In the last 2 episodes, I talked about Membership models 1 through 4. So if you didn't hear part 1 or part 2, I recommend that you start with those first. You can go to subscribeme.fm/26/ the number 26, and subscribeme.fm/27/ to hear Part 1 & 2. In fact, just go to the main site - subscribeme.fm and you'll see a big beautiful podcast player with the full playlist of all past episodes. And this beautiful podcast player is powered by CoolCastPlayer.com, officially the prettiest podcast player on the planet.

Membership Model #54. Magazine Model

This is one of the most interesting membership models, and back in 2009, I gave it this name because back in the day, like Dave Jackson from schoolofpodcasting would say, we used to get people asking how they can set up content access similar to a real-world magazine subscription. So if you are old enough to have ever subscribed to physical magazines - I say that because the funny thing is, I don't know if my kids have ever seen a magazine in my house - well, we did buy a sports illustrated a few years ago when Lebron James won his first championship. And then the People issue with Steve Jobs on the cover when he passed away - Rest in peace, Steve!

I remember, as a kid, I used to wait every week for this magazine delivery guy, who charged a fixed fee every month - I think it was like 20 rupees or something - which in today's exchange rate would be 30 cents. He brought this massive travel bag full of magazines, and you could pick out any 5 you wanted. And you could keep any of them for as long as you wanted, but you could only ever check out 5 magazines. So if you returned 5 magazines, you could pick out 5 more. If you kept 2 and returned 3, then you could pick out 3 new ones for the week. Ring a bell? That's actually how the DVD portion of Netflix works. The crazy thing is, while I'm talking about outdated paper magazines, even DVD subscriptions are well on their way to becoming extinct! So, with Netflix, you can check out a maximum of 3 or 4 DVD's, depending on which plan you are on. And then when you return one, you get the next one in your queue automatically mailed to you.

So I was thinking about this guy in India, this was back in the early 80's. He had a couple of these gym duffel bags, and he hung them from the handlebars of his bicycle, he wore slippers, his bicycle was all beat up and his clothes had seen better days. And YET, he had the entrepreneurial mindset and the passion and the determination to sign up for a bunch of magazine subscriptions himself, and then he basically lent them out to others. Sure, it would be a gross copyright violation today - you can't buy a DVD for personal use and then turn around and lend it to someone else for money. So just put that aside for a second, and you'll realize what an impressive thing this guy did. So I guess that was probably my earliest recollection of a membership model. I was really inspired by this man when I remembered him when writing notes for today's episode, and I hope it inspires you too.

Think about how a real world magazine subscription works: You subscribe to a magazine - let's use the example of the famous "Star" magazine, which, by the way, my wife Veena used to love to read many years ago. So once you subscribe to a physical magazine, you get a new edition mailed to you every week. And if you cancel your subscription, you will not get any newer editions, but you can keep the ones you already got in the mail, because obviously, you've already paid for those. And most importantly, you only get access to the magazine editions from the time you subscribe, and if you wanted older editions from the archives from before you subscribed, then you have to buy them separately. So in the early years of DAP, one of the requests we got was to be able to duplicate this content model, where you deliver digital content as if it were a monthly magazine. Only those who are currently subscribed during a month, get access to that month?s content, and keep access to that content going forward. So, for example... (listen to the show for the rest)

Shownotes at http://SubscribeMe.fm/28/

Membership Model #4. Recurring Subscriptions with Lifetime Recurring.

Basically, they pay until they cancel. It's obviously easy to do this if it's a SaaS product - SaaS is the acronym SAAS - which stands for Software As A Service. Like Leadpages, or Dropbox. Even at DigitalAccessPass.com, we offer a pseudo-SAAS model. DAP is basically a WordPress plugin that you install on your own site, but we packaged a lot of things into a saas like offering, where you get DAP, you get set up help, ongoing monthly support, a whole bunch of plugins from WickedCoolPlugins.com, and we made it a monthly subscription. So in this model, you get the benefits for as long as you pay. And when you stop paying, you lose all of the benefits. Like your gym membership. Or phone service.

Now, you might wonder, what if you have a regular online course? How to make it a perpetual subscription? That's where positioning and packaging comes into the picture. Of course, not all membership sites are created equally, and not all digital content can be charged for every month. If you're selling an ebook, for example, then.... obviously you are not going to be able to charge $10 a month - or even 1 dollar a month, that too as an ongoing subscription for life. So with a life-time recurring subscription, your mindset as a site owner, has to shift a little bit.

