The Twelve Commandments for creating a PROFITABLE subscription site with WordPress
Welcome to this installment of…
Learning to put bread on your table with WordPress.
This post is brought to you by: Common Sense
I am going to break this course outline into a series of three posts, because it is going to be converted into a full-blown course, and we are producing video content to supplement the same. Having said that, the Evil G loves to work “on the fly”. So… I’m going to jump out of this airplane without a parachute and sew one on the way down. Here we go!
1) The Magical Power of 12 -
Subscription sites provide you with recurring revenue, often by a magnitude of twelve, just like Health Clubs and Gyms.
a) What you should learn from Health Clubs for your Subscription Site:
It is well known to those in the health club industry that there are typically twelve times more members than the clubs could ever service. The clubs can oversell because eleven out of twelve customers never show up…but continue to pay anyway. Why? Because it gives them comfort to think that “if I have this membership card in my pocket, I MUST be fit!”
While we don’t suggest you adopt most of the tactics used by Health Clubs, the fact remains that human nature suggests that people will often subscribe quickly but be slow to unsubscribe. That is tremendously beneficial to your bottom line.
b) You have Twelve FREE chances to build a relationship, while being paid by subscriber:
A monthly subscription (or prepaid annual subscription) preconditions your customer to know that they will hear from you regularly. Solidify this relationship with EXTRA VALUE, while at the same time explore the opportunity to up-sell new products and services. Your customers have given you permission to present them with all your expertise and knowledge, so provide them with your personal recommendations on what will solve their problems or paint them a pretty picture.
2) If you can’t eat it, drink it, or sleep with it… don’t make it into a subscription business -
I hate the word “passion” because it’s overused. Instead, imagine you were going to get married to this idea in California, where you would have to give 50% of yourself to it if it didn’t “work out”. Would you still want to go ahead? If not, then keep thinking, because you will give more of yourself to this idea than you ever thought possible. Trust me on this.
3) Everyone is an Expert at SOMETHING – Find ONE THING you love and know best, and SELL it -
The easiest subscription sites to promote are those that involve help or advice on business, faith, relationships, fitness, personal grooming, technical or gaming processes. Search Google on these topics and you will see how much obsession exists regarding the same. Why so much? Who knows.. blame Snookie or the Kardashians. For our lesson today, just accept that if you want a head-start, determine whether you have any expertise in these areas… but don’t lose sleep if you don’t.
Ask yourself: “Is there something that I already love that might be turned into an online product?”
Use this test: “What topic could I speak about extemporaneously for 30 minutes, with no notes?”
Make a list…because these are the likely suspects for your first subscription product or service.
Examples:
ChurchNext is where passionate Christian leaders learn from a variety of experienced congregational development mentors.
Lead Change Group is a non-profit global, virtual community dedicated to instigating a leadership revolution.
The University of Makeup provides online makeup video courses.
Flower Arranging 101 teaches flower arranging classes via video that you can watch on your own time, at your convenience.
4) Be a “symbiotic” parasite – find your host and latch on!
The greatest leverage in the world for a boot strapped entrepreneur is to find a successful company with an existing community where you can ingratiate yourself by becoming the local EXPERT.
If you provide valuable help and information, you are most often welcomed into the community. By both the potential customers who need help, but also by the overworked and under-appreciated moderators of the community who are happy for someone like you to come in and wrestle the troops for a while.
The people to whom you offer free help will have developed a TRUSTING RELATIONSHIP with you that is the foundation for wanting to BUY from you down the road. That’s how it works. Just like in real life. People buy things from people they TRUST.
See how easy this is? Now you’re catching on!
Ground rules for parasites:
a) Potential customers will share information about their Pain or Desires
Examples:
Marketing Services for Doctors - Doctors are busy and not very adept at marketing themselves
Continuing Education and Peer Training for Attorneys - It is a challenge to run a Solo Law Practice
b) Discover a hosted forum or area to create a reputation for yourself
Become the smartest fish in the smallest possible bowl by picking out one area that has many interested readers, and service their needs. A great place to try this out is on Quora where you can find the questions waiting for you to answer!
c) Find a Springboard to launching a “product” via subscription that fills a sub-niche
Is there a skill or service that you have learned to provide that can be converted into a product by way of memorializing it into a video or written format? If so, then you can slowly ease yourself out of reliance on freelancing, and into a recurring-revenue business from selling this informational product about the area where you have become an expert. Teach others how to apply your experience to help themselves. It’s worked before 
d) Be prepared to be move quickly, or be eaten
I’ve lived through this scenario myself with a company I co-founded called WidgetLaboratory.
We became very popular, very fast, for selling our widgets and solutions on a large social network platform called Ning. One day we woke up to find ourselves, and our customers, “unplugged” (and not in the good, MTV sort of way). No amount of public support or mud-slinging was going to change that outcome… so the only choice we had was to move fast and “reinvent” ourselves with a new and more grateful host who was trying to compete with Ning.
Despite all the drama, the lessons learned from our experience on Ning provided a fantastic foundation for our later work with SocialGO and other platform solution providers. To this day, we find that many of our customers come from the “walled gardens” of legacy platforms. The contemporary solutions offered today by cloud computing and open source software provide an alternative to those seeking to escape. At LabSecrets, we specialize in servicing this particular niche and have turned our services and expertise into turnkey products and solutions.