looking at this right here. So modern content. Continue subscribe and get unlimited access to over 500 tabs. That's a good, good film music, pop music lessons, more. Start playing now. So I can do that. I can purchase this tab?

Yeah. And so you can purchase a tab for three bucks.

Got it.

Or you can subscribe for five dollars. And so psychologically we're trying to get people to go to that subscribe option. Just I think placing a value. We talked about this. Evan and I talked about this yesterday. You're placing a value on every single post. Like it's. They're all worth like three bucks each or if you want the whole thing, then five bucks a month. So from a psychological standpoint, trying to all three.

Are they all $3 each tab?

Yeah, we've done a global price on it all.

Okay. So you could almost have this. Purchase this tab for $3.

Yeah, it's a good idea. I'll make a note of that.

You know what it is?

Yeah.

So that's cool. So I can now choose to get full access or just by the one tab. No free registration. I take it on this.

No, no free registration. There is free content. And he does have a sizable newsletter list already from. I don't know if he's. I don't. I can't remember if he's getting that from YouTube or is it just people who sign up? Maybe it's just people who sign up.

Okay.

That's growing that list. Um, but I think he's got a number of people who are not subscribers in that list. I don't remember how he collected those emails though.

Okay. All right, that might be something to consider. Is. Is a email list building strategy?

Yep, yep. Yeah, we, we talked about a strategy around here's content that you promote to your free mailchimp people. And here's what you would send to your paid list. Letting them know about content that's new and fresh and stuff that they only have access to.

Right.

Because that's mainly how the news industry does it. Go ahead.

What about a free registration to access all the free content? Does that make sense or is.

Yeah, I think that's a good idea. I mean he's already offering, I mean a ton of free content on YouTube.

Right.

So if people do migrate over to the site.

Right.

I don't think it could hurt to lock down free content on a free wall.

Grabbing the, Grabbing the email address is really, really key. Maybe the. Maybe the approach is to have maybe a few selective tabs offer an email address in exchange for watching a premium, you know, like a one time premium video. That could be an approach. I don't know how this content is categorized. Like, you know, if he could. If he has all the tabs like in the tab category, is that. Do you know he's. He.

I think he uses Tags in order to do, like, paid or free. So, I mean, it's all there.

There. Okay. All right. Okay. So maybe if it's. Maybe you can meter the. Everything in the free tag, just offer a couple without doing any registration, and then pop a free registration to get full access to all the. All that.

Yeah, I think that's. That's probably a good. A good route.

He's got to build the email list. Like, that's.

Yeah.

I mean, pay proposed. This is, like, fabulous. And I can't wait to hear, like, what's actually happening.

But yeah, it's working.

Working. Working is good.

Yeah. But he's telling me that his turn rate for his subscribers that have signed up has been lower since he went to the pay per post and subscribe option on the site. So I think he's getting, like, qualified.

Better.

Like, leads that come through. They're not just subscribing and then unsubscribing and getting what they want. They're. They're sticking along for the ride a bit longer. It's only been a few weeks.

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's new. But why do you think. You think it's. Because there is value assigned to each yes. Tab now.

Absolutely. They. They are now seeing that if I want to purchase one tab, it's $3, or I can have the whole ship for five bucks. Okay. That's a tremendous amount of value because there's 500 tabs 3 times 5. Like, oh, my God, it'd be a lot of money if I wanted all that. So let's just do five bucks. I see the value, I see the content. I'll stick with it. And he was also telling me that he tried not to send his premium members emails.

Really?

Yeah, because he's like, no. I mean, he said not very many, but a couple of people will or I guess, unsubscribe or cancel. It's kind of like, I guess if you notify people about an upcoming payment or. I don't know, there is a tendency, I think, across the board for people to be like, oh, my God, I forgot about that subscription. I need to cancel it right away. But it's not. I don't think it's.