So instead of thinking, how can I charge every month for my ebook and a couple of videos, you have to think from another perspective: The question you should be asking, is what all can I package together, and how can I position the offer in order to make this membership site worth $10 a month? Now, I don't want to get into pricing yet, because that's a huge topic and I will certainly talk about it in a different episode. But for the purposes of today's discussion, let's say you already know whether you want to do a $10 a month subscription, or $50 a month, or $100 a month. Let's stick with $10 a month. So you should take careful inventory of everything you have ever created - whether it is an article you wrote, an email autoresponder series, any tweets you sent out, any content marketing you did, and make a list of every little thing you have in your content library right now, then to that list, add a comprehensive list of things you have the capability of creating in the future. In a future episode, I'll also get into how you can get your content from third-party sources, other than yourself. And you need to think about everything you can package in order to make your membership a complete no-brainer for the $10 a month that you're planning on charging.

In the beginning, you may look at your ebook, or the few videos of your course, and wonder how the heck you're going to be able to charge $10 a month for something so little. Don't necessarily go by the volume of the content. It's always the quality of the content, and the value it provides to your members. Remember, the bigger the benefit to your audience, the larger the value, the bigger the subscription fee you can charge. So even if you start with a basic 7 video course about, say, piano for beginners, you can identify the life-cycle of a piano student, all of their wants and needs as a beginner and as they start getting better, getting more advanced, and you can create courses appropriate for their advancing skills over time. Don't forget to check out episodes 24 and 25 where I talk about how to brainstorm content-creation ideas, whether it is for content for your membership site, or content that you can use for marketing. You can find those episodes at SubscribeMe.fm/24 and SubscribeMe.fm/25.

So that's membership model #4: Recurring Subscriptions with Automated Lifetime Recurring

Welcome to episode #25 of the SubscribeMe show from SubscribeMe.fm.

I'm your host Ravi Jayagopal. This is THE podcast to listen to, if you want to learn about creating digital content, marketing it, selling it, and then delivering it.

I am the co-founder & co-developer of DigitalAccessPass.com, easily the best membership plugin in the industry, fondly known as DAP.

Membership sites aren't just for subscriptions that charge you month after month for life, until you cancel. That's just ONE way to create a membership. And membership sites aren't just for protecting content for ongoing members. There are essentially 9 different ways to add a membership component to your web site, and I'm going to discuss all 9 of them in this multi-part series. And today's episode is part 1 of this series. So be sure to check out the next couple of episodes as well, for the full story.

Here are 3 (of 9) ways in which you can monetize your content:
Membership model #1.    One-time Products with Lifetime Access
Membership model #2.    One-time Products with Fixed-term Access, like say 1 month, or 1 year of access, with Renewal
Membership model #3.    Recurring Subscriptions with a Fixed-term

So let's dive right in to Membership Models...

Membership Model #1: One-time Products with Lifetime Access
In this, you create a one-time product where your buyer or member pays you just ONE TIME and gets life-time access to the content. They are never charged again for updates, so make sure you’re not giving away lifetime access to something that needs a lot of updates and support. For e.g., a lot of plugin developers get overambitious or desperate, depending on how you look it, and in order to start getting an immediate flow of sales, they over-commit on things like “Lifetime Updates” or “Lifetime Support” – sometimes, both!

It is incredibly hard to continuously develop software for many months, leave alone many years. And then, if everyone is paying you just once, and you still have to continue updating the software, introducing new features, making bug-fixes and then also support them via email or support tickets for as long as they continue to use your software, and you're never ever going to get paid EVER again, that's a really tough proposition. And that's why you'll see a lot of software products that haven't priced themselves correctly, go out of business every single year. WordPress plugin developers for the internet marketing community, are notorious for over-promising, under-delivering, and then just disappearing from the face of the internet.

But if your product is not a software product, and instead, is a digital information product, then it is easy to update your posts or pages or PDF reports over time without much effort. And information products don’t require much support in general - compared to software or services of course.

So this model lends itself very well to “How-to” courses and training programs and reports and tutorials.

