Episode 10 | Interview with Wally Wallace of 50Fish on Social Media Marketing

Welcome to the Paywall Podcast where we discuss paywalls and paywall strategies. We will talk with some of the publishers that we work with at Zine 101. The things that work and the things that don't. There are so many amazing things you can do in the digital world as a publisher to not only increase your digital subscriptions, but also engage your audience. Let's get started.

Welcome again to the Paywall Podcast. This is episode number 10 and I'm here with Wally Wallace from 50 Fish in Maine. And we are going to talk about social media marketing and we're going to talk about social media, probably some other marketing rabbit holes depending on where we go with a publication called Small Boats Monthly. We're going to talk about this particular publication as, as an example. Now, Wally, you're, you're from 50 Fish. You're, you're based in Yarmouth, Maine, I believe, is that right?

Yes, that's correct.

Beautiful.

We're based at home now, which is spread out. Yes. We have an office environment.

We're all based at home now. It's kind of, kind of the way it is. Well, welcome, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Oh, yeah. And you guys are, I guess what I would see you as an e commerce design and marketing agency with a focus on WordPress. Does that sound about right?

Yeah, pretty much. We started in E commerce and I think that's still a big focus for us. WordPress is something that pretty much all of our clients use in some form or another as an add on to an E commerce or as their platform. So it's a big part of our business as well.

Yeah, WordPress has really grown to dominate it, especially in the publishing space. There was a survey, they went out last year, it was a pretty big survey and they found that about 50% of publishers, large, medium and small, sort of a range, we're using WordPress. That's a big pain.

Yeah. It's come a long way back. When we first looked at cmss, we found Joomla and even the predecessor to Joomla and WordPress. WordPress is now the dominant one for us.

Yeah, I remember going through the same thing. I was looking at Drupal, Joomla and WordPress and, and they were all around version one. And I, and I'm not a developer but you know, I'm dangerous with code. So I remember setting up WordPress and they did the, I don't know if they still do the famous five minute setup, but that was the famous five minute setup. And it, and it installed on the server and it was up and running and literally in just a few minutes it was really easy. And then I went to one of the others and failed completely.

Yeah.

And I was like, yeah, okay, I guess my mind's made up.

We're going WordPress.

So anyway. But yeah, no, it has become a quite, it's for and for publishing. It's so flexible, you know, I mean you have, you have all these pre made solutions. I mean just thousands and thousands of developers contributing all these great plugins and themes. And of course now the challenge is a little different, right. Where you, you just need to, need to know what you're doing in WordPress to kind of keep it all organized.

I think that's it. It's, you know, it is very simple. Somebody can get into it and plug in a theme and go with it. But what we try to do is, is elevate that and take it to the next level. So we, we, for a lot of our clients, we, we kind of customize the themes so you know, the, it really, we have a base theme that we work from that we built and from there we, we can take it in any direction we want. That's, that's what we do with Small Boats as well, is really kind of cool. Build off the basis basics that are there and design a new site that is how how we and the client wanted it to look.

Yeah, that's absolutely the way to go. I'm so happy to hear you say that because then you can control the design aspects and I'm going to assume not litter it with functionality that gets in the way.

Right. That's a custom site and that's how we prefer to work now. We really don't use plugin themes any longer. Right. Yeah, it's really all custom at this point.

Yeah, we're in the same boat. Maybe use a pun. Yeah, yeah, you gotta, you gotta work with your own theme. Otherwise you just, it's, you can't debug a third party theme.

Oh gosh. But I'm not developing either, so I, I understand the basics of it. I did some development back in the early 2000s and once people start going away from tables, I kind of faded out of the picture.

Yeah, right. I think you and I sound kind of alike in that way. Well, let me dig into the Small Boats website and before we get into the social media marketing aspect, I just want to kind of set this up so there's a little history here. So I know we both been working on this site for years. We set up Small Boats Monthly originally with their old design. We didn't really touch their design, but we did set up leaky paywall. So we started paid subscription, paid subscriptions on the site. It was just paid subscriptions. There was no free registration which is currently on the site. We set up issuem for web based issues and we also built the iOS and Android apps. That's all integrated with, with the paywall system and the issues and that, that seemed to run pretty well for. For a while there. They are a, I'd say 95% digital only publication.

