Case study: How to set up your paywall to grow your website traffic and email list

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 and now for today's episode.

So we're going to answer a big question today. We get this question all the time. I get this question all the time at least. And it boils down to this. How do you increase your website traffic and build your email list and grow paid subscriptions with your subscription system? And just to couch this a little bit, I get a lot and I don't know if you get this too, Tyler, but people say, geez, if I put up a paywall, it's going to hurt my traffic, right? And it's which by default is going to hurt my ad revenue. So we see this a lot with magazine publishers who have traditionally come in with a ton of advertising revenue that are, that may be considering setting up a subscription system, a paywall. We see this with food bloggers that have a ton of advertising and they may win the award for most advertising jammed in on a website. And we have been talking to a bunch of them and they are considering setting up a content access or ad free plan. But the bottom line is I think that a lot of publishers think that the paywall or subscription system hurts their traffic, which like the first reaction is hurting the ad revenue. So do you hear this at all with your crowd?

Is this a. Yeah, to some degree. And a lot of publishers that I speak to are already at the point where advertising isn't really working for them. So they don't need to be convinced as much on going the digital subscription route. They see that that is a key path for them to maintain any kind of sustainability.

So they're at the pain point and they need to get reader revenue.

That's right.

Yeah, yeah, that's fair. And that's when people start looking for solutions and then they get in touch and they want to demo and all that. That is absolutely fair. Now the other thing I'll say too is that we look at a lot of paywalls here. Tyler and I are constantly, hey, check out this great setup or ooh, check out this disaster. And I want to say that most of the paywalls into implementations we set up are unfortunately driving readers away more than welcoming them in to join the party. And I get it, it's you set up a paywall, it costs X amount to get full access. And most people aren't ready for it. But there's a better way. We talk about it a lot and today we're going to go through and we're going to show you exactly how we do it. We'll show a couple things on our YouTube channel as far as what we're talking about, but I think you can follow along pretty clearly on the podcast. And welcome to the podcast, the Paywall podcast, where we get super nerdy about how to build paid subscriptions for publishers. Okay, here's what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about nurturing your readers through your paywall. And that means building your email list to grow your audience. We're going to talk a bit about SEO. We get a lot of questions on how does a paywall affect SEO? What should I do with my SEO settings? We'll talk about the importance of your newsletter and we'll finish off with a case study, which if you're on YouTube, you're probably looking at Mexico News Daily. And we're going to talk about what happened to them, who over the course of the last year when they set up a paywall and how we set it up. Okay, now what we're gonna. What I wanna just start with is if you take our recommendation here for setting up a framework to grow your traffic, you're gonna grow your, your email list and your paid subscriptions by 20% or more. Just gonna say that flat out right now. This is a really important episode for, we think, for our publishing audience. Okay, so let's, first, I want to get the low hanging fruit over with. First, let's talk about SEO a little bit. Kind of the intersection of a paywall or subscription system and search visibility. We're not SEO experts here, but boy, do we talk about it a lot. So we have some very fundamental, fundamental answers. And we've gotten questions on SEO, so I thought I'd share the questions that we've gotten and then jump into, jump into, get through the answers. Okay, now, so the basics. How do you optimize your paywall for maximum SEO impact? That's a question. Do you want to, do you want to take a stab at this, Tyler?

I'll let you take it and then I'll.

Okay. All right. So the question is, okay, how do I make sure that I don't screw my SEO when I set up a paywall? And there's a lot of answers to this, but the easy answer and the thing that you should breathe a sigh of relief is with a meter paywall, let's say with leaky paywall. If you set the meter to at least, let's say one free article per month, then Google will ignore the restrictions and it'll be able to fully index every single article on your website. We could talk about flexible sampling and things like that. And you can do with a hard pay wallet you can set up, you refer bypasses so you can still let Google in. So there are lots of things you can do technically to make sure that Google comes in, but really as long as you set the meter to one free article or more per month, Google will index absolutely everything. The short answer?

Yeah, and I think that's as much control as you have really. You can't control how Google is going to adjust their algorithm on any given week or day or hour. And you, you can't really do much about how they decide to funnel traffic or not funnel traffic to your website. You could work until you're outta your mind trying to craft SEO based articles that are keywordy and trying to meet a specific search term which yeah, maybe you could have some success but you're ultimately when it comes to Google traffic, you're stuck with whatever they decide to do. And yeah, and we do have, there are ways to mitigate that and maybe we could talk about that next.

