Special Episode: Subscription Strategies with Pete Ericson

Welcome to another special episode of WordPress publisher sessions hosted by Steve Burge of Publish Press, Leslie Sim of Newsletter Glue, and myself, Pete Erickson of Leaky Paywall. We invite smart people in publishing to share what is working in WordPress. So let's get into it.

Hi everyone. Welcome to episode two of WP Publisher Sessions. I'm super excited. We have me, Steve and Pete talking about the publisher ecosystem in WordPress and all the ways that we can grow your subscribers and your revenue. Today it's all about Pete, who is from Leaky Paywall. And I'll let him talk about that in a little bit and he's going to talk to us about subscription accelerator framework. Pete, over to you.

All right, thanks, Leslie. This is, this will be about you, the publisher that's listening to this, and we're going to dive into a very simple framework that will help you do two things. It'll help you build your audience and it'll help you grow paying subscriptions. And it's all about creating a flow. There's a third bonus piece to this which we're going to help you build a value add because with this framework, you end up with a premium newsletter at the very end of this recipe. So let me, let me jump in. Okay. See if I can figure out how to use the slides. That would be a good, a good start. So the problem that I hear from publishers, from myself, my wife, my friends, is that the web is loaded with all sorts of, I hate these paywalls that are popping up everywhere. No, that's not true, but it is a bit true. The problem really is that it's not the paywall that's causing trouble. It's the way things are implemented on a website. It could be pop ups, it could be paywalls. Usually it's a combination of the two and there's no real flow or strategy behind getting a casual visitor and say from Google or social search into the right relationship with you, the publisher, and then hopefully down the path to being a full paying subscriber. And I'm going to show you how you can actually turn your paywall into a relationship building tool. So the solution to this is essentially when somebody comes in from Google or Social sharing and they're a casual visitor, you need to engage them right up front and not annoy them. And the engagement, engagement usually today looks like a free registration, which only job is to capture an email address from that casual visitor. And that's the start of this relationship. Once you have the email, let's say they're on your newsletter. Let's say they're enjoying a little more free content. Then you go into that sort of relationship building mode where you target them and they want more content and they're convinced that they need to pay to access your content. And at the end, we'll show you how to create a, a premium newsletter for, for this. But I want, if you're, if you're just starting up a paywall, you're just thinking about getting into it really number one and number two are, are the two things to worry about. We're going to break these down. Okay. So we got started with this about eight years ago building a subscription platform for publishers. We, I personally was looking at what the New York Times was doing and that was. So they launched their, their subscription paywall in 2011. It's been about 1112 years. And if you look at this chart, you'll see that their print circulation, which is this bottom bar, has been softening a bit. They've done a pretty good job of retaining quite a bit of print subscribers. The, the top two bars is really mostly advertising revenue, which, if you can see that, how much advertising revenue has really fallen off for them, it's amazing. But since 2011, when they turned on their metered paywall, subscription growth has been amazingly consistent and, and most recently has actually grown more than when they started. So you can see that this, their, their digital subscription revenue has grown tremendously. And you can, as a publisher, whether you're a news publisher, magazine publisher, you can, you can essentially mirror what the New York Times is doing. And they are the tech bellwether or one of them in the publishing industry. And if you keep an eye on what they're doing, you'll, you'll, you'll see the things that are working and you'll be able to implement maybe not all of it because they use a very sophisticated technology platform, but essentially the fundamentals of what they're doing. And that works. Okay.

Oh, Pete, I, you mentioned the New York Times. So I went to their website and the first thing that jumped out of me was that they're being engaging and friendly on the firewall. So many of the. Sorry, paywall, not firewall. So many of them. So many paywalls are. You have to subscribe now or click here to turn off your ad blocker. Kind of obnoxious. The New York Times paywall, which I have in an incognito browser here is. Hey, thank you for reading. You can continue reading this article. Just give us your email address.

Perfect.

And that much, much more warm and inviting than most paywalls.

Couldn't have said it better. Yeah, that's, that's. If you do that, you're going to win. You'll get that email address and you'll be able to start the relationship with the reader. Absolutely. Okay, so. And we'll, we'll, we'll dive into that comment a little bit more, for sure. So I like to step back a little bit and just talk about the three buckets of readers that are out there for, for most publishers, this is very generalized. But, but true. When you put up a subscription paywall, you end up. Three things will happen. You'll have. Your hardcore fans will generally subscribe right away. They, they love you. They like what you're publishing. There's a connection, or read your content and they'll just pay. It doesn't really matter what you do, how you set it up, they just pay. And then on the opposite side, you have readers that come in from all sorts of all sources and they'll never pay for a lot of reasons. And then you have everyone in the middle. And these are what I call super casual readers. They, they really like what you're doing. They are, they might even be fans. They just can't pay. Whether it's financial, whether it's just. They're just not that interested, but there's a level of interest there that, that you need to capture. This is your biggest opportunity. And these fans that are not ready to pay today, but may be ready to pay in a week, in a month and four months, they're. They're there. And, and that's what we're going to focus on, is capturing this group of super casuals and bringing. Can I just. Yes.

