Lessons, Tips and Tricks for Selling Online Content

I want to update you on our latest experiment of selling individual pieces of content outside of the membership and subscription products we offer.

(Side note: I would have done so earlier, but I’ve been traveling to tradeshows and meetings over the past 8 days and didn’t get a chance to post. That’s something I need to work on, by the way. I have a tough time getting focused enough when I travel to write good blog posts. If you’ve found ways to write posts while on the road that are as high-quality as the ones you write from home or office, I’d love to hear them.)

Anyway, the experiment has gone well and we’ve decided to continue offering individual interviews for sale along with the subscription products.

The interesting thing has been that even though it’s less expensive to become a member than buying just two individual interviews, we’ve had quite a few visitors buy two and three interviews without becoming members. Interviews are $25 each and a monthly membership that includes all the new interviews is $39.

It seems that some folks have such an aversion to a subscription that they’d rather just pay more and not deal with having to cancel a recurring payment. That seems odd to me, because we make it so easy to cancel online. After logging in, it is just two clicks.

I was so curious I emailed three of the buyers and asked them about their decision. Only one replied, and he said he just didn’t feel like taking the time to signup and wanted the instant gratification of using PayPal to buy the content he wanted without having to fill out another form. Fair enough.

But it’s a good lesson to us all. Don’t make the buying decision for your customer. Even though YOU may think one way is better than another, let the buyer decide. I personally don’t think our one-year pass, priced at $399, is the best value, when a Lifetime Pass is just $100 more ($499). But many folks do take the one-year option for their own reasons, I’m sure.

For people who have been playing the pricing and option game forever, this isn’t new. In the comments of the previous post, Matt Petrowsky reminded me that a book we’ve read and refer to often, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions contains a lot of this information. (The link is to the revised and expanded edition out on May 10)

I highly recommend it to anyone selling anything. There are some fascinating studies in it about what makes people choose certain pricing options.

Tim creating content, subscription pricing Predictably Irrational

I was halfway into making a video about how we make videos for our membership, subscription and premium content sites when a friend sent me a link.

Someone beat me to it.

It’s an opt-in page, but the videos so far on the other side are really good, and Video 2 is exactly how we make our videos:

http://www.membercon.com/links/VideoBoss

They’re no doubt going to be selling a product after video 4 (I’d be disappointed if they didn’t given all the work they put into the first two videos I’ve seen), but the free video #2 alone is better than most “how to” programs I’ve paid for.

I followed Andy Jenkins back when he was with Stompernet (I was a subscriber to their magazine and bought of few of their SEO products early on that helped us get our first sites going).

So if you want to see how we do our videos, their explanation is a heck of a lot better than mine was going to be.

Tim creating content, selling content online Andy Jenkins, how to make videos, the video boss

Here’s Part 2 of my interview with membership site owner, Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline.com. Part 1 can be found here.

4 ways to watch/listen/read:

1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:

Transcript:

Tim – MemberCon.com: Now, you have a forum, which is really busy. I’m looking at it now. Are only members allowed to comment on the forum?

Don McAllister: No. No. Anyone can join. You have to become a member of the forum, but you don’t have to be a ScreenCastsOnline member to access the forum. I did initially set up a members’ only sort of area on the forum, but to be honest I’ve not really leveraged that very much. I don’t use it very much. I did in the early days. I sort of had conversations with the members in that particular forum, but I tend not to do much in there now. And to be honest, the forum itself is pretty much self-managing, which is a good thing. I did find a couple of people in the early days who were really, keen and frequently on the forum and they’ve done moderators. So in effect it self-runs, although it’s set up.

I mean I’ll drop in. I always go in every week and start a new thread to do with the show so that people can actually talk around, what I’ve discussed on that week’s show. I’m making extra information and, they can give comments about the show. So, that’s something that I regularly update as part of my workflow publishing the show. But everything else, the chit chat forums and their requests for help – it will be too difficult for me to actually manage that on a day-to-day basis. So, the moderators. And really the community of people on there is super. most of them are very knowledgeable. Everyone’s very helpful and it’s very friendly. There’s no spamming. There’s no aggression in the forums. it’s really what I feel to be a really safe place for a new Mac user to go to because they will be helped out. It’s a really valuable resource.

