Episode 20 | Subscription Accelerator™ Part 4: 15 New & Easy Publishing Tactics To Boost Your Subscription Revenue

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

Welcome to episode number 20 of the Paywall Podcast. I'm Pete, I'm here with Jeremy and we are going to talk about our subscription accelerator, step number four, which is all about new revenue streams. Welcome, Jeremy.

Yeah, good to be here.

Yeah. So in this episode, what I thought is I would talk about, or we would talk about a bit about, you know, the, the big new revenue stream which would be providing some big new content on your site that you would charge more for. And we'll talk about that a little bit. But I really wanted to dive into the low hanging fruit and we came up with 15 things that you can do pretty quickly on your website to generate new little revenue paths that, that some can significantly add up to more revenue. And certainly together you can really boost your revenue streams. So let's dive in. Now before I get to the list of 15, I'm going to talk about the big new revenue stream. And that is as you're publishing and taking paid subscriptions for your main content, you want to be thinking about what, what can you upgrade your current subscribers to as far as, you know, a bigger, a bigger purchase on your site. And that's something that is, you know, is a big heavy lift. Take a lot of planning. But a couple examples that we've run into that work really well. One is I Politics, which is a Canadian news publisher. And what they do every year is they have elect election coverage and they take a three month window where they have a daily, daily coverage of their elections and they charge $300 for access to the election coverage and it works really well for them. After that three month window is done, they take it down and wait to next year. So that's their premium plus level of coverage and their normal subscription price. I forget exactly what it is, $15 a month or something like that. If you're in the. A second example would be if you're in the how to space and let's say you're teaching people how to do something, whether it's B2B or B2C. One of the things you can do is you can start with a subscription level that is really article access and maybe guide access and Then have a much larger price point for coursework like videos on how to, you know, beginner videos, intermediate advanced on how to actually get something done. And the idea there is you have, you know, like a $10 a month easy entry subscription for a certain level of, of general article content that you produce and then a much higher level and especially if you're in the B2B, you know, then you might charge 100, $200 per month to access, maybe like a learning system or you can include a Facebook group for conversation or webinars or whatever that sort of the next big chunk is. But we're not going to talk about that in this episode. That's a whole new level of premium plus content to provide. What we're going to talk about is the 15 quick ways to turn things on for you as far as new little to big revenue streams. So first thing I'm going to throw out there is hiding ads to your paid subscribers. This one is very controversial. Ad revenue is a very sensitive topic. But the reality is with digital subscriptions, ad revenues are declining. Ad blockers are in effect. And what if you look at your actual traffic to the site and the page views to your site, your paid subscribers are really a small percentage of your overall traffic. So if you turn off ads for your paid subscribers, and the way you would do that is you would have, let's say $9 a month is your monthly subscription fee. But if you pay $11 a month, then you automatically turn off all the ads on the site. Now that's percentage wise. That's a pretty big revenue increase as far as subscription revenue goes. But as far as if you look at the page views, those subscribers, you know you're running 2%, 3%, 4% of your page views, maybe even less from paid subscribers. The majority of your casual visitors are still going to see all your ads, which is the majority of your ad impressions. If you run the numbers that that percentage bump in subscription revenue for a premium plus, you know, ad free experience is, is going to be much more significant than the very small amount of ad revenue ad impressions that you'll suffer. Okay, that's number one. Okay. And these are in no particular order, but these are all pretty quick. So with the, with the ad stuff, you can use our add dropper add on to accomplish this. Sharing the screen. Now, if you're actually watching the video and you can see that you literally just choose the subscription levels that you want to hide ads for. Okay, Number two, sell a donation level. So super easy to set up, you know, your publication might be very much mission based and might you might be able to appeal to your audience to donate more than what your, your typical subscription price might be. And how do you do that? Pretty simple. Put a donation link up in your navigation. Certainly you can promote donations to your existing subscribers and free registrants and all that, but the idea is that if somebody donates, they get to choose what they're going to pay and you give them access just like any subscription level to your content, your premium content. Super easy. I know that as soon as you add that to your publication on your website, you will get people donating. So it's like free money. They will help your mission essentially. And that's the name, your price add on by the way. Super easy to set up and let people choose. You can set the range of, you know, what, what people select. So if you're, if you're selling a $9 a month subscription, make the donation subscription level, you know, 10 to you know, $50 or whatever. It could be monthly, it could be annual. However you want to set it up real quick and easy to generate. Yep.

