Episode 15 | Easy ways to level up your website to build paid subscriptions - Part 3

This episode of the Paywall podcast is brought to you by zine101, the makers of Leaky Paywall. Leaky Paywall is the most flexible WordPress subscription platform. Find out more at zine101.com where you can download Leaky Paywall for free. On the Paywall podcast, we discuss paywalls and paywall strategies for news and magazine publishers. Let's get started.

Head on to part three and part three. In the last part section here, let's talk about new products or memberships. And if you listen to our episode, which we got some good feedback on, we created an episode where we talked about selling paid subscriptions, selling memberships, and asking for donations all at the same time. If you haven't listened to that, have a listen to that because I think that'll change your thinking about how you ask your subscribers, members, donors for money. And it works like gangbusters. You have a mission as a publisher and you get that mission in front of people, get them to pay for access to you. Content typically is a first step articles, but there are other things you can do to step people up into a membership level or maybe a premium plus product level. And then you can absolutely get people to donate just to support the cause. I mean, it works. So do all three. But that episode's for you, if that sounds good to you. Before I jump in a little bit, I also want to talk a little bit about your main product, which is your main paid subscription level. And we get a lot of question on pricing. And generally when publishers start out with digital subscriptions, you know, they'll pick a, they'll pick a price. You know, maybe it's, it's for its B2C. It's maybe it's $5 a month or $10 a month or $15 a month, or I've seen lows, you know, $3 a month for a subscription, and then for B2B, it's generally higher. So now you're talking, you know, 10, 20, 30, 50, 100, whatever, and up from there. But wherever you started as far as price goes, look at your pricing now. You've probably improved since you started in many ways in your organization as far as your content and what you're, what you're offering, your, your subscribers and advertisers and all that and raise your price. That, that's my message is it's so easy. Most of the time I'll look at the pricing structure of a publication and, you know, it'll be, you know, $4.99 or five bucks a month or nine, 99 or seven or six or some number. Think about what the next step up is that doesn't, that won't offend too many people. So, you know, for T journey, I'll give you an example, we were at $25 a year for a subscription, which I think is crazy, but the publisher wanted to kind of do that as a sort of an introductory price. So months ago, last year sometime, I said, look, we're at 25, let's go to 29. I mean, from a, you know, from like a perception, it's not a price difference, right? You go 25 and 29. Honestly, it's the same sort of gravity. That price holds the same amount of gravity. You're not going from 25 to 50, you're just going to 29. And so what happened to paid subscriptions actually went up a little? I don't know if it probably wasn't the price increase, but they certainly didn't go down. And so we actually just raised the price last week again from 29 to 34 per year. And this is true for monthly. You know, if you're running, if you're running a $3 a month subscription, go to 4. You're not going to offend anybody. That's a 25% revenue increase right there. And sometimes when you charge more, people think things are more valuable because the price is higher. So it must be good stuff. You know, there is actually a danger in charging too little. People won't take you seriously. You know, if you're at $5 a month, go to seven. Right? You know, seven and five, that's a big percentage wise, that's a big jump in revenue, but that's 40% increase in revenue. But from a, from, from a mindset, it's not that big a jump. If you're at 7, go to 9. You know, if you're at 995, think about taking the next hurdle to 12 or sometimes. You know, the reality is you want to offer something, something new or something addition to help offset that, that price increase. And I get that, and it's certainly very valid. You know, if you're at 15, go to 17 or 19 even still in that same. So pricing is the easiest way you can generate more revenue. Just, just increase your, you know, hold your breath, increase the price and just do it. And I can't say, I can't say I've ever, I don't think I've ever experienced a price increase with any organization when they came back and said you know what, that was too much, you know, or it didn't work. You know, it's, it's, you know, as long as you're doing a good job and you know you have a fair price, you know, we, we do expect price increases over time. It's just, it just happens. So. All right.

Yep. I'd like to throw one thing in there that I've actually seen work really well.

Yeah.

With a price increase is give it a timeline of when you're going to increase the price and then tell people if they buy it now, then they'll get grandfathered into the old price.

Yep.

That's been really successful for a few of our publishers. So that's a little trick there. When you are doing a price increase and you're, and you want to just try and get some volume in before that, it's a good way to get people to, to convert when they wouldn't have before.

I love it. Yeah, you get some fence sitters for sure. Yeah. And because you're, because you can target so easily. You could do that on the website. You could do that, you know, with your free, you could target your free. All your free level subscribers with a message like that and of course with email.

That's great. Yeah. Getting the message out there.

