Your #1 strategy for growing paid subscriptions

So what I'm going to show you here is a framework that works really well for building your email list and converting paid subscribers. So let's take a look at this framework. Your website. When you turn on subscriptions, you will generally capture your hardcore fans. They'll pay you right up front, pretty quickly, early on, but they're a very, very small percentage of the actual traffic that comes to your website. The 99% of your traffic are casual visitors, people that find you from searching in Google or get a share in social. They might really not be interested in your publication, and they might be fairly interested in your publication, but they're casuals, they're not ready to pay, but they're your biggest opportunity, biggest body, biggest opportunity. So how do you convert a casual visitor that's coming in from a Google search into a paid subscriber up here? Number three, and the secret that I alluded to is you're capturing their email address and sending them your newsletter. So the advantage of setting up a paywall in a way to force, essentially, and it's sort of carrot and stick, you're giving them some limited access in return for an email address, and that gets them on your newsletter, which then becomes number two. Oops. Yeah. And becomes your direct marketing tool. So building your email list up front, this is the, this is the most important thing you can do. If you walk away from this session with just one thing on your agenda, this is it. Make sure you set up a free registration. I'm going to show you what that looks like in a second. And you'll start there. Because when somebody registers on your website through your paywall as a free registered user, user with limited access, you're essentially starting the relationship with that person. And the data is clear. If you, the longer somebody gets your newsletter, your newsletter lands in their inbox, they click the article link, they go back to the website and they want to read the article. Maybe they get a couple a month and then they get the prompt to pay because they've used up their free allotment. The longer they stay on your newsletter, the higher chance they have of subscribing. Okay, so this is the framework and new products. You know, once you get this framework flowing and it works really well, you'll then, then it's time to start thinking about how do you, how do you tweak it, how do you add new products? There are lots of things you can do to, to accelerate that. If we have a little time, we can kind of jump into that. Okay, so here is small Boats magazine. If you go to smallboats monthly.com check this publication out. Before I forget, just start reading some articles, register for their free level, get on their newsletter, and pay close attention to how they promote paid subscriptions because it is just, it's awesome. It works so well. And the way they have it set up is their meter. Now they've been doing this for a while, so they're pretty restrictive about their content. Typically when publishers launch paywalls, they tend to be generous about their content. You might give away, you know, two, three, four articles or register and you'll get five a month or three a month or something like that. What, what Small Boats does now is the meter is set to one free article. And that's all you need for Google to be able to index your entire site, one free article. And then once you read that free article, you have to register and then you'll get another free article and that's it. So here we are. This is the homepage. Let's pretend I've used up my free article. I'm going to click this Swamp Creek article here and it takes me to the subscription message. So here I am, I'm in the article up here and I get this message right in content. And my, me as a reader, like I want to read this article. Like I'm getting, I'm getting this message at just the time I want to read the article because I clicked on it. And that's another benefit of the meter is you're not choosing which articles to restrict. That's a lot of work and you're going to get it wrong every time. The meter lets the incoming visitor choose what article they want to read. And that's how you get their attention and that's how you start that relationship. So this is the subscription message and the pitch is very, very simple. Read this article for free. This works every time. Well, not every time, but it works a lot of times. And so, okay, so I sign up here, no credit card required to finish reading the article. Pretty, pretty simple proposition. And even though Small Boats is only giving away this one article, I mean, they have long, beautiful, long form content. It works. I look at the, I look at the subscriptions coming in and the mix of, you know, free and paid subscriptions is strong. So now I click this, this, hey, read my free article and I get a simple registration form. And you can, you know, you can, you can sort of use the sort of standard approach where you. The idea, of course, is to grab the email address. You can also set it up. So it's just an email and it sort of auto generates their account on the fly. But the idea is they fill this out, this works, and then they get taken back to the article they were reading and the article is unlocked for them. They can read it, the email is captured, it's sent off to your, you know, mailchimp or whatever email service provider you're using, which means that now you have someone who is, who has subscribed to your newsletter in a sort of a more of a relationship way. And that works great. And so the results. They started so small boat started this registration last summer and they saw about 20% uptick in their email list growth and their paid subscription just from setting up the free registration framework.