Sure, yeah, we could talk about it. I'll just, I just want to add the mindset that a lot of publishers come in is geez, I've been, and I, for some reason recently I've been dealing with this more is that gee, I've been choosing the articles that I want to restrict with my current paywall. And the problem with choosing your articles that are going to be free in order to entice people in is that you're always wrong in your choices. You may think as a publisher that you know, but the only person that makes a decision on what article is important to them is the inbound reader. They're the ones that decide what's important. You could write a fluff piece that took you 60 seconds to write, but if it has their name in it, they're going to read it. They're going to want to read it because it's about them. That's just a simple example. People that come into a site are coming in through Google search or an article that got shared in social that they think is interesting. So it's important to them. So the meter takes the burden off of that decision making. You literally can just wash your hands, be like, okay, I set My meter to one or two maybe, depending on your volume of content. And you just say, okay, we'll let the meter do the job. So when somebody comes in and whatever random article they want to choose they get to see, it meant you, the publisher, don't have to deal with picking free articles.

It's true. And what's really interesting about that is sometimes these articles that you like, giving people the choice to decide when they want to sign up for access or whatever the meter is set at. Oftentimes you'll find that the low traffic stories are sometimes the highest converge conversion type stories when it comes to people actually paying at some point. Just because you think the story has high value to the audience and maybe it does, and maybe they'll, they'll want to read, doesn't always mean that it's like the right story to be blocking.

Right? That's right. Yeah. Yep. It's a tough decision to make. Now that sort of segues into the next question I got is how do you balance the visibility and revenue with a hard versus a soft or metered paywall? How do you choose whether to go hard versus soft? Do get this question quite a lot because if you go with the hard paywall, then you're doing that, you're choosing your free articles.

Yeah.

If you're going to give away free articles. Yeah. And the sort of, the simple answer here is the hard paywall is you're really shutting down Google and AI to get to your content. So there's a benefit there. And then the soft paywall, however, because it's being generous and you're just leaking one or two free articles, let's say each month, Google, you get all that Google visibility and you may get some AI visibility. We don't know a hundred percent yet. But what I usually tell publishers is that if you have a strong brand or like an incredibly tight niche, like we have B2B super deep research level information that you know can't be gotten anywhere else. Maybe, maybe you're a financial publisher and people love you and they're dying for your information because you are so accurate with your predictions, then setting up a hard wall might be the way to go. Because you have the brand or you have the traffic and people, you people know who you are and they want your stuff. That's where you start hardening your paywall. And you can harden a category of content. You can harden everything. You can still do set up a free registration to build your email list. But that's sort of the hard versus soft for most publishers that we deal with 90%. I would say the metered or soft paywall is, is the way to go to take away your burden of responsibility for what's like with two with you, Tyler? I think that's true for local news.

Oh, for sure, for sure. Yeah, it's. You definitely set the meter, let the meter do the job. And for our local news publisher, maybe the only thing that you're hard walling would be your, your E Paper, your E Edition. That would require some sort of payment that you couldn't just get for free.

Yeah. Because otherwise you get all the content.

That's right.

So. Okay, cool. All right, so I'm just going to move on. We're going to crank through SEO stuff. The other question I've gotten is about previews about like excerpt text on. On articles. And the question is how do you should you and can you craft compelling previews to enhance SEO? And so the answer to that is if you have a soft paywall or leaky paywall, you're. You're gonna get and you have a free registration, you're gonna be able to deliver more content upfront. If it's a hard pay wall and you're just leaning on previews for SEO, that's a different story for sure. But I don't think. And here's where I get a little muddy with my Google knowledge. My SEO knowledge is Google must have some sort of algorithm that looks at, at a restricted article that's hard locked and says, yeah, we're not going to really rank this one too high because it's clearly been restricted. What do you think?