It gives your buyers a sense of satisfaction that they don’t have to keep paying for updates, and it also doesn’t create too much overhead for you in terms of updates or support.

But still, buy once and get lifetime access is still a bit scary for a lot of people. Which is where, this second model comes in.

#2. One-time Products.. BUT with Fixed-term Access and Renewal

In this, you create your one-time product with a fixed-term access - like access for 30 days, or 365 days, anything but NOT lifetime. And then, at the end of this fixed term, access to the content will...

(a) Automatically expire and they have to manually pay a renewal fee to get further access to another extended period of time, or

(b) Access to the content they already purchased never expires, but they don’t get access to future updates unless they renew.

We've used this model with selling DAP itself. So you can purchase a 1site or a multi-site license of DAP, and you get 1 year of upgrades and support - the 1 year is the fixed term here. And then at the end of the 1 year, you can still continue using the version of DAP you already downloaded and installed, but you cannot get future upgrades and support, unless you renew for a fee. Now, in the case of DAP, renewal is much less than buying a new copy of DAP. So there's a built-in discount for renewals. You could do the same thing. Renewal is a fraction of the new product. So depending on how much work it is for you to create new versions of the product, or keep updating this existing product, you could charge anywhere from 33% to 75% of the cost as renewal. That way, they get a discount for renewal, and don't have to purchase it all over again, and you get a returning customer who is a lot easier to sell to, than finding a brand new customer.

Membership model #3. Recurring Subscriptions with a Fixed-term
With this, you are actually creating a recurring subscription product – but one that has a fixed-term of recurring payments – like it ends after 3 payments, or ends after 6 payments, or 12 payments. Basically, the payments stop after a set number of payments.

You could also call this a Payment Plan or an Installment Plan.

You could give two pricing options for the same product – the first one is a 1-time payment for lifetime or fixed-term access – for say 97 dollars. And the second option is, you offer a payment-plan for the exact same product in the form of “3 Payments of $37 each”. And because it is a payment plan, you can charge a little bit more in total.

So if they took the one-time option, they would pay 97 dollars. Or if they took the payment plan, they pay $37 x 3 = $111 - which is basically 14 dollars more in total - compared to the one-time price of 97 dollars.

In fact, you should intentionally make the sum-total of your monthly payments a bit more than the single-payment option, and this can help push your potential buyer towards the single-pay option when you explicitly tell them that “Save $14 when you take our Single-pay option”. Obviously, the more the savings on the single-pay option, the more easily you can make your single-pay option look better.

But sometimes, for big-ticket items – like say a $2000 product, it may actually be beneficial to keep the sum-total of the payment plan close enough to the one-time option. Like in this case, it could be “One payment of $2000, or 3 payments of $697.” The difference between multi-pay and single-pay is $91. The difference is not too little, and they can still consider the one-time option. And it’s not too big, so they don’t pay too big of a penalty for taking the payment plan.

Check out Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, a book about how we all make irrational decisions in a very predictable manner. In the book, he talks about many pricing-related experiments he conducted, with some very interesting conclusions about how people think.

A couple of things to note about this fixed-term continuity program:
a) You can charge the exact same amount each month - on Auto-Charge, or
b) You can charge a different amount the first month - and label it a trial, which is then followed by same amount being charged on the subsequent months - again, all on Auto-charge

So those were 3 of the 9 types of membership models. So what are membership models 4 through 9? You're going to have to come back for the next episode for that one.

The show notes for this episode is available at subscribeme.fm/26/ . And when you get there, you'll see a beautiful online player with a large play button ON THE LEFT, which is key, because otherwise it will look like a banner ad or a header graphic. That's where, you will be able to play the episode directly from the web site, thanks to my podcast player plugin, called CoolCastPlayer. It is without a doubt the Prettiest Podcast Player on the Planet. It plays podcasts as well as regular MP3 files. And a super cool feature it has, is the ability to embed that player on a different web site. So this is going to be awesome if you have guests on your podcast, and you can simply send them a piece of code so that they can embed your interview on their web site. So check it out at CoolCastPlayer.com.

Don't forget to join other SubscribeMe listeners and a network of folks all interested in the same thing: Membership sites and online courses. Join the group by going to subscribeme.fm/group/ and that will take you to my Facebook group.

Thanks again for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Cheers!