Follow these five simple steps to increase your visitor to subscriber conversion rate
There's no doubt that running a successful subscription web site can be a very profitable business.
There's no doubt that running a successful subscription web site can be a very profitable business.
Just look at the Subscription Web Site Profit Potential calculator, and you'll see that by signing up just 3 members a day, you can quickly build a $100,000+ a year business.
Before you can start spending all that money your subscription web site could make, you've got to figure out a way to convert visitors into paying subscribers. Here are five simple steps to help doing that.
How to convert visitors into paying subscribers
If over a period of weeks or month, a visitor discovers most of the search results lead to your site, they'll have a good reason to subscribe.
Having all the content in your site indexed in the search engines is vitally important to your success. This is especially true of articles within the members area.
To learn more about how to get high rankings in the search engines, see Search Engine Optimization - getting a higher ranking using bullet lists to guide the robots
So rather than hide these most desirable elements behind a sales page, put the compelling articles, resources, and other features right up front (like they do at the most successful news and magazine sites). Give visitors a reason to want to see more and to want to join.
A good example - the 20 article headlines (and accompanying teaser copy) on the front page at http://restaurantowner.com/ instantly builds a case for joining the site. No sales letter is needed - the strength of the compelling content at the site builds the demand.
The headlines and content build desire, and more importantly, trust.
The carrot needs to be something not available anywhere else, something perceived as having immediate value, and something that is directly related to whatever special niche interest it is that brought them to your web site in the first place.
A good example of irresistible bonuses can be seen at http://restaurantowner.com/.
Look in the center of the page under the 'Featured Resources'. You'll see several downloads that anyone interested in the restaurant business would want.
If you click any of the download links, you'll learn that you have to join before you can download - but if you do join, you get even more irresistible bonuses.
When offering carrots, be sure the carrots are not stale, or perceived as having no value. Bad carrots are worse than having no carrots.
An example - at http://www.bmyers.com, we have a pretty extensive download library. But since the download library is in the members area, potential subscribers won't be able to view its contents.
To solve that problem, we've make it so non-members can view the contents of the download library, but can't actually download any item (see Download Library.)
This gives non-members a peek at some of the content, which gives them more reasons to want to join. (We do the same with discussion forum postings - we show recent forum posts on the front page of our site - allowing non-members to get a peek at the discussion.)
Another way we do this is to allow non-members to search both the articles and all discussion posts.
And of course, if you do allow non-members to peek at these elements, be sure to tell them about in on the 'join us' page.
The free tip that you send should be useful, not include any overt sales messages, and should include a list of recent articles or resources added to your site.
Create tips that visitors look forward to reading, and they will eventually discover they want to join your site to get more. But if your tip has the appearance of spam, expect the visitor to unsubscribe from the tip, and not want to join your site.
And be sure to create a 'tip of the week' department where visitors can view the quality of your tips before they sign up for the tip of the week. This serves two purposes:
Small changes can reap big dividends
When it comes to converting visitors into paying subscribers, even small changes to your subscription web site can reap big dividends.
Just by adding a carrot, a tip of the week, and a few other elements, you can significantly increase your conversion ratio. And doing that can help you reach that $100,000 a year figure much more quickly.
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