Yeah, it's. I would imagine that's true to some level. And if you're worried about trying to get your excerpt to rank in Google, it just seems a very difficult position to be in if you're like doing the hard paywall route. Because again, as you mentioned before, if you're doing the hard paywall, you better have a strong brand, you better have a legacy. So they must know you. This must be the Wall Street Journal. You better have some loyalty built in, an audience built in if you're planning to go this route. And you probably shouldn't be leaning on SEO that much to begin with.

Right? Okay, let's see. Last question I have here is core web vitals, and how do you leverage core web vitals for. For paywall sites? So what are core web vitals? The simple answer is how fast does your site load so that people don't have to wait for your content to load? And I'm currently working with a pretty big Spanish publisher right now that's suffering from this big time. Their site is, they have a huge amount of traffic, they're writing a lot of advertising, and they're really struggling with getting their page speed. And that means that you need to have your web host has enough horsepower. Your website is designed, your themes are designed in a way that, that content loads quickly. Your images are compressed and your code is pretty clean. You don't have a million plugins that are installed that are cleaning things up. That's core web vitals. It's a big part of Google's algorithm now that really started with mobile, but now it's really about site speed and making sure that the reader isn't waiting. Yeah, yeah.

The number one thing you could do if there's any takeaway in that is to have some kind of front end caching happening, which leaky paywall does support. There's not many paywalls, metered paywalls that support front end caching. If you could turn that on. And you'll see a massive improvement in your site speed because you're not having to load every single page with invoking CPU and PHP every single time.

Yep, yep, yep, yep. No, it's. Get it to run fast. It's a technical solution, really. It's a, it's an easy solution. Yeah. In the grand scheme of things, I would say. Okay, so that's the, that's the SEO stuff. Now we're talking about building traffic, right. Growing your audience, growing your email list and growing paid subscriptions in one shot. Okay, here, let's say your website is running technically and how do you do the rest of these things? So what, what I want to do is I want to pull up a framework here and we're gonna. And this is the framework, by the way, that the case study we're gonna talk about. Mexico News Daily is, has been using for just about over a year. We have hundreds of publishers doing this, but we're going to focus on this. This is the Mexico News Daily is the largest English news platform for Mexico. And they have a, they have a quite a lot of traffic and they're building their audience very quickly, building paid subscribers very quickly. I'm gonna, and we're gonna show you the framework that got them there. So me. You're still seeing my screen, right? Yep. Okay. This invokes a few things. This invokes something that you need to set up on your website. A free registration flow. This invokes your newsletter, your Newsletter has to be compelling and active to send traffic back to your site. And then you need some really some basic targeting to convert paid subscribers. How do you build your email list? That's, that's really. If you're looking at the 1, 2, 3, 4 on this casual to paid flow framework, one is all about traffic coming in which we just talked about. Google sending you traffic, social sending you traffic, your newsletter will be sending you traffic. People hear about you, they, you end up with tons of random traffic on your site. And the first step in dealing with that is, is a free registration. You have to build your email list today. This is probably the most important part of the subscription process I think because Google is deranking publishers and there's nothing you can do about it. Tyler, you, you just mentioned Google changes their algorithm and they just, they did this March they had a big change. They do every year they have a big change. It's, this is nothing new. It's been going on for, since the advent of Google. They change things, you suffer, right? Oh my, my content's not ranking high enough. Okay, what do you, how do you solve that problem? You solve that problem by getting off of the Google and social media addiction train. I don't know what to call it but the folk your focus should be on built on controlling what you can control. And that's your email list and email. With all the changes in the web, email has persevered as the de facto one to one communication tool we all live with. And it really hasn't since the dawn of the Internet. It hasn't changed. Email is email and will continue to be because it's just the perfect solution for asynchronous communication. Which that was a big word but it means that you can send an email person can wait a few hours, few days and then reply to it and send back. And it works for our lifestyle. And the email list is in totally your control as a publisher. In order to build that email list you want to leverage your content like you have the best content for your reader. Like you're killing it. They want your content, they might be willing to pay for it right away, but they will give you an email address for it and that's the free registration. So you have essentially you, you might set the meter to one or two free articles a month. One Pro is generally better. But we do have publishers that have an awful lot of content they're publishing that might give away two articles per month. And then what you do is you basically say hey, if you register for Free, which means email plus password. You're asking them for a password, extend their email on the article that they'll, they can read that article right now. And it works like crazy. The flow is they get to your site, they read one article without being bothered, they go to a second article and it says, hey, register for free to read this story or read this story right now. They put in an email, they put in their password to create an account and it unlocks that article. And they get, and you're giving them that second article plus you're telling them that you're, they're going to get the newsletter too. So you're sending that email address into your email software and you're building your list. So, so Tyler, what does that do, what does that free registration do for a publisher in your experience?