They.

They're a magazine, but they're digital issue magazine.

Yeah. So they, they correct. They are. They're digital. They have an annual print that is basically a collection of the digital. The best digital stories from the year previous and. Yeah, but really it's. It's a digital publication.

Yep.

Yeah.

Do you have any idea how the print, the annual print does for them?

It does. Well, it's been actually we've been. We started releasing articles from previous editions of the print. The print goes back to 2007. Right. There is, you know, the digital started in 2014. So there's seven years of print articles about small boats that we're starting to re release on the site.

Interesting. So you're bringing, you're unlocking those articles, you're bringing them forward.

Yeah. And it was, it was mostly a newsstand piece. The print publication. It really wasn't a subscriber based item. It was, it was more of a newsstand item. And then it was sold on the wooden boat store and. Right, right.

Oh, that's interesting. I did not know that. So they really did start off as a print publication.

They did, they did. But small boats became a way to really test the waters in digital and see how that system works. Right, right. Yeah, it's been exciting. Yeah.

No, that's great. They get subscriptions through the app stores. They get subscriptions online. I actually checked in this morning and see that the free registration wall that you guys set up for them is really converting a lot of. A lot of visitors into registrants on.

So. Yeah, yeah, the paywall is fun. That is something that, that I know you guys have put a lot of time into, but it's a, it's a really fun thing to play with and see how little changes like that make a big difference.

Fun, that's a good word.

I like that.

Paywall is fun. Come on over here, we'll have some.

Fun joke about it. It's a really, it's a. The publishing world seem it. It's a promotional machine and you know, it's all based around the marketing and the product. You know, there's no cost to the product necessarily, like a, like a E Commerce product. You pay $20 and you sell it for 40. Right, right. There's unlimited supply. Right, right. An amazing business model and we've been excited to play with it.

That's great.

That's awesome.

So a few years ago, two years ago, well, you guys redesigned the site, I think.

Yeah, yeah, it was a process. We spent, you know, a fair amount of time with them going through edits and designs and, and really the content to get it laid out the way we want it. But it's been live for a little over a year now, I think.

A little over a year. It's awesome. So I just have to say, and I've told you this before, that I love this design. I mean, I think you just nailed the whole digital issue concept so elegantly with Issue M. It's one of the finest Issue M designs I've seen. It's just great. And it's, you know, the, the obviously you're leveraging some beautiful photography and you putting that front and center on your design language is just, is just terrific. And have you, have you seen any bump in conversions? The new design went live.

It's been night and day, so. And I think, you know, it's hard to say that it was just the design, although I'll give that a lot of credit because we, we had kind of ramped up and planned to get to the point where that design came out and ramped up social and email strategy and everything else get there to that point. So that once we got to that point, we had our audience beginning to build. We could really launch into the new design and promote it. So yeah, yeah, we've seen a huge uptick in not only, not only conversions, but traffic. And that's been great. You know, organic traffic is way up and just overall traffic to the site is, you know, I think we're up almost 100, a little over 100% year to year. Pretty consistent every month.

So let's, let's, let's. I think it's a good segue to kind of jump into, into the marketing side of the equation. So traffic's up 100%, organics up. I know you guys are doing some aggressive social media marketing for small boats. Sounds like email marketing as well.

Correct.

You wanna, can you break down sort of the, the different things that you're doing to generate this traffic?

Yeah, we, you know, it all starts with the content. So organic is big, email is big and social. And those are the three areas that we really play. And we do some paid as well with some remarketing and some, some targeting ads, but more of it is really around using the content to leverage these channels. So and the paywall, I mean the paywall is the genius part of it. So we, we basically, we know that, that the people on our email list are interested in our product, the site they've signed up and we know if we put enough content in front of them that interests them, we can convert them to subscribers. So that, that's a big part of it. And the same thing with social, it really comes down to showing them content, our followers and would be followers showing them content that they'll be interested in and then getting them to hit enough of it. So they hit the paywall and finally they realize this is great, I want more. And they turn into subscribers. So.

Gotcha.