Can I just clarify when you say subscribe? Because the graph says will subscribe right away and will subscribe after Nur. You mean we'll upgrade to a paid subscriber, right, rather than just a free subscriber?

That is correct, yeah. A paid subscription. Because the end goal is to get a paid subscription for your reader. Right. And there are a few ways to go forward with this. But the end goal is to take a growing percentage of these casual readers and move them through the funnel so that they pay for a subscription at the end. Okay, good clarification. So here's the flow. The way that actually, it actually breaks down. You have the casual readers coming in from Google and Social and what you do is you offer a free registration, just as Steve mentioned earlier, is you offer them. Let me back up one second. With a metered paywall. And I just want to say a word about the metered paywall. This is the most popular type of paywall today. It used to be the hard paywall where it was kind of an on and off switch where you, you go to a publisher and you can't read anything. But if you pay, you read everything. Today you can meter the content. In other words, you can give a, an article or two or three per month away for free without doing anything. And then you stop them and you say, hey, do something. And then you could get access. So what, what, what the New York Times is seeing and what we're seeing with our own publisher group is that the free registration really is the gateway to starting the relationship. Because what it does, and I'll show you in a second, is it stops the reader and says what's just what Steve said, hey, you can read this article now. Just give us your email address. And it, and it works. And you have to draw the line in the sand somewhere to start the relationship. But those super casuals, those I'm really interested in your content, but I'm not quite ready to pay. They will give you your email address. And we see this happening in droves. I haven't used that word in a long time. Droves. So that, that's what it goes. Now, of course, when somebody gives you their email address, what happens? That email gets sent to your, your newsletter service like a mailchimp or whatever you're using, right? And you end up building a free subscriber list. Okay, this newsletter then does. The main purpose of the newsletter is to be a direct marketing tool for you, the publisher, and driving these readers back to your website to read more articles. And that's where you get, you can get a little more sophisticated. But the, the, the, the main action is you're sending. Here are the new articles for today or for the week. Click. The person goes back to your website, wants to read the article, they registered for free. Maybe you gave them two or three free articles per month for doing that. They get to read their two or three free articles. But then they get stopped again and now it's time to pay. And they'll say, maybe, no, but that's okay. They're on your newsletter. You'll keep sending them back to your website to read content. And after seeing, seeing the upgrade message 10 times, 20 times, however many times it takes, their chance of actually paying for a subscription goes up and up. Because if they're clicking on your content, that means they like your content. If they're seeing the upgrade message over and over again, they're starting to get the idea that they need to pay to get full access and their chances of paying goes up. Okay, so I thought a real life example would be helpful to show this in action. I could use the New York Times, but I thought I'd use a very small niche publisher. T Journey. It's all about very. If you check out this website, it's Tjourney Pub, very deep dive into the world of tea. How it's grown, you know, going to China and they actually pull, they get content from China and Chinese translate it to English. It's pretty, pretty neat publication. So the way they have this set up is they have the, the meter, the subscription meter set to one free article per month, which means anybody coming in from, from Google or Social gets one article and then they get.

Is that unusually tight, Pete, One article?