Yeah, I was gonna jump in and tell you like a quick little story about kind of Google and your newsletter, like comparing the two traffic sources. So I've got a number of publishers that send, let's say they've, on average they've got a list of 20,000 people on their newsletter that's come through their free registration. Some are just signups that pay right away. So they've got these ginormous lists of people in their, in their communities. They'll send out a newsletter, let's say 9am or, I don't know, 4pm and right away I've seen traffic go from two people on a site to a thousand people at the same time. And so they're like, they're getting to decide, okay, it's time to drive some traffic. Let's do it. Boom. Push a button. And people start flooding in through their email newsletter. If you're just waiting for Google, yeah, you're going to grow your audience. You're not probably not going to have that kind of power to send a thousand people at the exact same time on your website. So just think about that in terms of the power of pulling in people from your free registration, growing your newsletter list and then you ultimately have control over, over the eyeballs and when they come to your site, makes your ad, your local advertising more valuable that you have on your site and just ultimately more control over, over the ecosystem.

Yeah. And time, I'll, I'll pick on you mentioned time, like sending it at a certain time, like 9:00am or whatever you decide. And that's, and that if you think about it, what Tyler said is you're controlling when to push the button, you're controlling what time to do that. And audiences are Different. We talk to news publishers have a different cadence than fishing magazines. That's right. So it's your audience. And you know what days of the week are important. If you're, if you're a, if you're an enthusiast publication, then Thursdays, Fridays are super important for you because people are getting ready to be enthusiastic about their hobby on the weekend. So. So it's. And Google won't let, like you said, Google won't let you do that, but your email newsletter list will let you do that. Precisely. So that's cool that you're actually seeing the traffic swell.

Yeah.

During the newsletter push.

That's great. I get notifications for some publishers in their analytics that when traffic reaches more than 600, let's say people at the same time send an alert and let us know. And so you can. There's a direct correlation between the newsletter fires and traffic increases right away to a specific story or stories.

Yep. Yeah, that's great. And I'll just finish by saying that don't underestimate the power of your content as a publisher. People want it and if you, and if you give them a free way to get more of it, they will take it. And the free registration, you're. It's a little more friction because you're asking for an email and a password which logs them in and gets them registered on your site, which lets you track their behavior, which is another really cool benefit. But you're using your content to say, hey, you can have a little more for free. You can have my newsletter and you can have this article or two if you register. And what we see is this converts 20% more email subscribers. Easy. Like 20% is like the average number. And because what you're doing is as a publisher, you're drawing the line in the sand. You're not just doing a newsletter pop up box like most publishers have. Like you get to the site, you might read an article or scroll down a little bit and then boom, it pops up. A newsletter. Or you might just have the newsletter box sitting in the side bar. You might have the newsletter call out in the content for mobile. And it works. Yes, but it does not work as well as the free registration. And you get better readers because they're choosing, you're making them choose a password.

Right.

They really want it.

I've got actual, I've got actual data right in front of me from a publisher that we work with that had that. This is 30 days of data for having your traditional widget for signing up to a newsletter. And that's all it does. It doesn't give you any free content. It just puts you on the newsletter versus the free registration that prompts when you trigger it. This is 30 days of data. This is a small publisher. They see about 40,000 page views per month. So it's a small publisher. Okay. The standalone newsletter widget on the sidebar on every single page. Got 12 signups.

Okay.

In 30 days. Okay. Not great.

12 and 30. Okay.

Yeah. And the free registration funnel saw 193.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

Wow.

So the writing is clear. And that signup form, that widget is on every page.

Right.

Same as the free registration. The difference is the free registration is gaining access to content. They want the content, they'll sign up for it, they'll get on your newsletter list, they'll become a free user, and then off you go.

