Lessons, Tips and Tricks for Selling Online Content

Over the past few months we’ve been testing various ways to sell individual pieces of content vs. making everything available only to members.

Several times a week we receive emails from people who want to download individual interviews rather than become members. Initially we simply said it wasn’t possible, hoping the content would be valuable enough to them to become regular members of the site. Some did, but many did not and we left money on the table.

My concern has always been that if we offered individual pieces of content for sale, our membership revenue would decline. That didn’t happen. Actually our membership revenue on a monthly basis increased AND we opened a new revenue stream by allowing the purchase of individual interviews.

Our monthly membership is $39 per month and we priced the individual interviews at $25 each. For people who wanted a single interview, it was a good solution. And for people who wanted more than one, it was a natural next step to become a member and save money.

We did, however, see a small decline in Annual Pass and Lifetime Memberships. It appears that having the ability to download new individual interviews increased sales of the monthly memberships but decreased the longer term memberships.

So, we made the decision about a week ago to make only older interview available for individual purchase for about 50% of the website visitors. Bingo! For those people that did not have the ability to buy the newer interviews and only had them available for older interviews, Lifetime Memberships popped back up to normal. (The older interviews in the archives are only available to longer-term members.)

It seems that having individual pieces of content available for sale only in the archives made the price of the longer-term membership more attractive when compared to how much it would cost to get the same content individually. In fact it makes the Lifetime Membership seem downright cheap.

I think we’ve finally settled on the balance of membership vs. individual sales that creates the greatest amount of revenue and offers the best choices for the site visitors and members. The conclusion has been to make individual pieces of content available for sale in whatever membership category you want to sell the most of. That’s counter-intuitive. I would have expected the opposite – but that’s not what the data showed. Since monthly members don’t have access to the archives (they only get access to the latest content), the expense of downloading the archives individually makes the higher-priced memberships more valuable. We sold more of them because of this.

The one downside to all of this – we may have tested everything too quickly. We did get a few emails from people who wondered what the heck we would offer next and asking if they should wait until we were done to purchase their membership. Not a lot, but enough to make us realize that we’d better keep the site as is for a while.

Tim membership pricing, selling content online, subscription pricing membership content, selling online content

We’ve initiated our next test on our membership site at Trader Interviews and I feel a little sick.

For years we fought selling individual pieces of content on our membership sites, for fear it would cannibalize the subscription revenue. There was no data to back this up. Just a gut feeling that if we offered individual white papers, eBooks, interviews and reports for sale, no one would join the membership. It’s the same think record labels feared when iTunes wanted to start offering individual tracks for 99 cents.

The time to get some data and either smash that theory or prove it once and for all has come.

Late last night Emile finished testing on the development server and went live with a new home page for the site that included “buy” buttons for individual interviews. Just the most recent four interviews (this is a test, after all). I cringed as I reloaded the page and saw those dreaded “Add to cart” buttons.

We receive regular requests to download individual interviews on a regular basis. I’ve always politely replied that they weren’t available and suggested they join the monthly membership or lifetime membership in order to access the individual pieces of content. Curious as hell, I always write down their email and name (or whatever data I can find) and then check a few days later to see if they have joined. They rarely had.

Either the price was too high to join the lifetime option (if the interview they wanted was in the archives) or they simply didn’t like being told how they could get the content when it wasn’t on their terms. Either way, we lost a sale. It’s tough to say, though, if we actually gained other sales and new members who simply never emailed, understood the deal, and joined up. I’m sure there were a few of those as well so perhaps it evens out.

The option to buy individual interviews has been up for less than twenty four hours and already something interesting is happening. We’re seeing a small boost in monthly memberships.

I have a guess as to why – more time and data will be needed to confirm this. It’s all about pricing and perception. We priced the individual interviews high compared to the monthly membership: $25 each. With a monthly membership at $39, I think we’re seeing a boost because compared to buying an individual interview, that’s a bargain.

The price of the monthly membership is the same today as it was yesterday, yet I think our visitors are seeing the value of a monthly membership when presented with the price of an individual interview. Prior to offering it, there really was no baseline to compare the cost of the monthly membership. Is it expensive? Is it cheap? Who knows? But giving the visitor something to compare our lowest-priced membership option to seems to be helping them make a decision faster.

This isn’t earth-shattering or ground-breaking news, of course. People have been using this method to create value in a consumer’s mind forever. But we just might have found a great way to sell more memberships by selling content outside of it. It’s all about pricing, however. Price the individual pieces too low and it will definitely affect memberships. Price it too high and your visitors won’t bother looking past the home page to see what a subscription costs.

We’ve sold a handful individual interviews so far. Would those have been new memberships if we didn’t offer them? Perhaps, but we’re not seeing the dip in membership sales I had anticipated, which tells me that those sales are found money that wouldn’t have happened at all if we didn’t make them available.

A lot more time needs to pass and a lot more data collected, but I’m feeling a lot more positive about this than I did last night.

Tim membership pricing, selling content online, starting a membership site, subscription pricing selling online content

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

A: A lot shorter than you think it needs to be (and by the way, it probably shouldn’t be free, either).

The question of free or low cost trial will be the subject of another post, so for now let’s just discuss the length of the trial. It’s also right up there with the most common question, right behind, “What should I give away to build my list?”

