When should you NOT drip content? Are there situations when content dripping is not right for your members? What do you do in that case? Do you simply allow access to everything from day 1 and risk getting ripped off? Or is there an alternative to content dripping?
#1: If you want your members to feel that you are continuously creating NEW content, fresh off-the-press, fresh-from-the oven type of freshness, then you should NOT use Content Dripping to make it look like it's new or just created. That is NOT what content dripping is meant for.
Your members will figure it out that the content that you are dripping was probably created a while ago - sometimes maybe months or even years ago, because there is bound to be some kind of a trail - like comments from other members, or references in the content to dates or events from the past. So DO NOT use content dripping to try to fool your members into thinking that the content is freshly created. You shouldn't do that with content dripping or with email autoresponders.
#2: Another reason why you should not drip content: is when you have a LOT of modules, and there's a chance that your audience might not want to consume it in the same order that it is dripped. Let's take the example of a physical fitness course. Within the main course - that we will call "Get The Body of your Dreams And Keep It For Life", you may have a long-term strategy and schedule for losing weight and keeping it off. Your modules might be Cardio, Thighs, Abdomen, Shoulders, Arms, etc. And you may be dripping the content in a certain order. And someone who joins your course gets the Cardio module on week 1, Thighs in week 2, Abdome in week 3, Shoulders in week 4, and so on. If someone joined today, and after week 1, they just don't care about the Thighs module, and they want to skip ahead to the Abdomen module from week 3, then since you're dripping content, they cannot fast forward the content. But at the same time, you may not want to make everything available from day 1. In fact, let's even say you're dripping content monthly, and not weekly. And what if they want content from Month #4 to be available today? You want to drip content, but they don't want you to drip content. So what do you do in that case?
Many years ago, at DigitalAccessPass.com, with the help of a DAP user's tiny little spark of an idea, we came up with the concept of what we called the Credit Store. The idea is, that instead of dripping content based on YOUR personal preference, you instead give CREDITS to your users, and then they can take those credits and redeem them for specific modules in your content store.
This is similar to buying tokens at the local fair. You buy tokens at the entrance, and you can use them on any game or ride in any order, as many times as you want, based on YOUR preference. Similarly, when someone signs up for a subscription, then with each monthly payment, they get, say 10 credits. They can take those 10 credits and go to your Credit store - which is basically your Content Store. And there, they see the Cardio module for 3 credits, Thighs for 2, Abdomen for 4 credits and so on.
This is an extremely powerful alternative to Content Dripping. And at DigitalAccessPass.com, we launched the Credit Store plugin a few years back, and it has been a huge hit among those who want to offer their members this kind of flexibility of redeeming content, while not giving away the farm on day 1 and still maintaining control over the security of the content.
Finally, another reason to NOT drip content, is when your content could get outdated quickly. Like stock quotes, or financial news, or current events, or when you're following a certain company or trend or current event. You absolutely cannot queue up any content, because by the time your content gets dripped, in weeks or maybe even in months, then it might already be outdated partially or even entirely.
So those are the 3 major reasons when dripping content is NOT a good idea.
All this and more in today's episode #13. Show notes available at http://SubscribeMe.fm/13/
Why not simply use email to deliver content? Why bother with a membership site, membership software and all the setup & maintenance headaches?
Let me first show you how to create the world's quickest membership site - in just 4 hours.
Step 1: Signup for an account with Mailchimp. They allow you to have up to 2,000 subscribers on your list, and send out 12,000 emails per month. So that's about 6 emails per month. Go to subscribeme.fm/mailchimp, and get $30 in free credit to use when you exceed 2,000 subscribers.
Step 2: Load up all of your course content into an email autoresponder sequence, set up these emails to go out once a week. You could even start with just the welcome email and content for module 1, since you will be dripping the emails over time.
Step 3: Create a one-page landing page through a free WordPress.com web site.
Step 4: Log in to Paypal, create a buy button, and put it on your free one-page sales page.
That's it! You could be done with this basic membership set up in about 4 hours. And you could launch it tomorrow.
So, if creating a membership site with just email can be done in 4 hours, then why even bother buying specialized membership software? Why bother with all of the setup and maintenance headaches of installing and running your own membership site, and spending time and money setting up a member’s area, and creating your content online, and protecting that content? So why bother with all that work?
In order to automate everything for yourself and your customers, you need a web site. And simply throwing up a WordPress installation on your site is not going to help you automate payments, automate member-account creation, automate content delivery, send out follow-up and marketing emails, allow members to access private content, watch videos, listen to audio, download reports and documents.