This is the third article of the series “Business with content”. Read the second one here.

You may call it online university. Or virtual classroom. Or interactive learning environment. Online coaching. Whatever. It does not matter. This is a business where you or your team are teaching your customer some stuff. On a topic you know better than them.

This is in essence a subscription / membership site with slightly different operational logic.

What are the main differences to the typical subscription sites?

• E-learning sites usually have some linear structure. A given course will have some kind of start and end, not necessarily time-restricted. The start would be some introduction to the topic, the end – some wrap-up. And between them you will gradually teach your users the topic. The typical membership sites are usually not that linear – they just give the user access to the protected content and the user can choose the order of reading it.
• Homework / assignments. Most e-learning sites include some kind of assignments and exercises to help the users study the matter. This is not a hard requirement, and often typical premium content sites may also have them.
• Test / exams. Usually you will want to assess users or let them self-assess themselves to figure out how well they learned the material. Some (most) LMS-es will let you tie-up the completion of a course or lesson to successfully completing a quiz.
• Certification. Although not a requirement, most e-learning sites will issue some kind of certification or badges to let others know that you have completed a course. The certificates can be issued in internal format or for example as Open badges etc.
• Charging is typically per course or per module rather than recurring (per month). But you can sometimes combine both approaches.

So in general, e-learning has a bit of more formal structure and puts some emphasis over assessing users and confirming they have learned the subject they have to learn.

Based on how linear your premium content is and how much of an authority you are in the subject you are teaching you may choose to create an e-learning site rather than a typical subscription content site.

But there are other things to consider: the advantages and disadvantages from business point of view.

Advantages of e-learning

Or why would you want to start an e-learning site rather than a recurring subscription site? One reason said above is the structure of your content, but it is a reason, not an advantage. Why would you want, from a business point of view, choose this option if your content does not require it?

Believe me, there are reasons:

• Higher one-time revenue. While subscription sites are typical priced under $50 per month, it’s not an exception to have online course priced at $99, $199 or even $999. Yes, it’s one time fee but you can then offer more courses to the same person and earn even more.
• People are more inclined to sign-up. Because typical e-learning sites charge per course and not recurring, your customers are not afraid of long time commitment and recurring costs. So often it could be easier to get sign-ups than for a subscriptions site.
• Higher authority. Of course this is just perceived authority (usually). An e-learning site with tests, badges and certificates is usually perceived as higher authority than just some site with protected content. Even if it’s just a single person behind it. Of course, as with all membership sites, your content must be really good.
• You can start with less content. With typical subscription sites you really need a lot of content to start charging a monthly fee. On the other hand, you can start an LMS with a single course, get some revenue and then gradually add more courses or modules.
• You can upsell. Customers who have completed a given course and liked it are very likely to buy another more advanced course on the topic, or a course on a related topic. As long as you can produce great content the opportunity to grow is nearly unlimited.

The downsides

• No recurring revenue. In a typical e-learning site you sell a course and once completed, the user does not need to pay more. Compared to a subscription site that charges per month this *might* mean less revenue from a single customer.
• You need authoritative and focused content. Subscription sites can go with less organized, less focused content, a few tools here and there. If you are selling a course on the other hand you need to have clear objective: what are you going to teach and what will the customer will learn when they finish the course.
• More complicated to organize. Related to the above, a typical course site is more complicated technically and organizationally. You have to plan the course structure, you have to create assignments, tests, certificates etc. Or at least some of this.

The technical side

As already said in the previous articles, we are a company focused on WordPress development so it’s natural for me to recommend building your e-learning site on WordPress. But this article won’t be objective if I don’t mention Moodle as the de-facto standard in e-learning. My opinion on Moodle vs WordPress has already been stated here. Which does not mean you have to agree. If you have a very complex e-learning site in mind and can manage Moodle’s complexity, and know for sure you’ll need features that only Moodle has – go ahead with it.

In most cases, the 99% probably, WordPress and a good LMS like our free Namaste! LMS or Sensei (just to name a few) will do the work very well.

You may also want to add (if not already included):

• A plugin for tests / quizzes
• A plugin for email marketing
• Some interactive content plugins depending on what you are going to teach
• A community / forum plugin like bbPress or BuddyPress

You may want to prepare some kind of certificates, become an Open Badges issuer, or even integrate your e-learning system with SCORM or Tin Can (this really depends on how official and technical your subject is).

One important problem with both subscription sites and premium courses (e-learning) is that all your content is private and not visible to visitors and search engines. This means you need a sound way to attract traffic (visitors) and make them sign up for your site. This may involve paid ads, affiliate programs and what not.

But there is also another way to sell content. Read on in the next article.

This is the second article of the series “Business with content“. Read the first one here.

The typical subscription site. This is the first thing one thinks about when they hear about selling content. How does it work? You create content and protect it behind a pay wall. Users need to register to read / consume it. Typically they pay per month for access to the content you provide.

What Does It Take

The one most important thing to run a successful membership site is to have good content. This is true for all types of business with content: in fact it can’t be good. It must be great. You can no longer earn anything with mediocre content. People just won’t pay for it.

You may have read somewhere online that it’s a good idea to rehash content from the web, “curate” it and you can still earn. They tell you this because they want to sell you something. It’s shit and crap. Don’t even try to start a membership site without amazing content. Don’t rehash the net, don’t fill it with yet another site telling the same stuff that can be easily found for free. Your content must be unique and really good.