It's really a fascinating marketing model that we've kind of fine tuned and seems to be working really well.

Yeah, no, I love how you say putting more content they might be interested in in front of them. That speaks volumes. You talk about three things, Organic, social and email. Just to break that down for the listeners. Organic, you're referring to organic search. So essentially Google traffic that, you know, people are searching for an article on something, they find the article on the site and so you have that level of traffic. And then social media traffic is social sharing essentially, or people being in social and discovering, okay, this is a new article that was posted and then email, a course or anybody that's registered or signed up to the email list.

Correct? Yeah. And I guess those are the three big buckets, you know, and there's other little things in play, but if we can focus on those three, we can make a big difference.

So are you focused in any one of the three areas more than another?

I would say there was a big focus on organic at the beginning where we went back through and worked on some of their content titles and things like that to make sure that we were hitting some keywords that we knew we would be able to attract customers in on. That is an ongoing process that we've worked with the editors to make sure that we're titling things correctly, including keywords where we can to make them powerful on search. Right, right. Our efforts have shifted really to the social and the email on the marketing side from there as the project has evolved.

So I noticed that Small boats is very active and correct me if I'm wrong, but yeah, a lot of action in Facebook, a lot of action on Instagram, a little bit in YouTube, and a little bit.

Where's the fourth one?

Suppose if I go to the bottom of their site. Pinterest. Yes.

Yeah, that's not the fourth. That's a. Pinterest is a. Is a funny thing that we didn't expect for this client, but it is one of the top traffic drivers to the website as far as social goes. Wow. You know, we're. We're playing with things to. To try to monetize that better and it keeps evolving. But Pinterest is something that, with this premium content and with the images that the content has, it's. It's amazing. And it drives, you know, consistently the most traffic to the site. It doesn't convert the most people into subscribers yet. It's definitely. Right.

That's interesting. Would you say Pinterest is actually sending more traffic than Facebook and Instagram?

Absolutely. Yeah. Wow. Again, Facebook and Instagram are more targeted and we can. We can present information, you know, in their stream on a daily basis, whereas Pinterest is. Is. You put the information up and you let people find it. So more of a search platform. Right. You know, a social engagement platform. Right. They're totally different, but absolutely can't be discounted.

So lesson learned. It sounds like anybody who's got a visual publication, lots, you know, lots of good photography should be in Pinterest.

Oh, my gosh. Yes. And there are tricks to setting up the boards correctly and making sure that the, you know, everything is pinned in the right way so it's searchable. But if your content has great images associated with it that revolve around subjects that are searchable and you can add that to the post. Right.

So I haven't been in Pinterest in a while, so I'm pretty behind the curve on it. Does Pinterest allow live links from.

We can link directly from the image of the content within the image post to the site.

Gotcha.

We can definitely play with some different scenarios to drive people in.

So that's different from Instagram, where you get a link to your main site off your account, but there's no hot links from.

Even that is changing. So we use a new program with Instagram so that when you click on the hot link in the account. Yeah. Pulls up a board with all of the posts and you can click on those individual posts to go to the article. And that is. That's been Great. Instagram is. Is doing really well in that regards.

Oh, that's interesting. So I'm on, I'm on Instagram now. I'm on the Small Boats magazine Instagram site. And I see you have stories at the top and then it looks like individual posts below that.

Yep. Okay.

And then trying to find a link in here. So is it. Is there a link is in the copy or is it like on the photo itself?

So if you go to, if you go to the. The homepage for the Instagram for Smallboat and you click on the subscribe and links button.

Yep.

You'll pop up. You know we have current issue archive subscribe.

I see one of these.

Got it. Below is a link to the article that is represented there.

Got it. Yep, I see. That takes you right to it. So the way. So what Instagram is doing is they're giving you kind of a master link and then you can build out the links that you want to send people to from that.

That's the other cool thing we've implemented here, which is neat, is. Is using stories to promote issues.

Yeah, I saw that. That was fantastic.

Yeah. So if you click on say current issue or January issue, it'll be a story that pops up, that rotates through some of the articles in the issue, disappears in people's feeds. They can swipe up on the feed to that article. So it's a great tool.

