How to find a paid sponsor for your publication's free registration offer

Welcome to episode 22 of the Paywall podcast. I'm Pete. I'm here with Jeremy and Tyler and we are going to talk today about one very powerful idea, one that is working a few publishers and that is how to monetize your free registration level. And the bottom line here is if you've been paying attention at all and you have a free registration or you're considering setting up a free registration level to build your paid subscriptions, we're going to give you one more very compelling thought and approach to generating more ad revenue. So the idea is that you set up a free registration level which triggers new paid subscribers and everyone's happy. But there's more you can do with that free registration level. Before I jump into the free registration tactic on the advertising side, let's talk a little bit about what it is. So if you don't know what a free registration level is, it is a level that costs nothing for a visitor that lands on your website to sign up and get some extra content from you. That's typically how it works. So let's say you have your meter set to two free articles per month. You stop the visitor at their second free article, and when they hit the third free article, they get a prompt that says, hey, why don't you, if you register now, we'll give you an extra article each month or a couple extra articles, or maybe just one extra article that works for large publishers like the New York Times and loads and loads of small to medium sized publishers. It's a great tactic. One, it makes your email list bigger because you're stopping people on the article they want to read. So they there's a motivation to join. Your newsletter list is now bigger. Sending more people back to your website, reading more articles, that increases their chances to subscribe. We talk a lot about this because it works so incredibly well. And if you're, if you're not doing it, now's the time to do it. If you are doing it, now's the time to review how things work for you. The second thing is when you get someone registered on your site and it's time for them to pay, they're already registered, they don't have to fill out their name and their email, choose a password. They've already done that work. So the friction of making a payment goes down, which is what you want. You want to make it easy for people to subscribe. Okay, so now that I've gotten that sort of intro to what a free registration is and why you need to have it, how do you monetize your free registration further? So the idea here, and if you're looking at the screen and through the video that we're producing, you'll see Rugby News. And Rugby News is monetizing their free registration level by creating a sponsorship for it. So if you think about it, and if you look here, it says student pass on their free registration subscription card. And the idea here is you're giving away something for free, so you're giving away your valuable content. So there's a good match here between an advertiser to sponsor the free registration level and what you can tell anybody that's new that's coming in to register. And I call these people super Casuals. In other words, they're not. They're not, you know, one and done. They hit your website, they read an article, they go away. These are people that are coming back. Maybe it's the first time, but they really connect with you and they decide that it's worth the effort to register and get on your newsletter. These super casuals, they will convert percentage of them to paid subscribers. But why not just tell them that, hey, this free registration, this valuable content that, that I'm giving away is sponsored by this company, right? This is the sponsor. So when you're talking to advertisers, we're going to give you five touch points minimum that you're going to tell an advertiser, look, if you sponsor the free registration level for each registered user that comes through the door, we're going to put your brand in front of them five separate times just like that. Which is what you need to do in advertising today. You need to repeat your message over and over again. Now, you can do it more than five, but this is a minimum that you gain right out, right off the bat. Okay, let's go back to Rugby News here. So you can see here the student pass. It says free with a valid high school email address, courtesy of UOW Crusaders global rugby program. So this is the sponsor for the free registration level. And this is what we're gonna, we're gonna pivot into now is the tactics of how you set this up. Number one, I'm gonna hop over to T journey here. When somebody comes to your site, they've consumed their, let's say, two or so free articles and they get the subscription nag. They get something like what we're looking at with Tjourney now, which says, hey, read this article at no charge or read this article now for free. And it takes them through the free registration prompt now this is a great spot to deliver a sponsored buy message. And you can design it any way you want. Maybe this big image in the middle here can have the branding for your sponsor right there. So every time someone is stopped on your web, they're presented with the option to register for free. And hey, they. This registration is brought to you by this advertiser. Okay, so that's one. All right, the second spot is. Let's say somebody says, yeah, that sounds like a good deal. I like free. So I'm going to go register because I like this publication and I go to the free registration page. Here's a second spot where you can deliver the brand for the advertiser. Hey, this free registration, which is going to give you these, you know, extra article benefits, is sponsored by this company or this organization. Pretty simple so far. And the idea here is you can set this up real quick