Yep. Yeah. I would argue this is the most important part of the whole funnel right here. Building your list with drawing the line in the sand. You have to give us your email, choose a password, and you get access to that next piece of content. Yeah. All right, so let's. Let me just back up. We're going to hop on to the next one, which is the newsletter. So you have casual readers coming in from Google and social, et cetera. They get to read, let's say, an article, and then on the second article, they get a registration prompt. They have to enter their email and password, which unlocks that article for them, gets them on the newsletter. And then now we're here and ready to talk about the purpose of your email newsletter. I just, I want to say, just keeping it simple upfront, is that when you have a free registration like this and you're growing your email list, and by the way, your email from the registration needs to be tagged or segmented in your email software. So it's. So you can put your finger on this growing list of free registered readers and send them promotions or whatever you need to do with them. But you, by definition have two email segments now. You have a free segment and you have a paid segment. So when somebody registers for free, you. They get sent into, let's say, mailchimp, and they're now tagged as free, and you get to message them to upgrade in their newsletter. Every time you send the newsletter, which is part of the targeting that you need to do for these free registered readers. And we live in a. And then the paid. When somebody pays, you want to move them off the. You want to move the segment off of free and move them into a paid Segment so they. You're not bothering them with upgrade to paid subscriptions if they're already a paid subscriber. Pretty simple. But you got to do that, and it's easy to do. So we live in a world where we're just so bombarded with messaging that in order for you to cut through the noise, you need to be very repetitive about your upgrade messaging. And your content is your superpower. You have the content that your readers want. Are they ready to pay for it? That's a whole other question. Most people are not ready to pay for it right now. They're not, but they may be ready in a month or 12 months. And that's where this free registration and then the email newsletter nurtures that relationship. So if I'm on your free list, I get the newsletter. And on every single newsletter, with all your articles that are in that newsletter, you need to have upgrade messaging. Maybe a little banner at the top and then a big. Like a. Almost like a mini landing page on the bottom, which explains the benefits of upgrading and becoming a paid subscriber that is leveraging your growing email list, the control you have over that email list with your newsletter, the messaging that's in your newsletter, you have to take a look at your. Your free newsletter and make sure that it has upgrade messaging. The purpose of your free newsletter is to sell paid subscriptions, to have upgrade messaging. That is literally the purpose of your newsletter. Yeah. Your content's in there, and you click an article and you go to your site and you get messaging on the site that says upgrade to pay to read everything. So that's. That's what your free newsletter needs to do. Okay, Tyler, you're looking very pensive there. Yeah.

I was just thinking your. Your next step, once they do pay, like, the reason for that segmentation, this paid cohort of people will be smaller, obviously.

Yep.

Your opportunity at that point is to get them to pay even more. So there's just layers of things to come. Once people sign up for free.

Right.

Once they decide to pay after being shown your content for six months or whatever it takes, they do become a paid subscriber. And now you. You've got them in this smaller cohort of people where you can maybe ask them for some donations, maybe you can ask them to upgrade to a premium plus plan or whatever. I don't know. There's opportunity beyond just getting them to convert to a subscriber. So once. Once they do become a subscriber, their value as your reader, like, skyrockets.

Bingo. Love it. That's right. Your paid list is now a small but super powerful list that can possibly upgrade and pay for other things.

Yeah, I'll just say, I'll just say this one last thing. The free registration list. Sometimes the open rate that I see on average is, I don't know, 35%, 40%, which is still really high. But that paid list, the smaller cohort can be like upwards of 65, 70% will open that. These are like super engaged people in your community, in, in your area that want to hear from you, that respect what you have to say and will likely give you more money if you ask for it.

Yeah, for sure. They're, they're, they're your super fans.

Right?

Yeah, I, I would add. You can. Asking for donations is a great idea. These are the people to survey. These are your super fans. They're paying you. They want your stuff. They love your stuff. They're the ones that will give you ideas for new products. So tomorrow you could send out a survey and make it three, three simple questions or something like that and then two, two softball questions. And the third one is what type of content would you like to see from us in the future? That would be a super simple question to ask from your best readers who will love to tell you what they want because that customers love to do that. Like here's what I. Oh, you want to ask me what you. What if I'm an enthusiastic customer? I'm always tell companies what I want. Please. Especially in software it's I love that little feedback box. Pop me up a simple little box. I don't want 12 questions. I want one little box. And then tell me what you want, which is something you can do on your website, by the way, for your paid subscribers. That's another podcast. Okay, you have. Let's talk. You have another example. Salem Reporter. What do they do on their pay for their paid subscriber list? Don't they have another thing to sell? Yeah.