Yeah. So with the stories, essentially what you're doing with Small Boats is you're teasing each issue as it gets published.

Exactly. Yeah. And those are pinned to the. The profile page. Right. But we use stories fluidly throughout our posts as well. Because it's a great way. You know, while you can't link directly to an article from one of these posts, you can link to it from a story. And you know, I think unfortunately you need to have 10,000 followers to be able to use stories in this way.

Interesting.

But you're allowed to swipe up and go directly to the article. So it's a.

10,000 followers. And I wonder why they restrict that. Interesting.

Oh, they're. They have some reason, I'm sure.

I guess they want to. They want to make sure that, that you are legit.

Yeah. Otherwise they're platform would be just filled with. Yeah.

Link farms. Right. Back in the day. That's funny. Well, what I so what what I so this, the stories is really brilliant. So each issue you publish, you create a story to tease that issue. And then. But I also thought what was really nice is on the. When you Click the main high hotlink to, to the landing pages. You have the, the current issue highlighted, the archives issues as a button as well. And then of course you have a subscribe button in there as well.

Yeah.

So you're really, you're really kind of.

Hitting it all and yeah, this is, this is a magazine. It's a, it's a digital publication. But we want it to feel like a premium. Yeah, we're calling out the issues as well as the archive. Yeah, it's great.

Yeah. The way you've set up Instagram is really pretty brilliant. It does call out the issues very strongly. It teases, teases them through stories which gets, gets highlighted. Of course, you're using beautiful photography and then in the. And then, and then the actual links out. And what do you call the landing page? It has the current issue archive and subscribe buttons on it.

Well, this is the program that we use. It's a shop grid landing page. Okay, got it. Yep.

So it's like an intermediary step. You're not just sending people cold to the site from a main link, you're kind of sending them to the. A warm up page which gives them options, some basic options and some more beautiful photos. Yeah, I like it. That's great. And one of the things that I think I always talk about is when you're selling subscriptions or premium access or memberships or whatever it is as a publisher, you want to weave in your. The fact that you have premium content and that there is a fee associated with it throughout anything you present. So when you're taking people to this intermediary page, the fact that you have a subscribe button right there up front along with the current issue in archives, I think sends that message. This is premium content.

Yes, I agree, it is. The content is definitely worth the price of admission and I think by showing enough of it here, really get people interested.

That's great. So yeah, I would say to any listeners that are publishing issue M issues and if you're not, you should be anyway, you should be publishing special issues off your news feed. Thematically similar special issues. But this, if you go to Small Boats Monthly and you go to the Instagram portal, check it out. It's a, it's a beautiful implementation of Instagram strategy, especially for an issue publisher that's taking paid subscriptions. So that, that's, that's really fantastic. Thanks for sharing that.

Oh, sure.

That's great. So let's.

Everybody's different. So different. Right, right. This is how we organize content. But that doesn't mean that everybody will do it the same way, but I think you can use some of the features here and kind of build out your strategy. You know, use stories that are pinned to this page and. Right. You know, maybe it's your most important content sections or. Right. That you update on a. On a weekly basis. We happen to choose issues because it's an easy way to it, but it could be anything.

Well, every publisher, I mean, from our experience, every publisher we've ever dealt with has had different needs on the content side, on the subscription side, whether it's issue publishing or some specific membership content or premium plus content or archive content. That's premium. You know, everyone's a little different. And so, you know, how you approach social media is probably going to be a bit different for everybody.

Absolutely.

So, all right, let's head over to the elephant out there, the Facebook, the big social media one, which now I've learned doesn't drive as much traffic as Pinterest, which I think is really amazing. But there are, you know, I'm looking at the Facebook page now, and there are quite a lot of folks that have liked the page. But what I notice and what I'm sensing is that a story goes into Facebook, it gets a little personal attention sometimes there might be multiple photos involved and there are teasers to the story, it seems like. So just before you jump in, back in the day when I used to do more social media work and I don't anymore, there was all sorts of, and probably still is today, but automated software to post articles. Right. So you would like, okay, we're going to publish this article and then we're going to blast that article to 10 different social media platforms, you know, stumble upon like, all these, like, you know, crazy platforms, and then we can kind of wipe our hands and just walk away. And we will say that we're done with it now, you know, since then, obviously that doesn't work. You know, people can sniff out an automated system a mile away, and that's not really being very social in social media. So let's assume that sort of the baseline knowledge level for everyone is I have an article, I post on my WordPress site and then I go to Facebook and I drop in a link, I hit post and I go away. What am I doing wrong?

