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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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.

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Mike McLin was an avid wakeboarder. He knew there was a market for instructional content for other wakeboarders to learn from experts but there wasn’t much available.

So Mike and a partner created a series of instructional DVDs and began selling them to the passionate community of wakeboarders. The success of those DVDs led to the launch of their current membership site, LearnWake.com. (Warning: don’t visit this site if you get jealous easily – it’s incredible and you’re sure to have a bad case of “website envy” all weekend.)

In this interview, you’ll learn how Mike made the transition from selling DVDs to selling memberships to his website. You’ll also hear him talk about how he tried to market the membership website the same way he marketed the DVDs and realized it was a totally different game. Finally, you’ll learn how he set pricing initially by getting into the minds of his prospective customers and how he gets through slow patches by marketing to a worldwide audience.

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

2) Download the mp3 file here

3) Read the transcript:

MemberCon.com: Hello everybody. Welcome back to MemberCon.com. Thanks very much for joining me for another interview with a membership site owner. Today, we’re going to be speaking with Mike Mclin. He has a web site called LearnWake.com. I was interested in talking to him about how he got into starting this site and what he thinks are some good ideas and tips for growing a membership site. So, let’s start with your site. First of all, it’s a gorgeous site. That’s kind of what attracted my eye in the first place. Do you design sites as well? I mean, did you do this thing all yourself?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: Yeah, me and my team, we pretty much built the site from ground up including all of the visuals and everything from preproduction all the way to the completed project. And we’ve also populated all the content that’s on the site, all the videos, motion graphics, and stuff like that.

MemberCon.com: How did the site start? Were you a wakeboarder yourself?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: Yeah. I used to wakeboard a lot. And I actually used to ride on the Pro Tour and stuff like that. I kind of was deep into the industry and knew a lot of the key people in the industry. And one of the largest wakeboarding camps where people go for instruction from all over the world is right here in my hometown of Clermont, Florida. So, we actually started at a DVD series, an instructional DVD series, and it took off and did really, really well. And we were thinking about making a sequel, pretty much, to the DVDs and we kind of started realizing the business model of delivering instructional content is actually much better suited for a web site than for DVDs because of all the interactivity you can do on a web site with forums and people talking to each other and asking questions. Plus, we started realizing that when we’re selling DVDs, you start off and DVDs sell really well. And then eventually, as they become older and mature, it stops selling in stores. Where a web site, a membership web site, is the complete opposite. The more you mature, the more money you make because the bigger your membership base became. So, that was a really exciting business model for us and we were just really interested in taking the next step in doing a membership web site and it’s worked out really, really well for us so far.

MemberCon.com: So, you kind of got proof positive that people would pay for this content by selling the DVD. Did you do any type of surveys or kind of focus groups to find out if there were other web sites out there that were selling content memberships or was this the first one that would be out there?

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