Yeah, I just wanted to note too that we'll have links to all the add ons we talk about in the show notes. So you can go to each one and check them out and you can get the show notes@paywallpodcast.com Show notes.

Awesome. Okay, number three, here we go. Classifieds. I think we've mentioned this before in a previous episode, but if you look@smallboats monthly.com and you go to their classified section and you'll see a bunch of classifieds. But if you want to actually place a classified ad and you click that, essentially what they'll tell you is hey, just be a paid subscriber and you can post unlimited classifieds. That was a game changer for them. Their class number of classifieds that they had being posted doubled, their subscription revenue bumped up. And it's so easy to do. All you do is install your classifieds plugin and I think this one is advanced classifieds and Directory Pro I believe is what's being used on this site. And then all you do is you, you lock down the submission classified submission page. Right? That's all you do when you lock that down with leaky paywall in the visibility setting and it requires a paid subscription. I've also talked to, I talked to a publisher recently who is going to set this up similarly. But they're going to have two subscription levels or payment levels. One is for sort of general full Access subscriptions, but the other one is for classified only placement. The idea there is simply they want a spam filter on their site for their classified submissions. So ideally they'd love to give free classified submissions away on their site. But in, but if they, if they charge $1 just to place unlimited classifieds, which is essentially the classified subscription level with unlimited access, then it keeps the spammers away because if, you know, if, if you're requiring a credit card submission on your site, spammers are not going to, you know, submit that.

Yep. And you can also use the, for that case, if you have different levels that need to have different access to things, you can put the submission form behind the leaky paywall short code that allows you to give access based on level. So that's a really easy way to do that as well.

Oh yeah, yeah. Those short codes are powerful.

Yep, yep.

And then you can output a nice message. Those that are not logged in that, that, that sells the benefit of joining for classifieds.

Yep.

Yeah, that's a good point. Okay, next one's yours, Jeremy. Right. Paper post.

Yeah.

So pay per post. The idea, let's say someone doesn't want to buy a subscription to something, they just want to pay a one time fee to get access to a piece of content. Then our paper post add on is a great way to do that. So you'll see here on T journey on this article you can either subscribe and get access to it or you can just pay a one time fee to get access to just that T report. It's a non recurring payment. So some people don't want to have a recurring payment going on and so it's great for that kind of thing. And it's a good kind of one time payment bump because you can charge more for it since they get lifetime access to the content. So it's just another way to offer content to your readers depending on what their needs are.