Right. We. So But I think let's step back and look at the different platforms. So every platform has a different message. So, you know, there's ways to tailor a post for Instagram and for Facebook. It doesn't take a Lot of effort, but they should. And the days of just, you know, like you said, pushing a button and sending it to all the platforms really should be over. We, we really need to, to curate these posts in a way that matches the platform and how people engage with the platform. I think that's, that's one big thing to note is, is the way you post on Instagram or Pinterest or you know, could be LinkedIn, which we don't use for this client, but we use for others more, whatever the platform might be, to use the rules for optimization with that platform and really stick to it. So that's important to know.

So what would be different between Facebook and Instagram as far as strategically? What might be something that you would do differently?

Yeah, Instagram, what we've, what we found, especially with this client is the hashtags around. Small boats are incredibly popular. We've built that audience organically by really just using hashtags, making sure that we, on Instagram we cover pretty much every hashtag we can for small boats. The direct subject matter, we want to keep it relevant. So we would never post a kayak and say hashtag powerboat. Right. Relevant. But we try to blanket it. So we're coming up in feeds for people that are looking, you know, people follow hashtags. Right. So that's on Instagram how you know, every post will be similar, the message might be a little shorter because it's really an image based messaging system and it will have quite a few hashtags attached to it. Facebook, we can be a little bit more in depth, but we're really still relying on images. One thing that we, that we found early on is, you know, you could quickly, when you go to create a post, just paste in the link of the article that you want to post to. Right. And Facebook will try to grab information about it. You could edit it a little bit if you wanted or just leave it and post it as a link to an article. Yep. What we found works better is to actually take the amazing images from this premium content, those as images on their own with a description and a link to the article. Yeah, yeah. And that's a big difference. So we're able to do galleries of images and we're not by just, you know, we see it so often where publishers or anyone else will just link to the article. Right. All good. But we found this, this method increases the engagement quite, quite a bit.

Yeah, well, so what strikes me with that, that's really interesting is that you're taking a really like a Native Facebook approach, where so if you have, if there are a few images in the, in the article, you can post two or three or whatever makes sense. And like you said, turn something. It could be like a mini gallery for a post and that becomes the sort of the native feel for that post. And then of course, you can custom craft the, the, the message, the messaging.

And we, you know, we try to lead in with a, a few sentences and, and then ask people to read about this boat, you know, read about it here and then give it away. Right, right. It's, you know, it's the images that draw people in. And if that image resonates with you, you're going to stop and look at it and then you might read a little bit about it and then hopefully you're going to go to the link.

Yeah, and I see a lot of shares on there. You know, almost every post has a number of shares, which is great. And I could see how the image leading with really good imagery natively in Facebook would really encourage people to, to share. And I like, you know what you just said about telling people to go here to read more. It sounds simple, but you don't get that if you just post a link. Right. Like, if you post a link, you get hopefully the right image and you get the excerpt. Hopefully the right excerpt. You have kind of, you have limited control over what gets posted. Sometimes, Sometimes I see publications are not even optimized for that and things look really bad. But the fact that you're telling people like, hey, read more about it here. It's, it really speaks to being very, very clear about what to do next on the web, which you always have to do.

I think that was great. You know, if, if you're interested in this boat, you're gonna, you, you want to see more images, you want to click through. It's a great way to do it. And once we tested it early on with posting articles versus posting images and descriptions, this by far was a winner.

This is great. One thing I'm going to say, we're working on insights for leaky paywall right now, and that's one of our big pushes this year. We have, we have a couple of beta sites already up and running. We're using Google's new dashboard for this. And one of the things we're tracking is conversions and what source the conversions are coming from. Because of the work you're doing here with small boats, we should probably front set that up sooner than later so we can start tracking. Exactly. Okay, well, you know, this came from, you know, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram.