and, and start selling it. Well, you can sell it first before you even set it up, but I'd recommend, and we'll talk about this a little bit, that we get something set up so you can show your potential sponsors what it looks like. All right, so that's the second spot. All right, what's the third spot? As soon as somebody fills out your form here and hit submit, they get a welcome email, right? Saying, hey, thanks for registering. And this welcome email is specific to the free registration level. With your messaging, add your sponsor branding to that email. So in the email box comes the message, hey, your. Your free articles are sponsored by this advertiser, this company, this organization. So that's the third spot. Again, super easy to do. All right, what's the fourth spot? I'm going to jump here to small boats. The fourth spot is, is back to website targeting. So we're looking at Small Boats magazine here, smallboats monthly.com, and I am actually logged as a free registered user. I've gone to the site, I've logged in to get my free article. And if you look at the bottom here, you'll see a little message that says, hey, we're glad you're enjoying the free content. Upgrade your account for full access. So that's cool. And that's a great message because you want to sell subscriptions. But again, wouldn't it be easy to simply add, hey, this, your. This article is sponsored by this organization and you can get that brand into the website when that free registered user lands back on an article. So that's number four in tandem with number four. And if you're a leaky paywall customer, you can Use the, it's called the conditional display notice, which I call the header bar. And to add this, you can also use our add dropper add on which lets you display notices to folks that are logged in for free and then hide the notices from paid subscribers. The ad dropper add on lets you display a banner or a message. Write in content in the article after paragraph. Let's say number three or four saying that this article is sponsored by that's on site targeting. All right, that's four. Now I promise five. The fifth one is the big one. The fifth one is promise your advertiser that you will send out a specific campaign for their brand. What do they want to do? What are they selling? What are they promoting? Help them build a campaign and then set it up and you can automate this completely so that, let's say if you're sending everything to mailchimp and the free registration level sends the new registered user, that person is tagged free. Let's say they use the mailchimp tag called free. You can then target everybody that's tagged free and you can automate that if you like. So after a certain number of days, this campaign goes out with the message for your sponsor. So that's a direct marketing tactic. The email gets sent and the big message from the advertiser is delivered to that free registered user. So that's five touch points. There's nothing custom here. This is all out of the box functionality. And you can really deliver a super sponsorship product to your advertisers time wise. They happen organically as the, that free registration, you know, discovers the content and then signs up. I want to answer the question, how do you do this? Not the technical part, but how do you actually sell it? Which is like, I get excited about this kind of thing. What I would recommend you do is since sponsorships are still a little bit, I don't know if I'd call them new, but they can vary in the way things are implemented. When you're selling sponsorships to an advertiser, what I would do is I would pick an advertiser that you want to give some free advertising to, somebody you work with closely and then set this up for them so that they, so that you have a model. So what I would say to them is, hey, look, we're putting together a new sponsorship option. It's going to give you visibility with five different touch points. It includes a big direct email that goes out to anybody who registers for free. And, and they'll say, great, but they have no idea what you're talking about because they haven't seen it. And then you say, okay, how about we do, let's say, well, I want to set this up, we're going to test it, I'm going to give you 30 days for free. And they say, yes, of course, free is great. Why would I not want 30 days of free advertising? And so then you set up the touchpoints that we just went through, put together a, put together an email or, or not. Number five can be optional, but what you want to have is the ability to talk to the next sponsor and say, hey, look, we have the sponsorship program. It's going to give you five touch points as you gain experience. And you're of course installing UTM tracking codes and all the links. You'll have more data in terms of page views which deliver the sponsor and the UTM tracking. So you'll build data over time so when you approach the next advertiser, you'll be smarter about it, but you'll have something to show so you can say, hey, look what we're doing here. You're going to be the good guy, you're going to be the sponsor. You're going to be giving away the free registration level. You're going to have a lot of on site website targeting and email, direct email marketing built into this campaign, these campaigns. And that's how I would approach your advertisers. Build the, show it to them. It's easier to show it than talk about it. Okay, so that's it. That's a quickie for, for this episode. Bottom line, get your free registration going. If you don't have it going. Two, if you do have it going, you're wielding a very powerful tool. Review it. If you want help, please get in touch. We love questions. And if you have a question on anything else as far as digital subscriptions go, please shoot it in to infoen101.com z e n101.com and until next time, happy publishing.