Good question. So the New York Times is doing it. We have a lot of publishers that are doing it and it works. And yes, it seems tight right off the bat. And what we find is new publishers that set up subscription systems tend to be pretty generous right up front. They'll, they don't want to drive people away and so they'll maybe allow, you know, two or three free articles. And a lot depends on your publishing volume. If you're a. This is TJ is a long form niche publisher. They don't have a lot of content. They have, they have, you know, maybe 400 archive articles that are long form, but weekly they're only producing a couple of articles per week. So they need a very tight metering. If you're a news publisher and you're publishing 10 articles a day, which, you know, we work with plenty of sort of that size publisher, then yes, you might want to offer, you know, three articles per week on the, on the meter before doing anything. But I will say that you'll do that for a while and then you'll decide, gee, my email list isn't really growing fast enough. Let's go to one. If you look at your Google Analytics, you'll see that the average inbound Visitor will read one or two articles. It's like 1.5, 1.7 page views per visitor. Right. Which means if your meter is set to two or three, you're not going to capture those inbound visitors. If your meter set to one, you're going to capture a lot more email addresses from, from those and you'll capture them earlier. So the generosity, you know, you as a publisher, you want to be a nice, nice person. Right. You want to offer something for free and trade for that email address and you can decide how generous you want to be. So you're offering at least two things. You're offering extra articles. In other words, if you drop off your email address, you can get one more article per month. Five more articles per month. New York Times started with 20 more articles per month back in 2011. Then they went to 10 articles per month for registering. Then they went sorry, on their meter and then they went to five. And then after they, they sort of got to five, they said wait a second, let's do the free registration and we'll just tighten it to one. But then if you register for free, we're going to give you a few articles per month and if you, their language is very important here. And that's, that's just a little tip when you're setting it up. Just offer a few free articles because then you can change things in the back end and it doesn't mess up your, your marketing on the, on the front end of your website.

In my incognito testing right now, it seems to be immediate. The very first article I click on, mm bang. There's the request for the email.

Could be, Yeah. I mean there's, there's, you can override all sorts of settings. Sometimes, sometimes articles are, are going to be locked down and, and for whatever reason. But in general I would recommend if you're, if you're struggling with the decision, set the meter to one and then set the free registration offer to a few. Which means in the back end if you're a news publisher, it might be three to five. You know you're producing a lot of articles. If you're a long form content publisher like T Journey, I would say one per month extra maybe so two a month or maybe just one more period. Financial publishers that want to really lock down content a little harder. That would be a good approach. It's going to depend on the publication.

So T Journey is kind of the, the HBO of the T world. Everything is, there's not much of it but what there is is high quality.

Yeah.

And one article alone has an enormous amount of value. So.

That's right.

Setting a very restrictive paywall.

Exactly, exactly so and just, just a note. As long as the meter is set to one free article or more or higher per month, Google will, will index everything automatically. And any single article can be shared in social media without to a thousand different browsers. It's only when the individual browser starts to Click through to more articles where the meter is counting for that individual and that. You know, I talked to a Swedish financial publisher yesterday, right. And they had essentially set up the free registration, but they had locked down all their articles. So they were getting very, very reduced Google search traffic and almost no social sharing. And just a simple matter of allowing one article to be metered per month will allow Google to index everything. It will dramatically increase traffic to the website.

I opened up t journey in my browser. First article, this bowl of matcha in Kyoto. No problem. Second one, cooking a romantic Valentine's Day dinner. The one, the article just to the bottom of your. Yeah, very fresh screenshot. Immediately the pop up says, read this article for free if you give us your email address.

Correct? Yeah.

As soon as you enter the second article, bang, there's the very polite request for an email.

Awesome. You're. You're ahead of my, my slideshow. That's awesome. I'm glad you like it. So, okay, so I'd say make sure you're metering at least one article per month as you go forward. Okay.

So I mean that if they've read more than one, they have to start paying. So it's one free article as a subscriber and then anything more than that, you have to pay. Is that right?

Close. There's the, there's, there's the free registration middle that we're going to take folks through. So let's, as an example, let just what Steve did, let's say I read an article already and I'm going to the next article and I click next article, I get stopped, say, oh, wait a second, I can't read the second article in this case. And. But the messaging here is read this article for free. And that's the motivation. And what we're doing here is we're offering a free registration. You can read this article for free and then you can get whatever else the publisher says that you can get. So what I would suggest is you always want to be promoting the benefits, features mostly, and benefits of every step of the process. Right. So even though it's a free registration, you still want to let your readers know that, hey, you're, you know, you'll get a few free articles per month. You'll get one more free article, whatever it is, plus you'll get on our newsletter, which is a benefit. Right. Or at least a feature that, that will motivate that person to drop off their email address. This works so well that, you know, we, this, this is a quick registration form where you're just asking for an email address and a password. Right. And so it's a very, very simple registration and the reader is registering on your website. So they get logged in and that email address gets passed to let's say mailchimp and off you go. But this is pretty new. Most of the publishers we work with have longer registration forms asking for you know, first name, maybe last name, email of course password and then maybe some demographic fields like you know, it could be, you know, where you're located, could be your, you know, category of interest. We have publishers that have other newsletters to check off and fill out and guess what? People do it. You know, it's amazing the piece of friction that you're introducing here. This is kind of a low bar for friction but if you need to collect even more information, that's okay too. It works. You're still going to get those registrations because they want to read the article and they probably want your newsletter if they're that interested.