I think, I think we might be ahead of you. That's great. We actually already do that with a data studio dashboard. Oh, good.

Oh good. You're tracking users.

We track. We, we custom create dashboards for our clients. And this one, I haven't even shown you this yet, Peter. I can, I can send you a copy of it, but yeah, so yeah, we track it. Basically. Basically we look at organic email, direct social media and referrals on the main page just so we can get a sense of a 30,000 foot overview where things are coming from and then we dive in deeper on individual pages. But yeah, yeah, that's great. That's hugely important. I mean, if you don't know where the traffic is coming from or the conversions. Right, right. It's going to make it difficult to optimize.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, we should talk afterwards because we have. Because it's optimized for leaky paywall, we're tracking sources of free registrations versus paid registrations since we're doing the e commerce tracking bit. So yeah, let's have a conversation about that.

I'll send you a copy of this. That's interesting. Because our business, from the beginning we have prided ourselves on always using data as a source. Knowing what works and what doesn't is big part of the whole puzzle. Right, yeah, yeah.

And you can speak confidently about it, for sure.

And it gives us a, you know, every, every call that we have with the client, we open up by looking at the dashboard. Right. Here's what's going on. Right, right. Awesome. Since we implemented your, your paywall with the email, actually our pay use per session went up, which we thought were going to go down.

Right, right, yep.

Things like that that are very, very interesting.

Yeah, Isn't that amazing? Yeah, we thought the same thing. We were wondering once the free registration started, but it turns out that, yeah, pads are up because traffic's up.

Yeah, it's great. All right, cool.

More to talk about. I love it. So let's, let's dive into YouTube a little bit. How with YouTube, the things that I do know about YouTube is once you get a, a video on your YouTube channel, your YouTube channel is actually like almost like another search engine. I think YouTube is actually the second largest search engine in the world after.

Google, the parent company.

And so there's a lot of benefit as far as visibility goes when you post something on YouTube and then of course you can embed it on, on the site itself. Any, anything special that you guys are doing with YouTube, are you finding that YouTube is driving any significant source of traffic to the site?

So I mean it does, it definitely drives traffic. It's, it's smaller. I don't think we leverage it quite as well as we could. So YouTube is YouTube. We include videos in articles, a complimentary video. It's not really content that would sit on its own necessarily. Right, well, so it's, you know, you're reading an article about a boat, you see all the pictures and then there's a video of somebody on the boat or a walk around or whatever it might be. Right, right. So I, I think, you know, we've talked about it and I think that'll be a bigger part of our strategy in the future. But we spent some time early on optimizing their YouTube videos. They didn't title those real for SEO as well as they could have at the beginning. Right. Descriptions and things like that. Because YouTube really relies on that to, to help pull in content. Yeah.

How are there how to videos of small boats doing. Doing anything in that department?

No, no, that's something we'd love to do more of as well, but it's, it's not been, been a, a part of the mix yet, but done that with other clients and those are great.

Yeah, I mean they're more involved for sure. But they're also something that could even become you know, like premium plus content.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. We had a video series that we ran for small boats that did really well. We actually were sponsored to two kids that traveled around Europe in their boat and it's part of our series section and it's great content. We put it actually on Vimeo behind a paywall. Yeah, yeah, it's worked really well. And you know, that provided social media content when they were released. You know, we released them once a week, these little episodes and we sent an email to all of our are current and so we have, we can talk about email at another time. But we have two different templates that go out weekly for, for small boats. One will be for current subscribers and one will be for non subscribers. Right. The non subscribers are getting introductions to content, but they're also getting, you know, asked to subscribe. So we're putting that call to action from them. So video in that respect is great and I think it's something we'll only do more of in the future.

Yeah, we have, I don't know if you're familiar with Catch magazine, but it's a high end fly fishing magazine that was launched not that Long ago, maybe six months ago. And we're doing some experimenting with email access and access to videos. So there's, there's one on there, there's a video on there now which you get a pop up, a soft pop up with just an email address that you enter. And then I think I have to double check. But I think once you enter that email address it gets, it certainly gets added to their mailchimp list but also registers the, the person as a free registrant.

Yeah.

