Pete Ericson shows how MilitaryLiving.com converted three print guides on military lodging, campgrounds, and Space A travel into a digital subscription business. They built a metered paywall, imported 10-20k rows of data into WordPress, and added WooCommerce to sell subscriptions. The result: current data, better Google indexing, and readers prompted to subscribe after sampling.
Questions this video answers
Pete Ericson (Zine 101).
November 17, 2016.
MilitaryLiving.com.
A metered "Leaky Paywall" (leaky paywall).
Approximately 10,000–20,000 data points (spreadsheet ran out of columns).
Chapters
Hi, I'm Pete from Zine 101. And today we're going to look at a traditional publisher of military guidebooks and how they went from large print tomes to a state of the art digital publication. Now, what you're looking at here is their old website. If you look closely, you can see that they're actually selling their print guides here on the site, along with some PDFs that readers can download the print guides. There are three main print guides. One is military lodging, one is military campgrounds, and the third is Space A, which is information on what free flights. Somebody who's in the military or ex military has access to their new site here. MilitaryLiving.com shows what the finished product is, what this transformation has done for them. Now, the three main guidebooks are military lodging, Space A, air, and camping. And there's a fourth piece which is the military installations or the bases themselves, which they call travel guide. The reader now can drill down into lodging or Space A or camping, or read about the base installations themselves and read a few free articles before they're prompted to subscribe. So what we did for them is we installed a metered paywall. We call it leaky paywall, and it allows the reader to sample a few free pieces of information and then get prompted to subscribe. So the way it works here, and the benefit for that, of course, is that Google can now index all those data points, all that data, all the installations, all the campgrounds, the space A information, and the military lodging. So when people are searching for that information, it comes up in Google search. Also Facebook, sharing, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. All this information is now easily shareable on social media. So there's a huge amount of new traffic, new exposure that military living is getting because of the way we've brought all the data out of there, print guidebooks and put it live on the web. It's not PDF now, it's their live web articles, essentially. So let me show you how it works. So let's say I'm looking for military lodging, place to stay, could be in California. I can click in here and get a list of states and countries. I can go down here and choose my location. Let's say Colorado and I can go for military lodging. I can hit find or I can literally just click in to the Google Map. And by the way, yes, we integrated Google Maps into all their data points. So as you'll see, for Colorado lodging, we'll get the map with all of Colorado on it and we'll get the List of military bases, campgrounds, space A, all that's available to drill into. So let's just go into the farish recreation area. There it is. If on my phone I can click on it and get directions to it. Here's a picture. And because I've been poking around the site now a little bit, I get the prompt to subscribe, which is this big orange box that says want full access. And this is the idea you give away some information to the reader. And because it's valuable information, and in this case it's money saving military benefits for lodging and camping and travel that military personnel are willing to pay for access to this site. So then I can either log in from here or choose subscribe. And there I have my subscription options. So how did we do this? Well, we started with a Google spreadsheet with 10 or 20,000 data points that we had to import into WordPress military lodging space a camping. And the installations are four essentially custom post types that we built for military living and we imported from that giant Google spreadsheet. And by the way, it was so big that they actually ran out of columns going out to the right that we brought all that information in and organized it in WordPress. And we also encourage them to now manage centrally their data in WordPress. So rather than relying on a Google spreadsheet, all the Data is in WordPress and that's what stays current. Which was a big problem before when they printed their guidebooks and shipped it out the door the next day, the data was out of date, things changing on a daily basis. And another benefit is they get to publish their newsletter, which is R and R travel news, straight onto the site and connect their news by categories to lodging. So for instance, if I go to Alabama here, any news item that was checked off in the Alabama category would automatically end up next to the Alabama lodging information. Again, all this gets indexed with Google and shared in social media, and that drives a lot more traffic to their site. And lastly, we install WooCommerce as their store. Now WooCommerce integrates neatly with Leaky Paywall because they Both share the WordPress user table, which means if I buy something in their store like a PDF or a book, my account is valid for a subscription, a recurring subscription to access all their data, and vice versa. If I purchase a recurring subscription for the data and then I go buy a book, I'm already logged into the site. And you end up with a way to sell individual digital products and a way to sell recurring subscriptions. And the subscriptions are coming on now every day. If you want more information regarding digital publishing, head on over to zine101.com or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Thanks.