Yes, they send a free newsletter. They send a paid newsletter and the two newsletters are very similar. There's not a big difference between the two. But that paid newsletter that contains some additional content that didn't make the. That wasn't around in the morning, perhaps when they sent that free newsletter. This is part of their offering when they. When you sign up for a paid plan, not only do you get access to all of our content, but you're going to get a premium newsletter and you're going to get a first look at content as we publish it throughout the day. It's a big value and it doesn't take that much more effort for them to produce. It's basically the same template, the same layout, swap stories. The messaging at the top might be a bit different, but that's it. And they fire it. Done.

And obituaries, did you mention obituaries?

Oh yeah. Like as a service that they offer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They do offer an obit service. Again, Salem is an all digital publication, not a news like paper, physical newspaper publisher. And they offer the ability for anyone to submit an obit on their site and they take payment for it. I don't. I think it's a hundred bucks. Maybe you submit all the information, all the details and then it creates a draft in the back of their WordPress ready for them to adjust whatever they need to adjust. And the money's already in their account and they hit publish. Done.

Awesome.

These are ups. It works. Yeah. People you go to their site and see every. Every obit that you see on the site I believe is one that's been paid for by the person who submitted it. So.

Yep. That's great.

So.

Salemreporter. Com. Local news success. If you're a local news publisher and you're listening to this, go check out what they're doing. Sign up, register for free on their site. Cause they're running free registration.

Yeah.

As well. You'll get their newsletter. See how they handle their newsletter and enjoy growth.

Yeah.

Yeah. Cool. All right. Last thing we're going to talk about today. I guess we didn't really talk a lot about website targeting in this framework. And I will mention that when you're driving traffic back to your website, you're. They may or may not see the article depending on your metering settings. It's the paywall. But you. They will get the upgrade messaging and they need to see that. Upgrade messaging a lot. Be restrictive. One or two free articles per month depending on if you're a low volume publisher it could be one more article period. One article per month is pretty typical. Works really well. Maybe two articles per month if you're a high volume, let's say news publisher. And then you're producing upgrade messaging so that your readers need to see that upgrade messaging 10 times a month or more. And that will. Every time they see it, it means they're on their newsletter. It means they're interested in an article that they don't get to see and they're basically being denied for things they want. And that increases their chances of saying what? Let's support these guys for a Year. Which is a. Which is the most popular plan for. Across all our publishers, the annual recurring plan is the most popular. Some of them have gone as far as to simplify and only produce an annual recurring plan or sell an annual recurring plan. And it works like gangbusters. So keeping the checkout super simple. But that targeting and that really means just the upgrade messaging that blocks the content is the secret sauce in getting those readers to pay. Just to wrap it up on the. On this framework is you have the Google and Social, et cetera, traffic coming in. You pop up a free registration early, like one free article or zero free articles. That works really well too. They get the next article. They get your newsletter. That's the promise. They're logged in because they give you an email and password. So they're logged into the site. You're tracking them. Your newsletter is now sending them all your content every day, every week, whatever your cadence is, hopefully daily. And then that's driving traffic back to your website, which then may or may not give them the article they want. Usually not. That means they get an upgrade message and they see that upgrade message over and over and they get pestered into finally breaking down and saying, I really want this content. Here's my money. And now you have a paid subscriber. And then that can take a day. Can be same day, somebody comes in and reads a couple articles, loves what they're seeing, you're nurturing them correctly and literally you've nurtured them in the period of an hour. Then they pay. But it might take 12 months. Might be somebody who just can't pay or not ready to Pay. But in six months or one month or 12 months, now they're ready. Now they've finally gotten to the point where it's, I just need to have access to this content. Okay. All right, let's go. Last thing. Case study. Let's look at Mexico Daily News. And I'm going to do one more. Do one more thing to look at here before I forget. And we. So we onboarded Mexico Daily News a little over a year ago. Mexico News Daily. I keep flipping those two and they came off of a big SaaS platform, I will mention, and had a pretty, pretty standard subscription set up going. They had you read a couple articles and then they popped up, hey, you gotta pay to subscribe. Pretty typical setup. Wasn't really doing what they wanted it to do. Why? Because of what we just talked about. They weren't nurturing their readers. So, Tyler, remember you were pretty heavily involved in this One bringing them over. And from what I recall, you told me that there was a lot of conversation about putting up the free registration and being really restrictive about it. In other words, just set it up so it's one or two free articles. And I think from what I remember, they were hesitant about doing that. Does that sound about right?