Yeah, and the high value content of course sells better because it's an effort to put in your credit card to buy one article. And so we're Starting to see B2B publishers have some success with this where buyers of a report, let's say we'll pay the, you know, the higher price in order to gain access because it's just valuable information. So if you're in the B2B space, this is something to look at for sure. All right, cool. What are we on to next here? Oh, gift subscriptions. I'm going to harp on gift subscriptions a little bit. If you have a giftable publication, then you need to be selling 20% of your subscriptions as gift subscriptions. And that is actually a proven number in the print magazine space. Absolutely applies to the digital space as well. I like the way Small Boats magazine does this very much. They have a landing page for their subscription. So anytime you get prompted to subscribe, you end up on this landing page, which I would steal this idea 100% and build this for your publication where you're selling the benefits in a nice way to subscribe. And then in this case they have two options essentially. There's subscribe for myself and then there's give a gift, which is subscribe for someone else. So what they're doing is they're really bringing forward their gift subscriptions right away when somebody lands on the subscribe page. And that works very, very well. If you have a more traditional two or three card layout on your subscription page, why not add just a subscription card to bring that, that forward to the site? But I really like the way that Small Boats does this. This converts very well for them. And then, you know, once you, once you hit, you know, give a gift, it takes you to the straight to the registration form for gifting. Okay, what's next? Oh yeah, let's dovetail into it. So the next one is to reduce your subscription offerings to the grand total of one option. Now this is something that Netflix of course has, has, has succeeded with where they have a, you know, a monthly, you pay $13 a month, $14 a month, and that's it. There's no annual subscription. There are no other choices really, it's just one subscription. And if you're a print publisher, you might be saying, yeah, well we got a lot of products that we're selling and, and I do agree with that. But we know of a print publisher that's actually going against that trend. They're setting up a print and digital subscription. It's a one year recurring subscription and it's going to be the only option on their site. So it's tempting to have monthly subscriptions and annual digital subscriptions if you, your print, print digital subscriptions and have all sorts of different offerings. But that adds a layer of complexity to the subscriber. So if I come to your site and I need to, and I'm going to subscribe and I have to make a choice between monthly and annual and you're giving me some pause to think about it, I might get interrupted by something and never come back. Or you really want that? You really want that subscription Flow to be simple and, and easy. And so consider slimming down your products to one level and the data is super clear. If you do that, you will have a bump in subscription revenue just by doing that one thing. That's an easy, that's an easy thing to implement. Maybe not such an easy thing to strategize about, but if you look at what Small Boats has done here, this, this is a singular and beautiful landing page to sell one thing. Now it's subscribe for me or subscribe for someone else. Really the only, the only options. So you know, when you come here, you, you already know if it's for you or for someone else. So that's, that's not a big, big decision and it works. So again, steal this idea from Small Boats Monthly. Okay. Oh, I will mention the New York Times is doing this too. You know, so the big publishers are starting to catch on to this where, you know, they have a lot of products. But if you go, if you, when you go and check out with them, they, they only promote one thing. There's one option they promote, so it works. If the New York Times can do it, you can do it. Okay, the next one is group subscriptions. So what's a group subscription? Well, let's say you want to sell a subscription to a business so all their employees can have access. A school or a library. Maybe it's a, maybe it's a part of the, you know, local, you know, the town. The town. Maybe it's. You'd like the town to have access to your news site. Maybe it's a coffee shop where everybody who wanders into the coffee shop gets access to your publication and you get to be the sponsor and on the coffee shop's counter. So this, this falls under group subscriptions and it's essentially a new product for you. I talked to plenty of publishers, haven't really thought about it. And the one thing I will say is don't worry about the technology so much. You know, it's, it's, at least from our end, it's, it's easy to implement on how you do it. But what you can, what, what I would do is simply start selling it. Just anyone you talk to that's involved in a business, just ask them, hey, we have a group subscription plan we're working on. Would you be interested? If they say yes, then you can figure out what it is, how to implement it, pricing, and if you need help, just get in touch. Lots of good ways to sell the group subscription. That's a new easy Product you don't have to do anything with, but just talk about. Okay, next. So this is a really, really cool idea. It's been running successfully for years. So spotlightnews.com so a local news publication in the Albany, New York area. And what they've been doing is sponsoring their photo gallery. So they cover high school sports, you know, lots of sports, they take lots of photos. And if you notice, if you're looking, if you're watching the video, you'll see that they have their logo here plus the logo of their sponsor, whatever messaging they want on here. I forget exactly what they do to actually create this. They automate this by running their photos through, I think Photoshop or something like that. It just lays.

There's also WordPress plugins you can use to overlay watermarks.

Okay, there you go. That's a good idea. The Watermark WordPress plugin. Okay. And so what, what they'll do is they'll just sell, you know, 30 days or 60 days, I think, I think they actually might sell every three months. So four times a year they switch out the sponsor. They pay a chunk of money to be basically in the photo galleries for four times a year. And so they're using their content to produce this sponsor on the photos. You know, it's very low key, it's very valuable to the sponsor. Super easy to implement. Again, one of those things you can just, you can just start, just pre sell it. Just talk to somebody who might be interested in that and tell them you're working on this idea. And if they say yes, then it's not too tough to figure out. Okay, okay, another one. So I forget what number we're on here because I haven't numbered these, but sort of on the local news theme. Something that's working well today is getting Realtors to sponsor your news site. So if you're a local news publisher, give the Realtor a coupon code in their name. You know, so you know, Jane Smith, 2022 or something like that, that's the coupon code number. And sell them, you know, 100 subscriptions that they can give away to their prospective, you know, buyers and home sellers. And so that gets their name out in front. It gets a nice benefit that they give to their customers. They really love that, the ability to give away something like that. And then you just charge them, you know, a bulk, basically a bulk subscription fee for that, you know, custom coupon code for them to give away these free subscriptions to your publication. Again, super easy, just sell it. Easy to Set up. Just use it, you know, with the coupon add on. Okay, what's next here? Oh, this is a good one too. So if you have, this is about your free registration. If you are providing a free registration, which you should be to build your email list, you can find a sponsor for that free registration. So this is Rugby news. They're in Australia. They, they had this student pass which is essentially free. Free access to their site. And you can do this with a free registration. And you'll see that the, you know, Crusaders global Rugby program is sponsoring this, this registration level. And so when, when you send your, you know, when they send their email, welcome email to the new registered subscriber. You know, guess what sponsor is promoted in the header of that. That email? Of course, it's the, you know, the Crusaders get, get the, the sponsorship spot. So it's a lot of exposure. You know, if you have experience with free registrations, you'll know, you'll, you'll know that quite a bit of free registrations get generated over time. And then essentially your sponsor gets this direct marketing pipeline where their, their brand shows up in people's email boxes as well as being displayed here on the, on the card. And you can, you can output their brand on the free registration form. Lots of ways to give them exposure. And that's a, that's a valuable. You know, you can really leverage that free registration and get somebody to pay for that for you. Yep.