Tim – MemberCon.com: I like the idea. That’s interesting. Most people that start a membership site, they put the forum behind the wall as well. You’ve decided not to do that and in a way I can see that being a really nice marketing tool. You’ve got the members talking about how great the last video was. Maybe it’s enticed people to join up and at the same time, you haven’t had to worry about trying to get that momentum going on the forum?

Don McAllister: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, very much so. I mean the only thing I might – in retrospect what might be better would be to actually put the discussion on the show page itself. on the main site rather than over on the forum. And I think I need to use testimonials a bit more. Because, I get tons of really good feedback on the forum for every show and that sort of – it’s definitely not behind the wall, you know? Anyone can see that, but they have to go to the forum to see it. When I get time to redesign the site, I might actually bring that across and actually put that on the main page for each show.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Now, you’ve been creating content for awhile. You’ve got a ton of HD video already up there. Do you find yourself struggling at times to find out what the next show’s going to be or has it always been easy?

Don McAllister: It’s fairly easy because the Mac market, it’s a rapidly evolving market. There’s tons of software available. Apple themselves, bring updates out. What I’ve tried to do, it always has to be something that I’m interested in. I never do a tutorial on a bad product. If it’s a bad product, I just won’t cover it. So, again that goes into the recommendation engine type of concept as well. So, it always has to be something that I’m interested in or more importantly something I think that, the viewers would be interested in. And if I can sort of expose something that people don’t realize or is, hidden away the more the better. So, I like to sort of bring the best out in a particular application set in its context and that gives people value. They’re not just, learning the nuts and bolts. They can see how it works and where it would work and where it might fit in with what they do.

Yeah, I mean there are weeks when I sort of scratch my head when I’ve got, a choice of things that I want to do and I’m not quite sure which one to do next. But there’s a ton of stuff. And also, I get loads of suggestions from people asking me to do stuff. So I’ve got a list, as long as my arm of applications that people want me to cover. So, if ever I do run out, I’ve always got that to fall back on.

Tim – MemberCon.com: And video is really time intensive. Have you been able to systematize it a little bit to make it easier?

Read more…

Tim creating content, online entrepreneurs, selling content online, starting a membership site Don McAllister, mac podcast, ScreencastsOnline.com

Part 1 of 2

Don McAllister owns a successful membership site that started as a humble podcast back in 2005. He built his membership entirely from scratch and eventually quit his full-time job to focus on the membership site as a business, ScreenCastsOnline.com.

Don has a tremendous reputation within the Mac community and in this 2-part interview he talks about how he built his membership site and continues to attract a loyal audience for his weekly Mac tutorial videos. Don breaks all the “rules” when it comes to membership sites, including not auto-renewing his memberships. But he has a specific reason for not doing so and it works for him.

4 ways to watch/listen/read:

1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:

Transcript:

Tim – Membercon.com: Hello everybody. Thanks for joining me at MemberCon.com for another interview with a membership site owner. We’re going to be speaking with Don McAllister. His website is ScreenCastsOnline.com. I’ve known Don for a few years now ever since back when I owned the podcast in New Media Expo and Don was one of the early adaptor podcasters that I learned about early on probably back in 2005 or so. So, we’re going to talk to Don about how he turned his site into a membership site and some recent tips and tricks that he’s learned about attracting new members. So, Don thanks very much for joining me on the show today.

Don McAllister: No problem Tim. Nice to speak to you as always.

Tim – Membercon.com: Well, when did you first start your podcast?

