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Business With Content: The Need of Expertise

This is the eight article of the series “Business with content“. To read the previous one, click here.

As discussed yet in the article about membership subscription sites you can’t make business with mediocre content. This was possible 5-10 years ago but that’s no more. Sure, you can get a few subscribers even of a site with cheap rehashed content but most of them will quickly unsubscribe, some will ask for refund, and none of them will recommend your site to others. The web is now full of all kind of content and a lot of it is free and high quality.

Expert Whiteout

So, what you need in order to be able to charge for your content:

  • It must be unique or at least hard to find elsewhere.
  • It must be expert content. If you are building a site giving career advice you can’t go with the stuff that you can find on every blog online. You need real expert advice and insights that work.
  • It must be rich. This means ideally not just text but also media like audios and videos, charts, info-graphics, tools.

For these purposes web scraping, rewriting existing articles, copying content from a book or (why am I even saying it) auto-generating content is out of the game. None of this will work. You need to invest human hours into creating very high quality content before you can even think about making business with it.

So, how? The options are mainly two:

Option One: Create Your Content Yourself

This is the most obvious one and it is the best. I know this does not sound like what a business owner does but with paid content sites it is the most viable path. You, or at least someone within your company (maybe several persons) should be knowledgeable in the subject you plan to build business around. The best content is created in-house and you as an owner of the site should be very well into the matters you charge for.

So how do you go about this if just starting? Focus on expertise you already have. Maybe it’s your job, maybe it’s a hobby or interest. But it should be something that you really know well, have experience with, or have inside information that can be shared. Gaining expertise along the way will not work: the quality of content required nowadays is too high for this. You can’t pretend to have expertise.

Now, if you are not good in writing for example, you can hire someone to rewrite or edit your articles. You definitely need to hire someone to create videos or audios unless you are expert in that. Don’t do cheap home made webcam videos unless you know what you are doing.

You will probably hire a website designer and someone to create charts, tools etc. This is OK. But the expertise must be coming from you, from your knowledge and experience. Not from stuff you just read online last few months.

Option Two: Get The Expertise From Someone Else

The second option to use someone else’s expertise. You can join forces with an expert in a given area and handle the marketing, sales and / or technical side of running a site. You can even take interviews and write the articles yourself. You can do this with multiple persons. Or you can just hire an expert to create the whole thing for you: videos, audios, texts, tools, etc. Either of these options are fine as long as you really have an expert.

And expertise comes from experience… so you get the idea.

What Not To Do

A sure way to fail your paid content site is to do any of the following:

  • Rewrite, copy, or rehash articles from other sites. This was already said but worth to repeat and remember.
  • Create lame content without having real expertise. This is just as bad as the above. It won’t get you anywhere.
  • Try to gain expertise along the way. No, you won’t become an expert in anything just by reading about it. Don’t try to create a premium content site on a subject you know nothing about.
  • Hire freelance writes to research and write articles. No matter cheap or expensive. Writing for a premium content site requires much less expertise in writing than in the subject of the site. So even a great writer won’t get you anywhere if they don’t know the matter. You are far better hiring someone who knows what they are talking about, even if they can’t write well.
  • Auto-generate content of any kind unless we talk about generating charts or reports in some unique useful way or based on private data that you have.

I wish I could tell you it was easy as in “hire writes for $5 per article and get 100 articles done” but it’s not. If you don’t have access to real top-notch expertise do not even try to start business with content of any kind.

So if you are just about to start, knowing where to find the expertise is going to be your main worry. And creating the content is your main expense. But not only. The next article in this series will discuss the costs of running a paid content site. Read it here.

Business WIth Content: Mixes (Be a Little Creative!)

This is the seventh post of the series “Business with content“. To read the previous one click here.

This is going to be short. I just want you to get used to the idea of mixing and marrying different types of business models. You don’t have to stick to any of the models discussed in these series. You can mix two or more of them together. You can mix them with free content models. You can mix them with something invented entirely on your own.

Heck, you can even switch models from time to time to figure out what works best. For example you can start with an info-product like e-book and later turn it into a subscription site just like Aaron Wall at SEOBook did few yours ago.

Here are just some ideas:

  • Subscription membership site with e-learning. Have most of your stuff accessible based on monthly fee, but also offer a paid course that issues a certificate of completion. Presumingly the course would be next level of knowledge over the random material in the subscription area.
  • Create LMS with courses but charge for monthly access. Thus instead of selling courses as products let users follow the material by their own pace (but in the order defined by you), while paying a fee every month.
  • Free content with some premium content. Instead of partially protecting articles, have a lot of stuff for free in a blog or so. Then charge for access to the most advanced stuff only – either as monthly subscription, as paid courses, or as info product (or all the three).
  • Run a membership site and also sell info products. Nothing stops you to do both together. Of course, ideally the content in the different products should not be the same.
  • Sell info product and have people who buy it join to a subscription site or sell them e-courses. This is the typical upsell method where a $39 e-book is used to promote a $399 course.
  • Give all the stuff for free but charge for access to tools and community. This was already discussed to some extent in the article about partially public membership sites.
  • Create an entirely free LMS with lots of excellent courses. Charge only for final exam that issues certificate.

