Lessons, Tips and Tricks for Making Money With Interviews

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.

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