Well, you don't have to. He doesn't have to. First for like B2C, you know, it's five bucks a month or whatever. I don't think you need to send that payment notification, but you should send a newsletter.

Yeah.

In order to show what's new. Right. Is that what he's Resisting. He doesn't want to send.

That's. Yeah, that was one of the concerns. Like when he sends. I think that's one of the reasons he wants to kind of have two separate lists like one to promote to free people. So. Yeah, and I said your messaging is going to be completely different from, from the paid and the free. So that could be part of it too. Because your, your paid newsletter is not the sales pitch. It's going to be more of a, you know, enjoy this.

Yes.

You know, ultimate premium guitar content that you can't get anywhere else or whatever. And then the free is more of a promotion around. Look at how much you get if you just sign up for five bucks. Like try this out.

I think, I think that's exactly right. I think if. Assuming he has mailchimp hooked up to this.

He sure does. And using our favorite newsletter glue integration to make it work.

Good. So yeah, so he has a premium newsletter and he has a free newsletter and so that free newsletter. So anybody who registers for free, let's say because they want to access all that free content, which they will do and help get that will then have the, the upgrade. Hey upgrade, you know, for. You can also have the, you know, buy, buy the individuals for tabs for three bucks or you know, get full access. And that messaging he wants to see, you know, he needs to deliver that messaging over and over again. So somebody 10 times, 20 times and then they finally wants it. But yeah, but then the premium newsletter becomes this new value add. It's a new, it's a new. Like why do you subscribe, you know, and pay. Because you, you'll also get the premium newsletter.

Yeah, you get it right away. And you know, we, we talked about, I think we talked about, you know, you could, you could put things in your newsletter, release things early to them and, and, or, or place direct links to things so they don't have to log in and just make, make their life easier in that, in that paid newsletter. So.

Oh, that's, that's pretty fantastic. Yeah. So I'd say so talking strategy, I'd say setting up that free registration, I mean he has to build his email list. It's just YouTube's great but you gotta, you gotta make people stick and newsletter. The email is the stick. And now, now he can control that 100. YouTube makes some sort of algorithm change and it blows up his rankings and Google and it does. You know, it hurts a lot less because now he's got a nice big email list and, and emails viral. Right. So people get an email and they got a friend who plays guitar and they're like, hey, you know, check this tab out or, or whatever. And then that, you know, email gets passed around. So it's just so important.

Yeah, yeah. Reminds me a lot of every other publication that we talk about. Whether it's, you know, tutorial based or news based or magazine based. It's. The single point of focus is growing the newsletter. Like growing the email list. Yeah, I thought about that this morning. Even just from like ordering food online, you know, it's like the most important thing for that restaurant is the email, if they can get it.

Yeah, yeah, it sounds obvious, but I talked to a publisher this week, was it yesterday? I remember all the days flow together and they, they didn't want to build their email list for maybe similar reasons. But there was sort of, at the end of the conversation, there was sort of that realization like, wait a second, this is the, this is the key to building paid revenues. And there's just no other, best, better direct marketing tool out there. You have to do it. You have to spend the time to get it right. And, and if you're doing paid and you're doing free, then you have a premium newsletter and you need to spend and then you can totally automate it.

Yeah, I think there's, I also think there's this misconception that if I grow this newsletter list, like, okay, I promote and I try to get subscriptions or whatever. Like that's, that's the point. Right? We're trying to convert people to being paid members or subscribers of whatever it is that we offer. But for even for this example, this guitar example, if you have a list of 5,000, 10,000 people in your local community, there is so much value for a local advertiser to want to be in front of that audience. It's so different than being on a display ad on the website or targeting people on Facebook or Google. The difference between the newsletter is that they're going, it's going straight to the inbox. And it's hard to find that kind of ad placement anywhere on the web, especially community like focused like that. So if I want to be, I'm in, you know, Morgantown, West Virginia. If I want to advertise to this community, going to the local newspaper here and putting in an ad for direct inbox, that's pretty powerful.

