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

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

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

Ryan Lee is the Continuity King.

After I wrote that sentence I thought, “ContinuityKing.com is a great domain name – wonder who owns it?” Ryan Lee does.

I called Ryan to do a quick interview about his thoughts on membership sites, growing an online business with integrity, and dealing with the time pressures of being an online entrepreneur.

As usual, four different ways to listen, watch or read:

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

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

Transcript:

MemberCon.com: Hi, everybody Tim Bourquin here from MemberCon. I’m going to talk with Ryan Lee today and a lot of you probably know of ryanlee.com. He’s a pretty much a leader in terms of membership sites and giving advice and education and coaching for membership sites, but I met Ryan at Blog World Expo really briefly. Ryan thanks very much for joining me on the phone today?

Ryan Lee: I’m excited to be here.

MemberCon.com: I watch your videos and of course you notice right away that the domain is your name, you’re branding yourself as the product, was that a conscious decision because I always think down the road of selling it and branding yourself as a person is tougher to sell while, but you make more money while you own the site. Was it a conscious decision to kind of make it your brand?

Ryan Lee: Yeah. And you know what it’s a great question because for years I fought it. I fought branding myself because of your exact reasons like it’s really hard to exit, but for me this is one component of my business is something I’m going to do forever. Like I’m Ryan Lee, just like Donald Trump, he’s Donald Trump, Martha Stewart is Martha Stewart. She’s not going to sell Martha’s. She’s always going to be doing whatever she’s doing, but what I’ve also done is build a lot of other business that aren’t depended on my name. I own a lot of membership sites. I own one called strengthcoach.com. My own software called Fitness Generator, a Nutrition Generator, and I own a lot of different properties that are not necessarily tied into my name. So Ryan Lee is kind of the umbrella for a lot of my Internet marketing stuff, but there’s still a ton of things that I own that are not my name. Like I have a new magazine coming out, it’s going to be called Dot Com Lifestyle and I could have called it like I could have been kind of an egomaniac and called it Ryan Lee Magazine or something like that, but I wanted to build a separate kind of brand, and I set up some separate corporations for some of these and separate merchant accounts. So if I were to sell those, it’s easy to just slice off little pieces of it.

MemberCon.com: Yeah. I’m glad you brought up about the magazine again too because I want to talk to you about that. You’ve got the recurring revenue report, which is a printed newsletter and a CD.

Ryan Lee: Correct.

MemberCon.com: And then you talk about doing an actual print magazine now?

Ryan Lee: Right. In case, I don’t have enough on my plate.

MemberCon.com: OK, you’re right, exactly, exactly. But I’m curious about that decision because of course prints are having a tough time right now and Internet is all about making it easy for digital downloads and things like that, did you find that people are signing up more for membership stuff these days if they get something physical on mail?

Read more…

Tim legal issues, online entrepreneurs, starting a membership site, subscription pricing continuity income, membership sites, recurring revenue, Ryan Lee

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