That's great. Okay, so that's pricing. Let's talk a little bit about adding a donation level because that's another like super easy thing to do with leaky paywall. At least create a subscription level. Check the donation that you want it to be, a donation level. Set the range of your donation. So if you're, let's say you're B2C publisher and you're charging five bucks a month for a subscription and you want to, and you can, and you can collect a one time donation or you can collect recurring donations, which is, you know, is great if you can, if you can get that. But you can set the range of price real quick. So you can say, okay, anybody who donates $6 or more per month, let's as an example. Or whatever, you can set the range from 6 to 100 or 200 or whatever you want and have that new donation level also gain access to your content as part of the benefit. But it gives people that want to help you help your mission the ability to help you. And it's so easy to do. It's like free income. We did it with T Journey. I just turned it on at one point. I said, look, Dan, you're. We're gonna, I just created a donation Level. Look, here it is, let's see what happens. And in, in seven days somebody gave, gave t journey 50 bucks, right? I was like, just boom. Right? And so that was, it just turned it on. And we, we see it with other, we see it with news publishers. Like look at Western Standard in Canada. They're, they're running paid subscriptions, they're running premium plus memberships and they're running donations and they're generating income at all levels. So that's, that's something you should do, do right away. And of course it's, you know, it's mission based. Right. So you know, you want, you need to make sure your, the mission is, is clear to the subscriber, to the donor, to, you know, to all, all paying members essentially. Okay. Another real easy to do, low hanging fruit is to remove ads for premium plus or member level subscriptions. So what does that mean? So you have your pay, your standard paid subscription level that gives access to your content. Great. Well if you're, as if you're charging $5 a month for that, why not create a member level at $7 a month or $9 a month or whatever you think is right. And what does the member level get you? Well, you become a member and you know, you get some, maybe you get some status of some kind as, as a member. But as part of it you can easily, with Ad Dropper you can just check a box and say hide ads from paid subscribers and you can hide the ads. That might not work for some publishers. It might be, you know, because you're, you're dependent on ad revenue so heavily. But we're finding more and more is that subscription revenue is really, is really growing so strong and the ad revenue is kind of heading in the other direction. That, that kind of an offer makes sense. And remember, it's just for one subscriber. Right. That subscriber decides to pay you more and you can decide how much more you need to be paid to turn off the ads. But again, you know, if you look at the data in terms of the income coming in from ads versus the income from one paid subscriber, it's a lot of clicks to equal the value, a lot of impressions to equal the value of that, you know, extra part of that paid new membership subscription. Does that make sense? Am I making sense? So that's, that's an easy way to do it. Just, just remove the ads for anybody who wants to pay you more. That's, it's a, it's a good deal. Another thing that's as far as, you know, we're talking about membership, we're talking about new products. Another thing is using time as a premium plus product. So if you're, let's say you're a local news publisher and you want to send your newsletter, your morning newsletter to paid subscribers at 6:00am and you, and it's, and it would be like a full, full text newsletter so you don't have to click anywhere to go back. So with leaky paywall and mailchimp, you can do that so easily. Now you just somebody you sign, somebody who signs up on, on a paid level now you, they get added to a specific tag in mailchimp and that specific tag is the segment. And you, you can send full text newsletters to those premium plus subscribers and they'll get the news early, they'll get it in full. They can just, you know, and what we hear back is, yeah, it's great because you know, I, I can just get the email and just read it without having to click or log in or do anything. I just get full text. And then if somebody, if somebody unsubscribes or the credit card fails, they just get automatically removed from that, that mailchimp segment. So think about time, you know, if it would be valuable for your readers to get something either in full text or early. You can, you can set that up pretty easily with mailchimp and leaky paywall. Another approach. Okay, time, I forgot to mention, you know, for some of our financial publishers, we have one of them that's, that's doing this or setting this up. And that's when they publish something, some piece of market information that needs to be distributed instantly because it's only relevant when it's fresh. So traders can, can make a move if they need to. And so you can, you can set that up as well where you, I think this might take a little custom work and Jeremy probably could chime in on that, but I don't think it's hard to do where you essentially, as soon as something is published, the email gets sent instantly to paid subscribers or members or premium plus subscribers. And so that the, your audience gets the news right away in their email box. Okay, all right, so here's so again, products, okay. What else can you sell beyond your standard paid subscription? So here's a really cool one that I love as a subscriber benefit. You could do it one of two ways. You could just add this as a subscriber benefit, which this Small Boats Monthly does, or you could add it as a premium product. A premium or member level service. So what Small Boats Monthly does is they're, they're in the, they're publishing about, they're on the Maine coast and they, they publish these all about the sort of lifestyle and construction of, and maintenance of these high end wooden, you know, small wooden boats, beautiful boats, sailboats, rowboats, you name it. And they have a classified ad section on the site. And a few couple years ago they were trying to bump up the revenue from classifieds and the activity from classifieds and they had a sort of a standard classifieds plugin installed and it was working okay, but it's, you know, it's kind of clunky because you gotta create an account for the plugin and for that classifieds ads software and then pay and off you go. So what they did, which worked out brilliantly for them is they now offer the ability to post unlimited classifieds to all their paid subscribers, which is a snap to set up. So what you're actually doing is you're just restricting the classified creation page of the add on. I think they're using advanced classifieds, I forget it would work with any one of them. And they're just restricting that page to paid subscribers only. And so the message, if you go to their site, smallboats monthly.com and check out their classifieds, you'll see if you're not logged in, it'll say, hey, as a benefit to paid subscribers, you can submit unlimited classifieds. And that really supports their mission. If you're, if you're casual or you're free, you can. But if you need to submit a classified, you just subscribe, you become a subscriber. And so what happened was is their subscriptions bumped up and their classified volume doubled in terms of the number of classifieds, which is a nice, healthier, much healthier marketplace and much more interesting to the casual and other visitors. So that was a really big win. And, and the lesson there is, you know, you can so easily integrate not only classifieds but even like an events calendar to do exactly the same thing. So if you're a paid subscriber, you could have the ability to post events on a, on a, you know, with a WordPress events plugin, right? And yeah, you could set it up so only like a higher level member gets the ability to do that. And you simply restrict the form of the event creation page or classifieds page to allow those higher level member only subscribers to be able to do that. But I would encourage you to think about these types of products that could easily add a lot of value and boost your and create a whole new subscription stream possibly for you. I haven't seen the events calendar one in action. Have either you guys seen that happening anywhere? I'd love for somebody to I'd love to get an example of somebody who's doing that and if you're listening and you either are doing it or or want to do it, please get in touch. Be great to great great to talk about gift subscriptions again. 20% of your subscriptions if you have a giftable publication should be gift subscriptions and that's you should treat that as a whole new a whole separate revenue stream, a whole new product to promote and which we already covered and that's about what I have for for looking at your paid subscriptions and you know, creating new products or membership level or donation level revenue streams.

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