Yeah. Another couple things you can do is when someone's logged in, you could use Add Dropper to display a notice at the top of all your content. If someone's logged in with a free level that says this access is provided by sponsor name. And another thing you can do is you can use our conditional display notices that can show messages at the top of the page based on level. And you could say if someone's logged in with the free level, you know, again, say this. Your access provided by sponsor name.

That's, that's awesome. Yeah, you can give that sponsor a lot of exposure. Yep, that's great. And easy, easy to implement. Super easy to do. Just, again, just sell it, you know, pre. Sell stuff and then, and then, you know, you can figure out how to get that stuff set up. It's. It's not, it's not hard. Okay. Okay, next one block incognito browsing. This is a, this is a, this is a big one. So, you know, people are coming to your site, they're reading an article, they're getting the subscription nag. It says, hey, it's, you know, please register or please pay. And then they're like, no, I don't really want to do that. So I go incognito. So, you know, you raise your hand if you've ever gone incognito to get around an article. And so what you can do with our incognito blocking add on, essentially, is prevent that from happening. And what we hear from publishers, especially we've heard recently from the financial sector, is they're telling us that that's actually increased their subscriptions by over 10% just having that one feature. And so, yeah, what happens when you go incognito is you essentially get the same article that you're opening up and you get the subscription prompt subscription nag. It says, hey, please subscribe to get access to whatever you're selling access to. It's as easy as that. And our add on, you just literally install it and there's no configuration. It just works. We're tracking IPs that people come in from and making sure that they can't get around your paywall. So it hardens. You know, your paywall's still, you know, Google accessible for search engine ranking and social sharing and all that. They just can't go incognito to get around it or switch browsers of any kind. It's a pretty big deal. And take you 30 seconds to install it. Okay, the next one's about private podcast segments. I think you. You had a comment on that?

Yeah. So another thing you can do is give access to private podcasts with your subscription. So there's a few different ways to do that, depending on what podcast platform you're using. And so when someone subscribes, you could, in the welcome email, you could send them a link where they could go to that platform and get private access to a particular podcast. We're also working on an API integration with Transistor fm. So if someone signs up, we can automatically add them to a private podcast. So that'll be coming sometime this year. But private podcasts are getting more and more popular as people want to give special access to content to their subscriber base, to their listeners. And so with we could paywall, it's easy to do. You just say this particular level gets access. And then like I said, in the welcome email, you can send specific emails to specific levels using our welcome emails plugin.

Awesome. Yeah, I didn't know we were working on a transistor API.

Yeah, we got lots of things in the works, Pete. Very good.

We're looking if you're joining us by video here, we're looking at Street Photography magazine and they have a public podcast and then their interviews. They have private podcast podcasts which are only revealed when you're a paid subscriber. That's been working really well for them. Another publisher, tbiz, which I just talked to, the way they're handling premium podcasts is they're recording interviews which are freely available on Apple podcasts or Spotify or whatnot. But then what they're doing is they're curating the most important segments out of those podcasts and those are being added to their premium, basically their premium articles and being restricted so that even though it's the same content, if you're already running a podcast and you spend some time curating out. So if it's a 30 or 45 minute interview or podcast on something and you're going to pull out a 10 minute segment, that hits the high points, that's worth paying for. So using the content you're already producing and then making that sort of the premium only access something that is also working.

Yep. Yeah. And for that you can restrict the whole page or you could even again use our shortcode to just restrict the audio file right within the content, depending on where you want to put it.

Yeah, I like those shortcodes because you can output the sort of the marketing promotion for, for what's available if you do subscribe. And the link subscribing too, of course.

Yeah. And another update we'll be adding to leaky paywall later this year is adding that same kind of functionality to blocks. So if you're using the new WordPress blocks, you'll be able to show and hide those based on someone's leaky paywall level. So that will be coming this year as well.