Right. Also, the value of free is really quite high to the people looking at this paywall that they're willing for free.

Right.

Contribute perhaps more data than you'd expect. I would have expected that those extra fields would have led to substantially more drop off.

It's, it's, it's important to have a piece of friction. I know it sounds counterintuitive but when you get somebody to fill out something they're starting a relationship with, with you as a publisher and you know you can, you can just pop up newsletter, you know like mailchimp newsletter pop ups to drop off your email address and join the newsletter. But you get, you get zombie accounts unless you do use double opt in, you, you know, you very, very low value list. But when you, when you're offering a registration and you're getting folks to log into your website, it's a little, it's a, it's a little commitment, it's a small commitment and your, the quality of that reader is higher than just a pop up newsletter ask. Okay, so let's say so I've, I've, I've read my one free article. I'm on my second article. It says oh, I can read this article for free but I have to register and then I'll get the newsletter. Great. I fill that out and then typically you know we do is we hand, we take people back to the article they were reading. They, they're logged in, the article's unlocked and the email address is sent to the email service provider. One thing to do right up Front I would say we're going to talk about this later with premium newsletters is you, you want to tag that email as free. You want to make sure that, you know that these are free registered readers that are coming in to your email service. So make sure that the tag free is set so you can target these readers. Right? So you, let's say you, I'm not a huge discount promotion fan, but let's say it's a holiday and you want to do a promotion and the things that are working today are, are like, like two months free. And then the subscription kicks in like things like that are working. So you're not really discounting, but you are offering some, some free value as a promotion, right? So like you, you have to drop your credit card in, but maybe you get two months of full access before the credit card is charged or a month or whatever you decide that lets you target that, that those free registrations and they are the most likely to take you up on something like that. Okay. And then there's website targeting. I won't get into that. But you, you have the benefit down the road of, of targeting right on the website itself too, because these folks are logged in. They're consuming your content. As they're logged in. You, you, you know, you, you can see what articles are, are converting these people into paid subscribers and what their behavior is. Okay, I'm just gonna keep trucking. Okay, so now we've captured the email address, they're logged in. The reader is logged in. They're now a free subscriber, free registered user. Right. And I just wanna, I just wanna lean into the importance of getting your newsletter right. This is so important. If you haven't watched the first episode Leslie talks about your newsletter, watch is the, it is the direct. You can tell how old school I am when I say it's the direct marketing tool of choice today. Right? For, for digital, it's the number one direct marketing tool. It's, there's no other method of, of, of essentially pressing a button and contacting everybody saying, hey, here's my message, you know, here's my promotion. Here's new content. Whatever it is, email works today and back in the day. The print email newsletter. Print email newsletter. Oh my God. More coffee. That's a new one. The print email newsletter. Let's come up with a solution.

I would not be surprised if there's lots of people out there who are printing email newsletters.

So the print newsletter people paid for, for newsletter subscriptions all the time and still do for Print. Right. So that has. Now, I mean, look at what Substack is doing. Right. You know, they're, they're, they're blowing it up with paid newsletter platform. Right. So the newsletter is just so important. We, as humans, we love packages of content that are delivered in our inbox. Right. And you spend a few minutes going through whatever it is and then you're done. And, and being done is important psychologically. Newsletters are just great and powerful tools. And, and you could say that, you know, like app messaging is also direct marketing. And that's true. But not everybody's going to download your app. But most people have an email address and they are looking at it. We're all looking at our email, generally speaking. Okay.

Say maybe a good fit for this focus on relationships you've been talking about. The newsletter is a little more intimate in terms of a connection with people, a little more friendly and so often easier to personalize. It's a, and Leslie talked a lot about in the first session about making it friendly and warm and making it a, a relationship building experience. If you're trying to onboard people and, and sweet talk them and nurture that relationship, the newsletter is, if it's done right in a warm and friendly way, it's quite an intimate experience. Right?

Yep. 100%. 100%.

And again, like really, really large publishers like the New Yorker, Washington Post are doing it. So unless you're bigger than them, like, there's no excuse to go really, to not go really personal.

Yeah. I mean, everyone's doing it. Yeah.

Leslie, you had examples, I think in the first session from the Washington Post with a whole different variety of newsletters. Each person had their photo like a friendly greeting. It was almost kind of a substack style, kind of friendly and felt very much as if it was written from one person.

Yeah, that's exactly right. Someone even posted a picture of their cat, I think, in one of the news issues.