And then they can go reset their password to gain access to their free level of registration. But that's something that's, you know, we're looking at, you know, how, how does that convert versus Right. Like an art, like a regular registration where you need to dump a password in. So that'll be interesting.

Yeah, email is, email is for this business model. Email is a huge subscription. So yeah, we leverage that quite heavily.

You heard it here, if you're listening. Set up your free registration.

Absolutely. That, that amazing tool. And, and we know, I mean our open rates are and I'm sure a lot of your clients with, with you know, people who are really passionate about, about their, their content. You know, the open rates are. Our average open rate is 51 for small boats. Wow. Love this stuff. Wow. And I think a lot of your clients, if you're feeding them the correct information, you'll have similar results. We're sending them content that they want to see on a weekly basis. So.

Yeah, passionate, you know, personal passion.

Absolutely.

Super popular. Boy, you're going to make all the publishers run and look at their mailchimp metrics now. Yeah, that's pretty high.

It's been that way. It's actually. Yeah. Since we really started ramping up email, it's been very consistent. Yep.

And so your track. So really as far as email, since it's part of the strategy, I think it's certainly worth talking about and it's probably one of the more important tools or most important tool in your toolbox. You're tracking two main lists, a free list and a paid list, essentially.

Correct. Correct. So we break them out into, we use mailchimp wall. So we break them out into a list based on their subscribe activity. So if they're an active subscriber who has not expired, we send them the content with basically, you know, it's just the content. So it's like here's your latest reading. Yeah. Whatever it might be. And yep. If you're not a subscriber, we send you content and we try to Tease in the reasons you should be a subscriber within that content. So just a different template that has calls to action but still presents them again. It's just like the social model. We're presenting them with enough content that they're going to hit that paywall enough times and they're going to. Eventually relentless. Because, you know, side note one thing that from our. We've been doing this for over 20 years in the digital space and one of the big problems that we have is getting clients to produce content. You know, from an e commerce perspective, they're. They're really so focused on sales and, And Right. Products and things like that. To get them to produce content to help promote their products is very difficult. That's why the publishing world, these folks are sitting on a gold mine of content. And every time we look at one of these companies, it's like, oh my gosh, you have so much great content here to promote. Like, I would do an email for this and a social post and. Right. You know, it just, it's just organizing it and seeing past the content for what. What it is and really diving into how it can be used to, to promote your business.

Yeah, it's. It really, it really leverages the whole movement for inbound marketing, which, you know, like HubSpot's a big, sort of a big proponent of that and that they built their whole business model around that and that is producing the content to drive the traffic. And, and so, yeah, corporate America, you're absolutely right, they're struggling to create content. They don't understand the power of content and they don't realize that it's an urgent priority. But in the publishing space, usually it's all there, but it needs to be presented properly.

Absolutely. And sometimes, at least with this client and some others that we've glanced at, I think, I think that, you know, they start to do it. They start it and they have all the intentions, but somehow that, that just drops off the map too because they're so focused on the content.

What do you mean? So back up a little. What do you mean by intentions?

They start to promote the content on Facebook or whatever it might be, and they have all the best intentions of continuing to do that, but then they, they go dormant for a week or two weeks and really needs to be a consistent right to make right.

Like. Yeah, yeah, be consistent about what you do. Absolutely. Or people drop off, they forget. Yeah.

So.

So let me ask you this. It's kind of a. I think this triggers another question for me. You're Obviously doing a really nice job presenting small boats in social media. How did you get them over the hurdle of doing it for them, in other words? So I've heard people say in the past, oh, well, you know, I don't want to. I don't want to hire out to social media because it's our brand, it's our voice. You know, I want to. I want to be careful about what's said. And then, like you just said, then nothing happens. How do you get over that? It.