Communities, the great is the right word there. The publisher has the trust and the community. So when the publisher says, here's an advertiser, they're, they're in Effect promoting that advertiser. And the audience is trusting and they're being a little more discretionary than, you know, an advertiser just throwing Facebook ads up.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. It's a bit more. It's more personal when it lands on the inbox.

Yeah, no advertising revenue. All right, so before I ask you the questions. Question. I'm just looking at the structure of this article. Is this. Is this long style article. A lot of free stuff before you get asked to pay. Does this typical of all the articles?

I think so. I think he puts all the goods at the bottom.

This is. If I hit play here. How much is this? This is about two and a half minutes.

Yeah, three minutes.

And what is the actual paid version? A free snippet of the tab is that.

I think it's a download of, like, how to play it. Not a video download necessarily, but like a. A structured.

Okay, so this is. This is. You can play like this. Yeah, for the download. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. So he's. He's showing you the. The finished product.

Okay, got it. And so the content and then there's the download and then.

Yeah, and here's the arrangement if you want to play just like me.

Gotcha. Yeah, gotcha. All right. That's fantastic.

Yeah.

All right. I love.

I love this model, by the way. This, like. I think there's a lot of different people on YouTube doing this exact thing.

Yeah.

This is very sustainable. You can do a couple of these a week. You grow your. You grow your audience.

There's.

There's a good. A good entrepreneur model, subscription model here. Yeah.

From YouTube to. To your own tube.

That's right. Yeah.

Own your own your get generate paid revenues. Build email. Yeah. Advertising. Okay, so the. So the big question. Have. I know, I know you know, I know this answer. Bringing that. Ask it. Anyway, so have guitarists paid for individual tabs? I asked three questions. Have they paid for monthly subscriptions and have they paid for tabs and then changed. Do we do. Do we know the answers?

Yes, we do. And the answer is yes and yes. There's people who have certainly purchased single tabs. I think it happens almost daily for him. People will purchase the $3 tabs, and then some will purchase multiple tabs before they. Yeah, I think that's something he's seen, or at least I know for a fact that he's at least seen people purchase one and they're like, ah, what am I doing? Subscribe, you know, So I think for me, Paper Post is not a model that is like, sustainable. In the long run, you don't want people just giving $3 one time. We want recurring revenue from a psychological perspective. It's placing value on every single piece of content and it tells people, well, this is worth three bucks each. I just need to subscribe. Whereas if you didn't have that, people are like, oh, this is all, this is, all of. This is worth five bucks. You know, I don't know if it's worth it. You know, it's awesome.

Yeah, that's. So what I, what I, this sort of, the connection I make with this is that if you're on YouTube and you're teaching anything, you are a teacher and you're helping folks learn. This model would work for you if you create, you know, and I don't know if you know, and telling music guys sort of a course or if it's in just individual downloads or, or what it is. But this is teaching essentially. It's like if you want the whole in depth guide doing something, you pay.

Yeah.

And then, you know, here's, here's what we're gonna, what we're gonna teach you.

Yeah, yeah. This model, I remember when this model became a thing, I was, I must have been like 11 or 12, like right in the infancy of YouTube. And I learned how to play piano by watching people on YouTube back in the early versions of YouTube. And I remember that people would play about half the song or a quarter of the song, and then they would be like, hey, by the way, go to my website, check out everything I got up over there, and you can, you can subscribe for five bucks. So I think this is a very proven model. If you have a skill set, especially in the music world, people want to know how to play popular music. They want to know how to do that, and you know how to do that. This is a great, a great kind of turnkey solution model that's already been proven, I think, over and over and over.