Yeah, yeah. Leslie, I remember you talking about being personal. And I think Steve and I were both like, we need to be a little more personal in our newsletters. And, and it's true. And Steve, you're right on. It's a, it's, it's the start of the relationship. And so it's, you know, you're touching your customer with an email every single time you send one out. And it's, you're, you're, you're growing the relationship. You're building trust. You're showing that reader all your new content, your fresh content that's coming forward, which Builds trust, which builds the relationship. So the newsletter. I talked to a publisher not that long ago who didn't have a new, an email newsletter and it was just, I mean it's like, it's a bit of a head scratcher and he knew it. Most, I find are sending out newsletters that are functional. There's also a case for automating your newsletter through RSS or whatnot. So you can focus on publishing content that works better for sort of news publications or more transactional publications, but especially when you get into magazines, lifestyle things that require more design and I'd say sort of polished communication to bring that relationship forward. No matter what, which category you fit in as a publisher, you have to take a look at your newsletter and make sure it's doing the job of building that relationship. It's super important. You have total control over it, which in social media you have no control. The platforms keep changing their algorithms. Facebook, you know, is the worst offender. Oh, we love publishers. We don't like publishers. We love publishers. We don't like publishers. You know, you can't, you, you can't build your business on a social media platform. It will help you, but your business is built on your newsletter. That really as a publisher that is the foundation of the way you reach your readers.

So this T journey newsletter you have here, Pete has the, the request, the upsell request right at the top of the newsletter, right?

Yeah, that's right.

Is this one, is it maybe a little more old fashioned than we've been talking about in terms of the style, this particular newsletter?

Yeah, it is. It could use an update. I would say that we, I'd say that there are three things that you want to do with your free newsletter. This here we're looking at your free newsletter. So you do want your promotion on there, right? You need the upsell message to pay. I would probably send that to the bottom. I think it's great to offer some sort, some sort of free trial or whatnot, send it to the bottom, have your content up top. Your content is essentially excerpt content, titles and excerpts and that you have to click to read more on the website. And that's where your subscription meter kicks in and counts for how much you have left. And then the third thing is sponsorships. So one of the hidden benefits of having offering a free registration in your newsletter is that you're going to grow your newsletter. It's just going to grow with high quality readers. Sponsors love it. It's direct marketing for the sponsor and so they will pay you for Putting their logo or what or message into your newsletter. And so I would, I would flip this, Steve, you're right. I would have content right away. Maybe you have one sponsor up top. Your, your. If you get to the bottom, then there's messaging to upgrade for a paid subscription and then, and then off you go. But have your, have your, have, have your article excerpts there to drive people back. That's, that's the most important thing. And then have your. On your free newsletter, your call to pay for a subscription underneath that. Okay, So you're driving folks back, readers back to your website. They're using up their free articles, and then they get number two, which is the upgrade message. And this is the thing here is that you simply want your readers to see this multiple times. Like I mentioned earlier, it takes, you know, there's some official statistic which I think changes a little bit for how many times you need to see an advertising message in order to actually notice it. Right. It used to be seven. I think it's. I think I heard 12 last, and it's probably 20 now. I don't know what it is. It's some very high number that has to cut through all the noise that we have in our lives in order to actually resonate. But you have somebody, you have a relationship in process here. They're, they're interested in your content. You're seeing, you're, you. You know, so you've, you've stepped forward. It's not just a cold message because these readers have opted in. They're free registered, but they see the upgrade message and they'll see it over and over again. And there was a piece, I forget the source, that was published very recently that studied free registrations and their effect on paid subscriptions. And the data was really clear that the more times, you know, the longer somebody sat on a newsletter and saw the upgrade message, the higher chance a reader had of paying for a subscription. Okay, let's keep going. Okay, so we've so step one, into this, step three, you can skip for the moment. But I, but because you're in the process of setting up a free registration, it's so easy to kind of just step forward just a little more and end up with a value add for your paid subscribers. So one and two, One, set up a free registration. Two, dig into your newsletter. Make sure your newsletter is awesome because it is your main driver of paid subscriptions. And talk to Leslie if you need help with that. Okay, so the premium newsletter, you have a free registration on your website that readers Opt into. They're getting your free newsletter that has promotional content on it, has your article content on it. So by definition, you have a paid or premium newsletter for your paid subscribers. So as soon as somebody clicks that upgrade message and pays and checks out, you'll send the, the paid tag to mailchimp or whatever email provider you're using. And now you'll know who all your paid subscribers. So you'll end up with a list that's growing, free registrations and paid subscriptions, and you'll be able to message each one differently. So why not take advantage of that and say an offer to, as part of your marketing message to your paid subscribers, your premium newsletter. And then I get the. Well, what's. I don't have a premium newsletter. Well, well, by definition you do, because you're not. You don't have your, your promotional subscription messaging on your. That you're sending to your paid subscribers. So that's one clarification. But there's some easy ways to make your premium newsletter actually premium. And I'd say that the, the easiest way to do it is to simply provide full text to your readers instead of excerpts. Right? So, and this is easy to do, you publish content and instead of the excerpt going to the email box, you have full, full article text going into the email. So me as a paid subscriber, I can, you know, I can get ready in the morning and I've heard publishers tell me this story. I can get ready in the morning and I can open my email and I can read the news or whatever's coming in in full without clicking, which is an effort, and without maybe logging in, which is an effort. I just get the news in, delivered in my email box. I can read the whole thing and I'm done. And that is a benefit of being a paid subscriber. It's the convenience. And that convenience is, is we are all about time savings today. In our life, time is. Gets more and more valuable. Things move faster. We just need to sa. And we need, we want things to be more convenient. We're willing to pay for convenience so that one simple adjustment to your newsletter makes it premium and you can, you can automate it. And it's fabulous. Okay, another thing. Go ahead.