That. That would be correct. As most publishers are, they're. They're a little bit frightened by the idea of locking down content even in a free registration scenario. They get a little bit worried about their traffic as publishers do.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It's a common thing. You're. You feel like you're putting up a wall, you're blocking and you're driving people away. But what we just discussed, the free registration framework that we have set up, is you're nurturing because you're inviting people in with free content. So in the year that's transpired, if you, if we look at their settings right now, they offer two free articles before you have to register for free. So let me see here. I have. Let's just gonna see if I can trigger the paywall real quick here. Hope I'm not logged in here. Yeah. Okay, here it is. So I read a couple articles and then I get the, the registration, which is email and password submit. And that free registration has been in place for over a year. This was. They were hesitant about doing it, but what actually happened? So I talked to Travis, who's the CEO and publisher there recently, and I was trying to get. I'm just going to say what he said because I asked him about the traffic from one year ago versus today that's going to the site after putting in a restrictive free registration in the middle of the nurturing. And the word he used was we've had significant growth. So we look at our data, we see 20% growth for your email list and paid subscriptions. I think his growth might be higher, but that was his words. And we're talking like six digits when it comes to like email list size. So that's. I know that's a very broad range here, but it's a big, it's a big list, it's substantially sized list and it's growing like crazy. And the system is doing exactly what we promise and what we showed in the framework in that you're building this email list quick, so quickly that your newsletter. And they have a daily newsletter and they have a week, they have a lot of newsletters going up. And I know, Tyler, exactly what's happening. Cause they're using Our flow letter service, email service. But they're driving so much of their free registered readers back to the site that it's overwhelming whatever they're losing with Google search, which was like the original thing we talked about and so significant growth from one year over one year ago to where we are today. And that's what you want as a publisher. You want it all. You want your cake, you want to eat it. That's the weirdest expression, but I'll just say it. You get, you get email list growth. So a properly set up paywall, this is all we do is grows your email list, grows your traffic. Your advertisers are happier because of it because you have a bigger list that you can put them into. You have more traffic to your site. And guess what? You convert more paid subscribers. You really do get it all if you set it up right, which is how we've just shown you how to do it. And it doesn't have to be super complicated either. I'm going to show you one of their, just real quick here. This is one of their newsletters and they're still working on the format of their newsletter, but this is one of their daily emails. And it's, they have this little banner. So it starts off with the feature story, right? And then the title and excerpt of the feature story, it says read more. And then right under that is a, an orange banner that says subscribe today. So it's just a simple horizontal banner that cuts into the content and then they have their articles for the day. And these will take you back to the site and trigger upgrade messaging. And then they have a very simple second message at the bottom that says, hey, unlock full access at the bottom. And we're working with them to make this messaging a little more compelling. But it's really too, it's just one little simple message at the top and I would argue one more comprehensive message at the bottom with the benefits of becoming a subscriber. And your reader, each reader is seeing this every day, right? Every single day in your email. And if they clicked on an article, they're going to see it on your website too. It's the constant reminder to upgrade for full access, get the newsletter, get whatever other benefits you as a publisher are giving them. And it works. It's, I think if you break it down, it's actually a pretty simple idea, but it needs to be executed the right way and in a very much like a nurturing manner where you're really taking care of your readers. Did I miss something? I think that wraps it up.

I think that covers it. I think it's time to have some Mexican food for lunch or something.

Oh my God, you're right. That sounds like a great idea. Thanks for listening. Find us infoen101.com if you want to reach out and we'll talk to you next time. See you, Tyler.

Yeah.

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.