Yeah, yeah, of course. So let's reverse engineer this a little bit. So I'm, I'm on YouTube here. I'm on the channel, I got the featured video and then I have a little intro and then I have a free guitar tab. So if I want to go to the guitar, free guitar tab and I end up with here, I'd say that this might be a place to test an email ask right here. It's like you get it and give us your email and you'll get the, you'll get our newsletter so you won't miss a tab. That's the benefit. And then you'll get this tab or. Or maybe it's a series of tabs or whatever that value. Like what's the value transfer between email and tab? Is it. Is it, you know, one tab, one email? Or do you need to give away like maybe a little playlist of tabs or something like that? I don't know. I'm just. I don't know. The business just.

Yeah, yeah, some.

Something. The value. Get the value bar high enough where somebody says, yeah, here's my email address.

And it might just be what you see here that might be enough, like his free content. It might. It might be very much enough because it says right there, free guitar tab. Go there and find it. So that's essentially, in my eyes, that's premium content that he's giving away for free.

So right now it has a value on it now.

Yeah, and he's. I mean, his songs, like the. He picks popular, like current. I think that's part of his model is finding current things that people are listening to or whatever. And.

Right.

Sucks people in from that and.

Right, Right. Yep. Getting. So we got traffic here. YouTube's the second largest search engine in the world, so that's good. And so that. Because this is the main call out here now, let's say if I land on an actual video, which is how YouTube is going to send someone, yeah, play this. And then I'm listening to this and that's fine. Well, let's just see if there's. Jumps right into the song.

Smart.

Go to the end.

People don't want to wait. They want to see right away.

Okay. And then let's just mute this. All right, so then. Okay, so then it's a call out to go here. Guitar tabs and block. Okay, so that's. That's. That's pretty good. I would say that you could be a little stronger with the, you know, you know, get this, get this. Get your free tab or get your, you know, the playlist or, you know, maybe it's a very specific. Call out. Yeah, you know, guitar tabs and blog. That's great and fine. But. And maybe you can make this a clickable link at the end. But some specific, like, go, go, go here. You gotta tell people, like, why they're gonna go there.

Yeah.

What are they gonna get? And get the thing. And that's gonna cost an email address and that's gonna build the email list and get the newsletter. But. Okay, then let's see what's here. So this is good. Free guitar tab and Blog. This is the same.

I think he. I think he links. Yeah. To each one individually back to his site.

Yep. That's perfect. You definitely want that. Yeah, you definitely want that. Okay, great. Yeah, I like this. The URL should be in the Intella Musica URL.

Yeah. Yeah, maybe that's.

That's a little like off putting. Like, is this hacked?

Yeah. Right. A little spammy maybe.

Yeah, it seems a little hacked. So I would. I would do that.

Look at this.

Comments. Oh, my goodness.

Oh, yeah. He is. He's a man, man. He is. He's doing it. He's making it happen.

Okay, so get a free registration in there to. For the free. For access to the free content that will build the email list that will drive paid subscriptions, it will drive paid individual tab purchases, it will drive future sponsorship, sponsored ad revenue.

Yep.

Put a free registration on that landing page from. From the channel so that folks have to draw. And again, this needs to be this URL intellimizica.com here. It's. It feels like spam to me. I don't want to click it, but.

Yeah.

And then. Yep, get the email, pop up here and get access to. To. To everything. And does that cover it?

Yeah, I think so. I think so.

Yeah. Site's really clean. Really great. Love it.

Yeah. Yeah, he's got it. He's got it going for sure.

Nice.

Yep.

Awesome. All right, well, I think we just recorded a paywall podcast.

I think so. So there you go, Evan, on your way to. He does lessons, I believe, in person, too. So he told me that he listens to the pod when he's driving around. So here's some super targeted information just for you, Evan.

Yeah. Hey, Evan. Yeah? You got a cool thing going. Keep rocking it. That's awesome. Yeah. All right, cool. I'm going to stop recording and we'll catch everybody next time.

All right, see you later. Thanks for listening to the Paywall podcast. If you'd like to get in touch to discuss subscription strategy, go to leakypaywall. Com. See you next time.