No, I just said nice.

Awesome. I wanted to hear it again. Okay, so the other thing you can do is early delivery. So the Canadian news publisher, that part of their subscription offering is early delivery. And what does that mean? Well, that means you get the news gets kicked out at say 6am so it lands in your email box then versus you know, 8am or 9am or whatever you choose. So there could be, there could be a, and we pay for getting things early time wise. It might, might not work for your publication, but that's something to look at.

These are not, not complicated things that you're offering to the, the pro users, the premium users. They are really pretty basic, pretty simple things that wouldn't take too much time for a publisher to do.

Thank you for saying that. That's exactly right. There's, there's, there's a lot of low hanging fruit here that you can grab and craft a very simple system to, you know, build that email list and then nurture that relationship and tempt that reader to pay for full access. And, and I just want to lean into that again. You know, we, we've paid for newsletters since the beginning of the newsletter and whether it's paper or whether it's email. And so why not jump onto that very long, very powerful trend and make that part of the, the value that you promote to that reader. It's a big value. It's really important. And it's like Steve said, it's super easy to do and you can automate the whole thing. You don't have to fuss with it every time. The other thing too is now you have a, you know, premium newsletter that you probably have some sponsors that might want to reach directly out with some special messaging to your best readers. Might not be high volume, but they are your best. And again, part of that relationship is using language for that sponsor that really connects with the paid, paid readers.

Yeah, I think you could do like special discounts for your paid readers. And so even though it's an ad, it sounds like it suddenly sounds really exciting for the paid subscribers because everyone wants like, you know, secret sales and special discounts.

Yeah, that's actually, that's actually a great idea. You pay, you become part, you become. Maybe it's a membership you call it. And I think those two words are pretty interchangeable and one's membership sounds a little nicer than subscriber, but a member subscriber. But yeah, that's a member benefit or subscriber benefit. There's, there's other things you can offer that just are a higher, that take more effort. You know, you just. Premium content. Right. So if you're a publisher, and so this publisher I talked to yesterday, they were, they were running a weekly stock pick for their financial publication which is very high value content. And so you know, for a premium subscriber that Weekly stock pick, you know, maybe, maybe that ends up, maybe they get a second weekly stock pick as a premium subscriber, you know, like a higher level subscriber. Maybe it's, maybe they get to ask questions, maybe there's a response. You can connect with the publisher in some way and get more information from them. As a paid. So there are other things you can inject into your premium newsletter, but I would start with the full text, maybe early delivery. And I like the idea of a discount if you can work, connect and partner up with, with vendors that serve this, your same audience for sure. Okay, that's. So that's, that's it. That's the whole, that's the whole framework. Set up a free registration to build your email list that throws off tons of great things. The newsletter is driving and promoting your subscriptions. And then set up that paid newsletter call, you know, call it a paid newsletter. Just, just write it in your marketing copy when you're setting it up and then, and then connect with Leslie or myself and we'll help you set up the, the paid paid newsletter version.

So it sounds simple, but when it comes to the first step, most, most websites don't have the registration. They have a buy now either jump on or jump off option rather than a nurturing option. Step one, then step two, maybe the newsletter isn't regular or isn't relationship building enough. And then often step three maybe doesn't exist.

Right.

These three steps come from your experience. But often, maybe all three steps are broken for a lot of publishers.

Yeah. You're treading on a very sensitive sort of topic for me.

I'm not asking you to name any names.