Nice. Yeah, the block editor is getting really good. I've been enjoying that. Took a little get a little getting used to, but I think it's changing the game for WordPress at this point. All right, cool. Let's see. Premium archive access. So this one is if you're a publisher, maybe a magazine publisher, and you have a lot of evergreen content on your site, maybe you're a how to website. You can set up like TrueWest magazine here, 60 years of content so you can set up a higher level subscription that is gated by our timewall, essentially where you would just charge more for access, full access to all the archives that you've produced. And Sometimes it's just PDFs or flipbooks that folks can have access to. But that's all your valuable evergreen content. And my recommendation would be to just set up an annual, you know, a one time higher fee for that. Make it annual and then so some might want to access and then cancel. So you might as well grab the revenue for the year. So that's something that can be done very quickly. Falls into that category as well. Okay, the next one, Jeremy's got your name on it about, it's about upselling on checkout.

Yeah, yeah. So one thing you can do with leaky paywall. Leaky paywall isn't meant to be an e commerce system. So it's not meant for adding multiple items to a cart. One thing you can do is if you want to add an upsell is do something like you're seeing here on the screen with small boats where they add a checkbox on the registration page that says yes, you know, in this case, yes, please add a print issue to my order for a one time charge. So if you want to add something where it's just a one time charge, you know, it could be a print issue, it could be a calendar, maybe a dvd. This would be a great way to add some extra value to the order. And you know, the user can opt in or opt out right there on the subscribe form. So it's really, really easy for the user. And upsells work if you just look at, you know, all the E commerce data that's out there, upsells, you know, offering related products, stuff like that. Those do increase not just conversion rates but also, you know, the amount of money that you get per customer as well.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that small boats, I think they do a coffee table book at the end of the year. They take their best content and then put that together in a, in a bigger book and print it and that. And that does work really well for them. They've been doing that for years. Yeah. And upsells, upsells work absolutely. Easy, easy peasy. Just check, check it off. Right. All right, cool. Let's see. Okay, number 15, the last one here is this one kind of falls into the. Geez, my subscribers keep sharing their, you know, their login information. How do I restrict that? And I would flip that and say, why don't you sell a family plan so you could have a regular subscription and don't really restrict anything. Just have your regular premium subscription and then have a premium plus level and just call it a family plan and let people know that, you know, five family members can have access to content. You could just include A coupon code in the welcome email for that particular family plan level and and off you go. It's very little extra effort. You're essentially saying, hey, if you want your whole family to have access to something, just pay a little bit more each month or for the year and and off you go. Super, super easy to implement.

It's also a good use case for a group add on. It would work really well for doing the family plan.

That's right. Yeah. You could use our group add on to do that. So you create a subscription level with five seats as an example or however many seats you want. And then your. Once you're, once the buyer finishes the purchase, then they get a little dashboard where they can just drop in the email addresses of each of their family members and then the family member gets notified by email and then they get basically get logged in and have access to your content. So super easy to set up, creates that additional revenue stream for you and off you go. Okay, we have covered 15 pretty easy things to do. We talked a little bit about the big premium plus level content, but I think that's maybe a discussion for another time to get in deeper on that. It's typically a one on one discussion too. And if you have a question on that, like you have an idea for content, please feel free to shoot it in. We'll answer it. In fact, we'll answer just every question that you have about building subscription revenues. We hear a lot from different publishers, a lot of cool ideas, things that work, and we're happy to share that.

Yeah, if you need help implementing any of these things we talked about today, just get in touch.

Yep. Infoen101.com that's our email address. Just send it off there. And if you're new to this podcast, just head over to zine101.com and grab our Zoom subscription accelerator guide. It's free. Just drop your email address off there and get going. We even have a 77 page deep dive guidebook on subscription strategies which there's a link in that at the end of the accelerator guide if you really want to get into the weeds on that.

Yep. Yeah. And just a note, we did rebrand at the end of the year, so if you do go to zine101.com, it will take you to leakypaywall.com and so we're still getting used to that around here. But LeakyPaywall.com is our new domain, new brand that we're doing everything under, so you'll see some updates around from Z101 to leaky paywall, but just know it's still the same people just rebranding around leaky Paywall to make it more clear what we do.

Yeah, thanks for calling that out. You caught me.

I still do it, too.

Yep. All right. Cool habits. Old habits die hard, right?

Yep.

Well, thanks for joining us, everybody again. Get in touch if you have any questions and we'll talk to you next time.

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.

Sam.