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

Explaining how your membership site will help prospective members, quickly and effectively, is an important step.

I’ve written in the past about how selling with a story is the best way to do this.

We just updated our “selling story” for our main membership site and posted it below. I’d love your feedback in the comments. It feels like it might need some background music.

Let me know what you think. If you were interested in online trading and investing, does it make you want to join our site?

(If you are reading this post in an RSS reader, you may need to come over to the site to see the video below.)

Do you have a “selling story?” I’ll bet you do, even if you haven’t made a video yet. More on coming up with your “selling story” in another post.

Tim selling content online, site marketing selling with a story

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

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?

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