Well, I don't have to name any names because it's, it's almost everyone. You know, we have a, I say, I think our, our biggest challenge, you know, what we do as a company is we try to help publishers set up a very seamless experience for their readers so that it's, it's a relationship build from step one, which would be the free registration and on. And I've been doing a lot of reviews. We, you know, publisher will launch their subscription mall, whether it's maybe a relaunch from something else or brand new. And I'll go in personally and I'll actually review their setup. And even after, you know, what I consider helpful conversations as far as strategy to get the subscription system set up is they are fundamentally flawed because they're, they're not following the, the, that sort of flow that you need to take the subscriber through. So we go back and we help. And you know, publishers in general are great at their content. Like their expertise is their subject matter and what they're covering. They are absolutely, I read, I read their content and I'm in awe of the way they put things together. But generally speaking, unless they have a marketing team, they're not digital marketers. And you know that you, you in digital marketing, you know, this was, we learned this a long time ago. I started in 98, so that tells you something. But you have to build a relationship from, you know, from the first touch point, which is the website. And you have to figure out how to grow that relationship over time and that, you know, instead of having a paywall or pop ups annoying readers and sending them away. The ad blocker thing drives me insane. Right. That's just a lost battle. Forget it. Right. Do the opposite. You, you know, use your subscription system to be the nice publisher and collect those registrations and give away free content and a newsletter and you know, and, and, and really, and work that relationship and then, you know, and you have to draw lines in the sand. Right. You know, but if you give us your email, you'll get X amount. If you pay, you'll get all sorts of great stuff. It's a, it's a, you know, we look at it simple because we've been doing it for a long time. We know how to build a relationship. Publishers are not digital marketing experts, so they blow it most of the time and they need a lot of help with that. And honestly we're struggling with figuring out how do we help publishers do this. And again, low hanging fruit, right? Simple stuff. It doesn't take a lot of effort but you got to know which way to drive. Right? Okay.

I guess it's what this, it's cool to hear you being so passionate about it. And I guess that's what these WP publisher sessions are for. Right? To help publishers figure out the flow and how to drive revenue.

Right.

I have a question about like, I think like Steve kind of talked about like asked it as well. Like does that mean that the primary CTA goes, moves away from become a subscriber or upgrade and goes into become a free subscriber? Is that kind of how you think about it?

Yes, yes. Um, there, let me show. But there's some, there's nuances to everything. Right? Let me just, let me show you real quick. So I know I've shown this one before, but let's take a, take a look at another long form niche publisher. If I run. If I start reading their articles, I'll get asked to register and I'll get one more free article. But let's say I come in and we look at the data. You know, people sometimes art an article that stops somebody will trigger a paid subscription, but sometimes they'll just come in and subscribe, right? Like they look at it, they just know they want it. So they hit the subscribe button. So the nuances, you know, like always have your subscribe button as a button up top. I would have this as a text link, the sign in link. You don't need it to be a button, but at least this button is highlighted. It's very obvious. And when you go to subscribe, you know, they're very smart. They're, they're offering one mental decision point and that's subscribe for me or subscribe for someone else. That's an easy decision tree to make, right? They're not offering, they're not giving you, you know, five choices, which is another whole other topic. So then I hit subscribe and then I go pay. I register and I pay and I check out. And this, this happens a lot when I'm coming through the content, however, right. So let's go into this article here and go to Risk Taker and I'll probably get stopped. I don't know. I'm not sure though. Yeah, I got stopped. So they're giving me the excerpt and then they're so, so now they're taking me through the different path. Read this article for free. Okay, cool. I'll do that. I'll sign up and now go into the free registration form. Right? And I'm gonna have to do a little more work and. But I only get one more article. That's it there. You could just read this one article and that's it there. You end up, I'm going a little deeper here, but you end up end up with a ratio of free registrations to paid subscriptions. And what you'll, you'll figure out over time is what percentage of free registrations are going to convert. It's typically around 5 to 10%, but these guys is way higher. I won't mention what it is, but it's, it's, it's off the charts because they're very long form, very deep, deep article content, high value content. Readers want it. They're only giving away one, so they're drawing a line to pay very early in the sand, but they're still building a relationship because they're giving away a very important Piece, you know, a high value piece of content with that email address. And it's, and it's, and it's working for them.

Is there a, a type of publisher that you're seeing have a lot of success with these paywalls? Does it help if they are very niche that we've talked about people in the tea business, we've talked about people interested in crafting their own small boats. Does that very specific niche lead to more conversions?

Yes, and I'll throw news publishers right into that too.

