Is Pay Per Post the Right Way for You?

If  it’s your first membership website and you are struggling to get new members you may wonder why people don’t buy a subscription for your website.

After all, you know you offer the best value for their money and you know if they just try and give you a chance, then they will probably not cancel and enjoy the value that you are giving them.

But still you are having almost no success is getting the amount of new members that you really want.

You may have asked yourself: maybe they are afraid of paying on a monthly basis, and you might even consider switching your website to a pay per post model.

Is it really the right solution?

A Quick Story on Wishlist Member Experts Website

As you already know, we are managing a few membership websites of our own and we are also building membership websites for clients.

[pullquote]You may have asked yourself: maybe they are afraid of paying on a monthly basis, and you might even consider switching your website to a pay per post model.[/pullquote]One of the websites that we own is Wishlist Member Experts. This website is publishing premium guides especially for Wishlist Member users.

The website includes guides that many of our clients have asked help about,  so we have decided to open a  website that includes only premium guides for Wishlist Member.

When we started, we knew that we could not support this website on a weekly or even on a monthly basis, and even though we really wanted to make it a membership website, we thought it wouldn’t be fair to our customers.

After all, Wishlist Member Experts was established on December 2011 and as for the date of this post it has a total of 6 premium guides.

So we asked ourselves what is the right business model for this kind of website?

If it is going to be a membership website we would need to increase our time and investment in this website, a time we knew we could not spare.

On the other side, is Pay Per Post the right business model  for this website?

As a rule, we love the idea of membership websites, but for this website we have decided that the pay-per-post is a more appropriate model.

After almost two years we have decided to disclose our revenues from this website (something that we normally don’t do) and only because we are thinking that this can give many other people who are just starting out a different point of view on the pay-per-post model.

If you don’t know Wishlist Member Experts here are few words:

• All the premium guides on Wishlist Member Experts  include in-depth information on each subject
• We are including a lot of screenshots and step-by-step lists on every subject
• The website currently includes only paid information
• The price for each guide depends on the amount of time we have invested in creating it

The Stats

After checking the stats last week it turned out that we have sold 628 copies combined for all the premium guides so far!

That is a great sales volume for only 6 premium guides.

But that is not all… Here are two even more interesting stats:

• We had only 0.63% refund rate (yes it’s lower than 1%). In numbers it means that only 4 clients have asked for a refund, and from a business point of view this number is equal to 0%  refund rate which is incredible!
• Almost all the premium guides are sold evenly, that is also an interesting thing because when we created this guides sometimes we thought to ourselves: this one is too simple no one will need this kind of guide… but apparently many do.

Seeing this stats we are very glad that we have helped so many people learning the subject that they needed to know.

The idea  for starting Wishlist Member Experts was never about making money from this website, we wanted to give  good and quality information on subjects that almost no one can find on the web.

As we started we even thought to give all the information for free,  but we knew from our own experience that most people will never do anything with free information.

It’s basic psychology affect, if it free than I have nothing to loose if I will not use it and we want people to take action!

Paying for information was our way to encourage them to take action.

Even though we know we are giving information that can’t be found any where on the internet in such in-depth explanations, we decided to make the price lower as possible to make the customers feel that they are paying for the information but not too high to make them not buy the guide just because of the price.

Returning to the sales stats ….

After seeing this results  we started to ask ourselves: What if we have decided in the beginning  to open Wishlist Member Experts as a paid membership website?

Could we made more sells? Could this website create a study members registration flow?

We could charge about at least $15 per month, but I’m almost sure that no one would want to try and buy the membership option.

So we would basically have the same problem that you have right now.

Your Story

If you are creating content and value to your potential members on a daily / weekly basis you have all the reasons to use the membership site business model, but in order for you to start you should give them a taste of your great content and that exactly where the pay per post business model comes in.

You should create a membership website.

You should get paid for all the value that you are giving your members.

You should never underestimate your value and say to yourself  that the price is to expensive (if you honestly don’t think it is).

But you should also give your visitors a choice to taste your content before they become your members.

What you need to do is to price your membership at one price and also give them the option to buy your content on a pay per post basis.

The price of each post will be a little bit more expensive that the price for your monthly membership website. After all, you want them to be your members and  you are giving them an option to pay once to taste.

The Problem

Wishlist Member has the option to manage pay-per-post protection, but it is lake a lot of basic features that with them managing a pay per post is almost impossible.

For example:

• If you display a member that already bought a list and links to all the posts that he just bought, you can’t do it with Wishlist Member alone
• If you want to display to your members on the main page the posts they had already bought and the ones are still closed to them you can’t do it Wishlist Member alone
• If you want to hide the option and the sales button to members who already bought the posts you can’t do it with Wishlist Member alone

The Solution

Currently the only way to really use the Wishlist Member pay-per-post feature in a way that is really going to work for you is with “Wishlist Pay Per Post Shortcodes” plugin.

Wishlist Pay Per Post Shortcodes plugin allows you to add simple shortcodes to help you manage the pay per post option the right way.

Currently the plugin is sold in 2 different packages:

Package #1

A Combo Package – Wishlist Pay Per Post Shortcodes + the complete Pay Per Post premium guide

Wishlist Pay Per Post Shortcodes Plugin + Complete Guide

Package #2

Only The Wishlist Pay Per Post Shortcodes Plugin

Wishlist Pay Per Post Shortcodes Plugin Only

Conclusion

So if you want to build a membership website and still want to give your visitors a taste of your content before they join to your membership website, then adding a pay-per-post model could be the best sales strategy you will need for your website.

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