How to unlock your e-edition (flipbook) content to grow digital subscriptions

In this video we're going to talk about E Editions or Flipbooks and how they relate to your digital strategy. What I'm going to tell you is that the biggest challenge is that they're really not a big part of your future growth. Yes, they will help you in the short term and they'll help you bridge your print readers into digital, but they will be a minority of your future digital subscriptions. Now they do have a role. There are three things that they do well. One is they bridge the gap between print and digital so your print readers have something to look at digitally that they're used to. Two, they do help you tell your advertisers that their ads are here in their editions on the web in digital. But thirdly and most importantly is they show the aspiring print subscriber what the print product looks like and it does a really good job at converting print subscriptions. Now why no real future growth with digital editions? Well, the bottom line is that your content in a PDF or Flipbook is locked away from Google search and social sharing and it also doesn't do well on a mobile phone. When we look at the data from our publishing customers and we see where are people coming from. Google search is a big component. Social sharing can be the number one component. Email newsletters a big component and direct links. The digital edition, when was the last time you saw it show up in a Google search? Or when's the last time you saw somebody share digital edition? It happens very infrequently. Let's look at the opportunities here for you. And the opportunity here is to combine your web based article, articles and flipbooks into one package on your website. And when I say a web based article, I mean the standard article you run across when you, when you read a news site like you're looking at here, this toys for young and old stuck at sea. This is a web based article. Google can index and rank this article in search. I can share this URL in Facebook, LinkedIn. So what's the opportunity here? The opportunity is to combine your Flipbooks, your E Editions with web based content. The trick here is to not to put too much effort into the Flipbook edition. It's going to be part of the solution, but a small part of the solution. We find that about 15% of readers will gravitate towards the Flipbook. Those are your existing readers, but your new readers, the casual readers that you convert into loyals paid subscribers, those 85%, they're the ones that come in from Google search and social sharing and get on your newsletter and get sent to your content. That's where the opportunity is to convert paid subscriptions. All right, let's talk a little bit about the Business Journal in Youngstown, Ohio. They are, but every publication is a little bit different. The Business Journal has grown their email list to a point where they feel comfortable in really restricting the content even more, which is typically what happens as publishers get experience with paywalls and learn is that they'll start with sort of a wide net, very, very loose a news publication. They have a print edition and they began with only a print product back in the day. We helped them launch their publication a few years ago and brought all their news stories onto the front page. And what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to click in and we're going to take a look at what this looks like. So the Business Journal's news stories are laid out in a very typical news format, but they're also offering their editions as both web based and flipbook based. And they're combining it all behind a paywall. So if I click into an article here, it'll simply open up as a web based article that Google can index and social can be shared in social media. Now, this article happens to be part of the December 2021 issue. And if I click on this issue, it'll bring up all the articles that are in this particular issue. There's a table of contents here and I can click through and read all these articles. Now, if you look closely, you'll see that there's a Flipbook link here. And because I'm logged in and I have access to the flipbook, when I click it, it opens up the flipbook right on the website, fully integrated. Look at the URL up top and you'll see that the businessjournal daily.com is still the URL. You're not sending people away to another site. And that lets you set up a paywall that can meter your news content, your E Edition articles, and your flipbooks at the same time. And this works just as you would expect. So what happened when they launched their new paywalled website? Let's talk about that for a little bit. What they decided to do is pretty interesting. The first three months, they took on free registrations for full access to their content. They gathered about 7,000 new email addresses, which was a very big deal for them. And then they turned on the paywall earlier this year, and now paid subscriptions are coming in at a good clip. So they went from print to web based publishing, to integrating their Flipbooks onto their website, to a free registration to allow access and warn their readership that a paywall was coming. And then the paywall came. And if you go to their website now and you look at their subscription options, there is no free registration anymore. And if you've listened to any of these videos in the past, you realize that we're big fans of free registrations. They do work. And then as you gain paid subscriptions and the free registrations come in, publishers will tend to tighten up the restrictions and offer less and less as they get better and better at converting paid subscribers. Okay, so the visitor framework here that I want to show you encapsulates really how you need to approach your website. The Flipbook is great. It sits here on your website and it will serve your current print readers. It may convert some new readers as well. But the majority of your website articles will attract Google Search, Facebook sharing, LinkedIn. Sharing your newsletter will drive readers to individual articles and people will find you directly by typing in your web address and going directly to your website. These are the four major ways that you get new casual readers to your website. And that casual reader body is really your biggest opportunity for driving subscription growth. And the Flipbook, unfortunately does not target that body. It targets your existing print readers. Now, some people say, hey, people love reading flipbooks. And yeah, I'd say on an iPad and on a desktop, that statement can be true. There are people who do love reading flipbooks on a phone, though, it falls apart pretty quickly. The screen is simply too small and those are where most of your new readers are. So the next steps for you, if you're considering a print to digital strategy, is look at the Flipbook as part of your solution. Make sure you get your articles into a web format and whether it's category based or whether it's issue based. And then get your Flipbooks integrated with your website. And you can do this a couple of ways. One is you simply embed the flipbooks into pages on your website which are restricted with your paywall. Or two, as we do work with a WordPress plugin such as Real3D and you have a tight integration between the Flipbook and the paywall. And the last step, if you want to grow your subscriptions, grab our subscription accelerator. It's free. Just head over to LeakyPaywell.com grow and enjoy.