Don McAllister: Well, the podcast actually started back in the summer of 2005 so it was quite an early podcast. It’s one of the first podcasts really that came out. And when I started it, it was, a hobby podcast basically. I was generating content and I’m just throwing it out there for free probably for three or four months. So, it was very much a passion of mine, you know? It’s all to do with the Mac. ScreenCastsOnline is a video tutorial site and each week I would create a video tutorial using a screen capture technology. So these will be screen casts, hence the word ScreenCastsOnline. And I basically take people through, using the Mac, using the latest Mac software, and using the operating system. Really just sort of helping people through, how to get the most out of the Mac. And, it was something I really enjoyed doing.

Tim – Membercon.com: And so your target audience is basically anybody with an Apple product or basically a Mac computer?

Don McAllister: Yeah. Yeah. Really, speaking, although it’s quite interesting in that I do get, Windows users as well who are interested to find out what all the fuss is about the Mac. I mean, I was sort of caught away as well at the time because, the Mac sort of gained in popularity significantly over the last three or four years especially over here in the UK and in Europe. So, I still get lots of people who aren’t Mac users, but still are interested in possibly switching across to the Mac and really just want to see what it’s all about. And they just can catch some of the free content and start to understand what it is that makes the Mac so attractive and why it draws so many people in and people enjoy using the Mac so much.

Tim – Membercon.com: So, a lot of our listeners are probably in the position you were in back in 2005. You’ve got free content you’re creating. You realized there’s an audience for this. At what point did you decide, “I can monetize this. I can actually turn this into a business?”

Read more…

Tim creating content, membership pricing, starting a membership site Don McAllister, membership site videos, ScreencastsOnline.com

We started using webinars to generate buzz and interest in premium content about six months ago. They are a terrific way to deliver helpful information to a worldwide audience and talk about the benefit of joining our membership sites or purchasing premium content. At $99 a month for an account with GoToWebinar.com it is cost effective as well.

There are two business models that have worked nicely for us with webinars:

1. Do a free one-hour webinar with a partner that has a product to offer. 45-minutes is pure education on a specific topic, 10 minutes of questions and answers, then 5 minutes of pitch for the guest presenters product. We take 50% of everything sold through the webinar.

2. A free one-hour webinar with a partner who then does a follow-up webinar that is paid. The one-hour webinar is education on a subject and at the end is a pitch for the paid webinar. One we did recently was a free one-hour webinar and a 3-hour paid webinar the following week. (three evenings with one hour each). We split the revenue 50/50.

While we’ve found that 7:30 pm EST / 4:30 pm PST works best for our US-based audience, we have a large international audience for that site as well. We record the video webinar using Camtasia and post it about 18 hours after the live webinar.

Offering the video recording made sense – especially when our international audience would have to get up in the middle of the night to view the live recording. The intent is, of course, that anyone who isn’t able to attend the live webinar will watch it later. This would fine if I actually thought people were watching the recording when we sent them the link. Some certainly do, but my sense is that many don’t.

The more webinars we do and as our list gets used to the fact that the recording will be available later, the lower our attendance at the live webinars have become. It’s a trend I am becoming increasingly concerned with. The stats show that not even half of the people who didn’t attend the live webinar (but registered so they would get access to the recording) are watching it. I know everyone says the media world is transitioning to an “on demand” culture and that consumers of the media are demanding media be on their terms. I get it.

The trouble is, the media never gets consumed if it is available “on demand” forever. As with everything else when it comes to getting people to take action, when the recording is available forever, there is no urgency to watch it and therefore it doesn’t happen.

There are a few solutions we’re considering:

1. Do the live webinar and then replay the webinar recording at a specific time that would be late afternoon / early evening for Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

2. Offer the recording for only 48 hours after the live webinar, after which time it will be taken down. It would create the urgency to get more people to watch the recording.

I think #2 is the best solution, but I’m interested in hearing the feedback of others who know the webinar space well like Paul Colligan and Ken Molay of the Webinar Blog. What do you think, guys?

If anyone else has ideas or has experienced this trend as well, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

Tim creating content, site marketing how to record a webinar, record webinar