I’m sure you can add some ideas on your own. Don’t stick to a particular business model just because that’s what you have seen. You can combine different software solutions as long as you have premium content to sell.

This leads us to the next article in the series, which is also very important: The need of expertise to run a paid content site.

Business With Content: Paid Newsletters

This is the sixth article from the series “Business with content“. You can read the previous article here.

Paid newsletters are another rather old and never dying method of making business with premium content.  It’s probably one of the first methods used from the times when sites were mostly static HTML pages and having a server side software on hand was expensive and clumsy. So people were sending newsletters using desktop programs for windows or even (for smaller customer base) one by one through their regular email client.

Newsletter

Now there are all kind of web apps and services for sending newsletters so that’s no more an issue at all. All you need to do is to figure out what kind of newsletter to make and to start working on it. Some ideas:

  • Stock and forex picks. These could be daily or weekly, or at random times.
  • Sport betting picks. With all kinds of picks you obviously must be really good and probably have to publish your average success rates.
  • Email courses. Although this works better with online e-learning sites, there are still people who prefer sending courses entirely over email, using autoresponder software.
  • Newsletters with discounts, special gifts etc. These are newsletters which are used to send discount codes or downloadable goods to the subscribes.

There are certainly more types of paid newsletters you can think about. Any premium content can be sent out as a newsletter which lets you control exactly how much content the customer receives over time.

The Good

The main advantage was just said: you control how much of your content is given to the subscriber. So if you are sending a course or other kind of pre-planned newsletter you know exactly how long the subscriber needs to stay subscribed to study the whole module. It’s not like in the membership sites where they could study / download the whole content quickly (unless you use some kind of delayed content access system).

Because all the content is delivered by email, it’s harder to pack it and upload on pirate sites. Of course it’s not impossible, but requires effort that most people won’t put. It’s even harder with any kind of picks newsletters because the pirate would need to re-email your content each time you send email. In general you have to worry much less about piracy issues than for example when selling info products.

Regardless what kind of premium newsletter you are sending you don’t have to prepare all your content in advance. It’s an ongoing process and all you need to do is to have the upcoming newsletter contents ready before you send it.

Finally, newsletters are typically just text and are easier to create. They generally require lower upfront investment than most of the other premium content business models.

The Bad

Creating a newsletter is usually an ongoing process. Unless yours is entirely based on pre-formatted autoresponder sequences, you need to prepare a new mailing campaign each week, month, or whatever period your newsletter is delivered on.

Newsletters often have lower perceived value unless your insights are really great / secret / unique. People rarely pay more than $20 – $30 monthly for premium newsletter (there ARE huge exceptions though).

Newsletters get no organic traffic because all the content is delivered by email. Unless you also publish the newsletter online after being sent but in many cases that will defeat the purpose. This can work however with stock / forex / sports picks: you can publish your content after the picks are no longer valid to demonstrate your success rates AND attract search engine traffic as well. Very powerful method if your picks are successful.

People often ignore email newsletters even when they paid for them, because the content gets delivered at time when they are busy. So it’s easier for them to forget to read it and at some moment to decide this newsletter has no value for them. This could lead to lower customer retention rates compared to other kind of subscription based content business.

The Ugly

Delivery problems and spam issues. This is huge problem with online newsletters and can cost you from few to 10%, 20% or more of your business. The more severe email filters become against spam, the lower overall delivery rates are. Of course, email service provides take measures and fight this but some percentage of your emails will never be delivered. Or with email clients like Gmail some will end up in the “Promotions” folder.

This is something you have to live with: there will be complains and refunds from paid subscribers who don’t get their newsletters. There will be users who unsubscribe because the email goes to the Bulk / Promotions folder and this cheapens its value. You’ll have to deal with all of this, and ensure the highest possible delivery rates of your newsletters.

You may prefer to use a service like MailChimp but they are expensive. If you are using your own newsletter / autoresponder software (like our Arigato for example), make sure to use reliable SMTP account. Combining a self-hosted software and reliable SMTP service like Amazon SES or Sendgrid is good and cost efficient method to get your premium newsletters delivered.

You can also have issues with the quality / formatting of your newsletter, displaying graphics etc. Email is a tricky matter so I recommend not making the design of your newsletter too fancy and having a backup online URL. This URL will need to be protected / contain unique code for each subscriber, otherwise it kills the incentive to pay for subscription.

Don’t let the few issues scare you off though. Running a premium newsletter is very suitable for some businesses and nearly the only good route for them. It’s also a low investment and relatively simple in terms of technology. Just make sure you have a customer acquisition strategy because your newsletter won’t usually generate any organic traffic from search engines.

In the next article we’ll talk about various mixes.