Having amazing content is especially important in this business model because you are not charging just once, but you are hoping to retain these users and charge them monthly. This requires great content, and a lot of it.

We are going to talk more about this in another article of the series – the one about the need of expertise.

You need a sales funnel or other way of attracting users. We are going to talk about this in another article too.

You also need software to run your membership site which is discussed in the next section – the technical site.

The Technical Side

There are multiple ways to handle it – you can use a standalone script like aMember or E.M.M.A. or you can go with some of the popular CMS softwares like Joomla, Drupal or WordPress and handle it with a plugin. The second option is probably better because plugin development for open source CMS-es has become very popular and there are a lot of options, free and paid.

As a company focused mostly on WordPress it’s most natural for us to recommend you WordPress. It’s the most popular, easiest to use platform, and probably has the largest number of affordable membership site plugins available.

I am not going to do a comprehensive review of WordPress membership plugins here. There are sites who have done good job on this already.

I’d like only to suggest also our Konnichiwa! plugin which is free and will do the work for many of simple membership sites in very easy manner.

The Good

What’s the best thing about running a membership site for you as a business owner? The recurring revenue of course. It’s not like selling an info product like e-book. As long as your content is good and takes time to learn you can retain your customers for years.

There is also a strategy that includes gradually giving access to parts of the content. This is typically part of learning management systems but you can do it with standard membership site too. You can create delayed access to parts of the content to ensure that the customer won’t download it all for a month and then leave.

You may also want to add new content over time, build a community, have private discussion forum etc. things which can give more reasons to your members to remain subscribed. You can build tools that only members have access to.

The potential is really unlimited as long as you are creative and have some real expertise to share.

The Bad

All the above sounds great. Too good to be true? Actually not. All these advantages are real as long as you can produce great content.

So what could be the downside of running a subscription site? It’s not only one:

• You need a lot of content. You may sell an e-book of fifty pages successfully if the information in it is good. Heck, you can even sell a 19 pages “blueprint” for $19 and sell thousands of it. And unless what you are selling is utter crap you aren’t going to get many refund requests. With membership sites things are different. You can’t expect people will subscribe and pay say $27 monthly for a subscription site that has 10 short articles. You need at least a hundred good ones. Or two hundreds. Or a thousand. And tools. And community. And videos. Maybe not all of this but some. It’s a lot of work and large upfront investment.
• You need good reliable hosting. You can’t risk to upset your paying members with downtime. So in most cases shared hosts won’t work. You need good VPS or managed WP service. More cash upfront.
• You need to keep your members. Getting someone to subscribe is probably not that hard but keeping them active is. Some people have no time to read regularly and will unsubscribe. Other have lots of time and will consume most the content shortly and unsubscribe since there is nothing left to read. You need to have lots of good stuff and add new stuff constantly to make things work.
• People perceive membership sites as expensive. Paying $97 once for an e-book is acceptable. But $49 every month? That’s a lot of money for an year and many won’t want to commit to it.

Membership / subscription sites are good and viable business models. Of course they have their downsides but they are a good business model if you have good content to offer.

They are however not the only way to build business with content. In the next article we’ll cover the e-learning sites and interactive learning environments. Read it here.

Few years ago you could put up a blog and write. Write passionately about something you knew about. Write good useful information and write regularly. And you could easily make money by doing this. Just throw some Adsense or other ads on it and visitors would come, click on ads and you could earn a lot.

These days are gone. Today CPC earnings are way down and the battle for traffic is way harder. Having unique content is no longer enough to draw thousands of visitors. It’s not enough even to draw hundred visitors per month. Things have changed a lot in the recent years.

Why Are We Writing This

We develop and sell several e-learning solutions and a drip marketing suite for more than 5 years. During these years I have personally interacted with probably thousands of customers working on all kind of content sites. Although there are some customers who earn from ads, most are having business models relying on paid access to premium content.

Watching how these businesses grow, listening to their problems and feature requests I have gained some insights about the many faces of this business.

So here I am to share some of what I learned by writing a series of articles that will review how you can make money with premium content in 2016 and ahead. And not just make some quick money but eventually build a stable business based on it.

This series will of course not reveal anyone’s specific business details, unless I have explicitly asked and received permission to publish them. Our customers privacy is top priority.

Current Successful Models of Business With Content

Making money with free content and advertising is out of scope of this series. There is a lot of information online on this topic. My personal experience and impressions from watching others is that this rarely works any more and you are far better to monetize your content directly (or indirectly by using it as sales funnel) rather than by placing third party ads.

This series will focus only on earning directly from your content, by charging for it in one or another way.

This currently boils down to several business models:

• Typical subscription / membership sites.
• E-learning sites and interactive learning environments.
• Partly public membership sites (some very interesting models here).
• Selling info-products.
• Paid newsletters
• Mixes.

I do not aim to cover all possible business models. Maybe there are more. More interesting and original ones. If you know one and want to share it, let me know. I’ll talk only about ones I have explored in one or another way. I will talk only about stuff that is still working and not going anywhere any time soon.

There are several other important topics we’ll review here:

• The need of expertise to run paid content site
• The costs of running a paid content site
• The acquisition of users

Let’s go!

The second article of the series is about membership / subscription sites. Click here to read it.