Emile and I haven’t done as much testing in this area as we have with pricing (we’re in the middle of a pretty big “trial-length” test right now on one of our sites). But I’ve talked to a lot of membership site owners about this subject. I’ve also talked to quite a few of our current members and members who canceled during the trial.

Most people think they need to offer a one month / 30 days so that the trial user has time to really dig into the content and determine if it’s right for them. However the user experience is usually much different.

So here’s the shocking truth: nearly all of the members of our membership sites I’ve talked to that canceled during the trial made the decision to do so… during their first visit behind the membership wall and that usually means within 30 minutes of becoming a trial member.

It makes sense though doesn’t it? As much as we’d like to believe that new members will investigate every nook and cranny of our content filled awesomeness, it is their initial first impression (that happens within minutes) that dictates whether they are going to stay on as members or cancel before the trial period ends.

For the vast majority of premium content site owners, a one-day trial will be more than enough time for them to decide.

Now, that said, right away I’d argue that our online trading site is one of those exceptions. We offer trial members access to the most current four audio interviews. These run about 35-40 minutes each and it’s not realistic to think that new members will sit down and listen to all four in one day. Even a few days may be pushing it. So we run a $1 trial that lasts seven days. On the 8th day, they are charged the full-month fee and become regular members.

Site owners who have longer-form content will probably need to give their trial members more time to decide.

But there is another problem with 30-day trials. Aside from being totally unnecessary based on the above, longer trials reduce the urgency a new member has to check out the site. When a new member has a month to evaluate the site, they may come in very briefly to see what’s going on, but often decides that they’ll “really check it out thoroughly tomorrow.” Tomorrow becomes the next day, then next week, and before you know it, thirty days has come and gone.

So they say to themselves, “Well self, I didn’t have time to check out that site. So I think I’ll cancel for now and I’ll just sign up again later when I do have time.” There goes your trial member.

Making your trial shorter forces your new member to go in, consume your great content (it IS great, right?) and maybe even take some action based on what they’ve learned. The bottom line is that if they don’t take action based on their membership, you probably aren’t going to keep them on board past the trial.

If you’re offering a long trial right now, consider shortening it greatly and continue to do so until you see conversions going down. You’ll find a sweet spot in there somewhere that is long enough to give your new members time to truly evaluate your content, but not so long that they put it off until another time.

I’d love your thoughts on the subject!

Tim creating content, membership pricing, selling content online free trial, how long should a free trial be?

Emile and I have decided to make a change to the way we sell memberships to TraderInterviews.com. Since we launched the site back in March, we’ve made anywhere between $9,000 and $26,000 per month in memberships and subscription sales. TraderInterviews.com has been our testing ground and we’ve tested all kinds of pricing models – monthly memberships, annual memberships, and lifetime memberships. We’ve tested discounts, value-added reports, webinars and free trials.

All have had varying degrees of success but the clear winner has been the Lifetime Membership on a discounted price and for a limited time. The ability to pay once and have access forever at a price that was lower than our annual membership was the choice most members took. But we also heard that the reason most of our members chose this option was because it took the pressure off them to listen to as many interviews as they could in a limited amount of time.

We’ve known for a while that our growing library of available content (nearly 200 interviews and transcripts with successful online investors) was a clear problem. Members would join up on the monthly option only to cancel within 5 months simply because they were overwhelmed and didn’t know where to start. It’s a good problem to have, in a sense, because it means we’ll never be short on content to sell, but the information overload stress it is causing our members is hurting our retention. It’s also difficult to explain the value of having so much content and I think it’s started to make our pitch confusing and complicated. It’s something we’ve finally decided to tackle.

And our constant price testing has taken a toll as well. Here’s an email I received from a prospective member yesterday:

I have been following your site with interest but I am struggling to understand the price for your service. I have seen $299, $399 lifetime, $399 annually renewable and another one for over $1000. I would obviously prefer the $399 lifetime offer as per one of the mails you sent. Has this expired now? If it has, I would probably not join. If it is still available I may join with my end of year bonus.

Yikes! That’s what happens when you think you’re being sneaky and think your site visitors aren’t watching your pricing very closely. The truth is that most aren’t, but those that are can get dizzy when they see as many prices going by as we’ve had in the past six months.

So our two main issues are:

1) We went a bit nuts testing our pricing and while it provided useful data, it has confused our audience.
2) Our archives have grown to the point where the sheer amount of information available to new members is hurting our retention

So, starting Monday at 5:00 pm Pacific our membership pricing and content is changing:

1) We’ll be offering a $1 seven-day trial that will roll into a $39 monthly membership
2) New members will have access only to the most recent four interviews (we post one per week)
3) We’ll be selling the archives as an upsell to the $1 trial for the same price we currently offer the lifetime membership ($399 and shipped on a USB flash drive anywhere in the world)
4) If they say no to the upsell, we’ll downsell a $199 archive access pass whereby they can access the archives digitally and download each individually

This solves several problems, namely that new members won’t be overwhelmed by content when they enter the member area. But it will also allow us to offer a lower monthly price point while still selling access to the terrific library of content we have.

It will be interesting to see how our revenue is affected. I’ll keep you updated.

In the comments please let me know what membership or subscription models you’ve tried and what worked best for your specific audience.

Tim creating content, membership pricing, subscription pricing