It's. And it was true with, with small boats as well. It was. People are reluctant to give up that control because you're right, they feel like nobody could do it the way they do it. It's their voice, it's their product. They know it better than anybody. So really, we worked with small boats and with a lot of our clients, we post social for quite a few clients. We work with them to make sure that we're developing the voice correctly and we involve them in the process. So we use a scheduling tool called Asana, and we basically create boards where we'll put posts in the board in a column that basically says pending approval, and the client will come in and they know once a week they go in and they look at 10 posts. They can see exactly what's going on, what is going to be posted, and they just. They make edits, if they have any, and they just slide that tile over to approved, and then we schedule out. So we're. We're usually about two weeks scheduled out for all of our clients, but we, you know, back to your original question. We give them eyes on this and let them see what we're doing. Right. And usually within a. Within a month, they're. They're approving just about everything that comes in. Right, right, right.

That's great. Yeah. I mean, that, that answers the question. So they're. They're getting to see a draft version in advance.

Yeah. So we, we do the grunt work, for lack of better term, to, to produce the post. Yeah. In all formats. Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest. And then really, in 10 minutes, they can come in and look at these posts and approve them and they're done for the week with social. So it's a very simple process and everybody has really enjoyed it.

Well, what's great about it is that it's. It's system. You're, you know, like, like anything you do in business or in life in general, you just have to build systems so that things get done.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, one of the things like, we're, We're. We're not a publisher, but we do publish articles from time to time, and we're publishing this podcast, and we're trying to do a better job of publishing, but things didn't really get done until we hired a copywriter. You know, like, like, we. It's just, you know, you get busy and there's. There's stuff to do. And so, yeah, for social media. Yeah, posting social media, I could totally see that. You know, you go wild for a couple weeks and then you just for, you know, something else turns up. And now, oh, yeah, 30 days goes by and then, oh, wait, we got to get back. And yet, you know, you got to build those email lists, which Google certainly helps you with, but social also helps you with, and getting that traffic to the site and getting people to register, and it's an important part of the mix. You can't ignore it. You got to be doing it all the time. I think your point is well taken, for sure.

Absolutely. And really, we want to make it easier for our clients to post. So, you know, we take the. And it's, you know, some clients, it's difficult because we aren't on site, so we can't take a picture of this product or this new whatever, so we have to rely on them to help us. But a lot of clients, especially in the publishing space, their product is on their website and the images are gorgeous, and they're right there. And we just, we take it and we put it in their voice and we, we enhance it and they just approve it. Yes.

That's great. That's great. Well, Wally, this is a lot of great advice. Thank you.

I feel like we stuffed around a.

Little bit, but no, we got. There was a, you know, I'm a note taker and I take notes on paper, so I'm always, you know, doing the old school thing, and I got a full page of notes. So I think, you know, you really, you get, you know what you're doing. Sounds to me just right on. I mean, I don't. Again, I've been out of the social media space for a while, but, you know, it sounds like you're leveraging the paywall and free registrations with certainly search and then really social work. That looks glorious. Driving the traffic. It's consistent. You have a system in place. No wonder the numbers are through the roof. I mean, 100% traffic growth and 50% plus open rates and mailchimp. I mean, this is, you know, that's good work, man. That's awesome.

Well, it's. The content's there. They've really made it easy. When you apply some of the things that we've done for other clients.

Yeah.

And apply it to this business model. It's. It's a race car of a business model, for sure. It's. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's awesome. That's great to hear. Well, I'm gonna. I think. I think this is probably a good ending point. Where can people get in touch with you or your business?

Yeah. Great. You can head over to 50fish.com and you can see our outdated website that we'll update at some point when we're not busy doing this and. Or you can email me at Wally W A L L Yifty. Fish dot com.

That's number 50 fish number five.

Number zero. Yep.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah. So I'd say if you're listening, if you're still listening and you're ser. You're interested in driving more traffic, which drives more registrations, which drives more paid subscriptions, then I think it'd be worth at least a call with Wally to have a chat about your situation. Again, thanks, Wally. Thanks for sharing all your knowledge. Really, really appreciate it. We should do this again. Maybe we'll talk about analytics next time.

Yeah, we should. We love talking about this stuff, so. It's great.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks again. Yeah. Enjoy the snow if you can.

Oh, I know it's still too much snow, but summer will be here soon.

Oh, yeah, Sounds great.

All right, thanks.

Have a good one. See you.

Bye.

Thanks for listening to the Paywall podcast. You can find us@paywallpodcast.com Be sure to subscribe and your podcast player of choice, and we'll see you next episode.