You're.

If you're a local news publisher, you're in a niche, right? You're, and you, you, you might very well be the monopoly of your niche, right? You're the number one publisher. So you have a lot of, there's a lot of motivation to pay for news about the local area. We work with lots of like niche publishers that cover, you know, these kind of like deep, deep topics and they're digital only and it's low, it's low volume. News publishers tend to be high volume. We work with, we got our start with magazine publishers and they are by definition niches where they're covering a subject matter. Maybe it's an enthusiast, you know, like sports enthusiast, you know, rugby, I don't know. We have several rugby news publishers for countries. You know, we have a, like bike racing in Ireland, you know, and the, and so as a publisher in general, yeah, you want to tackle a niche, you know, the, the big, you know, like the USA Today of the world. They're the ones probably struggling the hardest to capture paid subscribers because their news is, you know, generalized and you can get the news everywhere. But if you're publishing news you cannot get anywhere else and you're tackling a niche. And my recommendation is be the number one in your niche, right? Like find your niche and be number one in that niche. That, that's, that's. Then you'll convert paid subscribers. So I don't know if that answers the question, but yeah, it does.

I was on your website and leaky paywall examples, drummers, small boats, track and field athletes, most of the case studies and examples you have quite spectacularly niche. Hey, who, who wants reviews of the latest drumsticks? Not many people, but those that do, they really, it's their, that's their job. They drum for living or for a lot of fun.

And yeah, and news, I mean, I brought up my villager. This is a local weekly newspaper and they, you know, they were a free, free weekly for forever and depending on ad revenue in the in the paper that was, you know, deposited in retail locations, and they've pivoted now to paid subscriptions. So if you want that newspaper, it's no longer free, it's paid. And if you want digital access to their content, it's paid. And this is a pretty dramatic pivot for this news publisher. And I can't give away any details, but, you know, it's working nice. You know, you cover local news. You, You're. You have a monopoly on your niche. You know, you have unique content. People pay. You just have to. You just have to build that relationship with them to get there. Those casual, Those super casual readers. Right. You're. Hey, your hardcore readers, they'll pay. They'll support you. They love you. That's. You don't have to do much to get them. But those fans that are not ready to pay, those are the ones you got to work with, and they're your biggest opportunity, too.

Yeah, I feel like we could do an entire episode on Niching Down.

That'd be fun.

That'd be pretty good, right? Yeah.

Throw off loads of examples of crazy niche publications. Yeah. One thing that we've learned is that every publisher's, you know, content and audience is different. You know, they have. They want different approaches. You know, they have different content audiences have different needs. Language is different. There's a lot of different. But this framework of capturing an email address and in exchange for some free content, that is. That is the common thread amongst all the successful publishers we work with.

And so, Pete, you have a final question for me. You've actually done the smart tactic of branding this approach. Subscription accelerator.

Yeah.

So when someone comes to leaky paywall and wants some help, you're like, hey, let me introduce you to the subscription accelerator, right? Step one, step two, step three.

That's it.

Let's get it done. This will improve your sales. This will improve your membership levels.

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's a pretty niche document, but it's, you know, we're targeting publishers and we do, you know, they do download it, they do read it, and. But honestly, I think the. The thing that's been most helpful is the podcast that, that, that has been. We get more feedback on that than anything else from customers and potential customers. That, that's been, that's been good. And, you know, we don't have a big. We don't have a big listenership. I mean, we're very. We're small business or we're, you know.

You were going to say niche, weren't you?

Trying to find another word.

So the podcast will fit into step two. The podcast goes in your newsletter. It's part of the relationship building process. People listen, they realize, hey, these guys know what they're talking about.

Yeah, yeah. Well, we, we, I mean the whole, we could do a whole session on content production, but we, we record the podcast with screen sharing. So we're showing off a few examples. Not a lot, but a little bit on. And then that turns into a video that goes on YouTube. We get some traffic from that and then that's. The podcast gets released first. That's the first thing that's always released, the audio. And then that goes on our blog. So we do a transcription, we pull the transcription. We use a little AI to summarize the transcription so that publishers can know what this is about and some takeaways and then. And that, yeah, that seems to. It's pretty efficient and it works. And so, yeah, podcast. Yeah. How to turn your podcast into content on your, on your website. And we have publishers that are starting a podcast free mostly, but some have paid podcasts too, which are, which are working. That could be another episode.

Yeah, I'm writing it into our topic ideas doc as we speak.

So. So, Pete, if someone wants the full subscription accelerator document details, where would they go?

Yeah, just go to leakitpaywall.com success.