The WordPress drip marketing plugin Arigato PRO 2.5 has been released. It’s Intelligence module is also updated to version 1.0.7. In order to get the most of the new Performance Stats page, when updating Arigato PRO to 2.5 it’s recommended to also update the Intelligence module to the latest version.

Here is the changelog between versions 2.4 and 2.5:

• You can restrict by user role the feature “Automatically subscribe in this list everyone who registers in my blog”.
• The feature “When user subscribes to this mailing lists, register them as subscriber for my site too” also allows selecting user role.
• New page “Advanced Stats” will show you excellent overview of your best performing newsletters, autoresponder campaigns, top subscribers, and more.
• Unsubscribe stats will show you which newsletters, autoresponder campaigns and individual autoresponder emails lead to most unsubscribed users (note that these stats are recorded from a recent version so you won’t get meaningful results from before installing 2.5).
• When users unsubscribe, we’ll record which email they clicked the “unsubscribe” link from. This info will be shown in the subscribers list page if you choose to not delete the unsubscribed users from the Arigato PRO Settings page.
• The plugin will now track where the subscribers come from – web form (and on which page), added by admin, imported, subscribed by email, auto-subscribed, or subscribed by some custom method. This information will be visible in your list of users and can be filtered in the search form.
• The number of active and unsubscribed users is now shown under each mailing list on the Mailing Lists page
• Added num. sent & num. unsubscribed users under the list of emails in an autoresponder campaign. Same done for newsletters.
• Custom fields will also be included in the search subscribers form. Note that the search is text-based and works the same way as searching in the default fields.
• You can now easily setup your blog homepage or selected URL to work as “Squeeze page” and not show any of the WordPress header, footer, sidebar etc links.
• Advanced role management lets you specify which pages and what access to them will be given to the different user roles. This lets you get your team members involved into the autoresponder management without giving them access to the whole functionality of the plugin. This configuration is available through a new link in the “Roles” section of the “Settings” page.
• New setting lets you choose whether the unsubscribe page will display all lists or just the current list the user is unsubscribing from.
• [Intelligence module] Post contents is also added as variable for the digests
• [Intelligence module] New trigger: when user stays subscribed for X days do Y
• [Inteligence module] Basic responsive template included

The update is sent by newsletter to eligible customers. If your free upgrades subscription has expired, you can renew for another full year for 40% of the regular price.

This feature requires at least Arigato PRO 2.5.1.5 and Intelligence module 1.0.8.

It allows you to split test different versions of emails and see which perform best. The best place to figure this out is the new “Advanced stats” page introduced recently.

To enable the feature select the following checkbox in the Add / Edit Email Message page:

The feature is not available for newsletters.

Few things to note:

If you select “Enable split testing” the email will be included in split testing with other emails that have ALL of the following satisfied:

• They are in the same autoresponder campaign
• They have “Enable split testing” selected
• They are of the same type (i.e. all emails are of type “Send X days after registration”, or all are of type “Send every X days” etc)
• They have to be sent in the same day
• The “time of the day” setting is the same

Emails based on individual user events (enabled by custom profile fields) can not be included in split testing.

The split test will deliver each email to approximately equal number of subscribers.

How exactly does it work:

When the autoresponder runs it will select all autoresponder emails that have to be sent today. If there are 8 receivers and 3 split testing emails for the day, they will be spread approximately equal between the 8 receivers so the first 3 receivers will receiver email A, the next 3 – email B, and the last 2 – email C.

Split testing does not guarantee equal number of receivers for each email in the split test over time.  For example if there are 3 emails in a split test but there is only one receiver today, he will receive email A. If the same happens tomorrow, the receiver will also receive email A, and not B or C. Split testing takes effect only on the given day so it’s recommended for larger mailing lists where at least several members are expected to receive given email in a given day.

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.

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.

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.

WatuPRO version 5.2 is out with a new set of improvements and bug fixes:

• New option lets you not display questions already answered (or only correctly answered) by the user in previous quiz attempts. More info here: http://blog.calendarscripts.info/watupro-dont-display-already-answered-questions-to-logged-in-user/
• New button “Save & Reuse as New” on Add / Edit Question page lets you reuse the question as a template for the next one. This can save you a lot of time if you are creating similar questions.
• A simple snapshot on the admin dashboard (the homepage of your blog admin) will show you the number of quizzes taken today, last 7 days, this month and the percentage up / down accordingly to the previous period + some more stats. The snapshot disappears if you switch WatuPRO to low memory mode.
• The optional progress bar on paginated quizzes can now also show the percentage of completeness
• The basic bar chart now accepts “overview” argument which allows you to show previous attempts for the same user. See the blog post for more details: http://blog.calendarscripts.info/watupro-basic-bar-chart/
• Information about the achieved points & grade per question category will now show in the “View results” page. Note that these stats will be recorded from now on, so you won’t see them for quiz takings completed before applying the new version.
• New option lets you use default points for incorrect / correct answers across the whole system. The setting can be overridden at quiz level. The option does this: when initially loading the form with an answer to a question, the “points” field is prefilled with the default incorrect points. If you click on the “correct” checkbox/radio it auto-fills the default correct number of points, and vice-versus when you uncheck the box. Of course the box content then can be edited and this number can be changed. This can save a lot of time when creating many questions.
• When the “My Quizzes” page is shown with the watupro-myexams shortcode, the “view details” link goes to regular page instead of popup to keep the layout mobile-friendly
• Single-choice and multiple-choice questions now can have their answers arranged in 1, 2, 3, or 4 columns. This is suitable when choices are short or contain only images.
• In the shortcode watupro-myexams you can pass a named argument “reorder_by_latest_taking” to reorder the completed quizzes by latest completed on top. This works together with the sorting argument because the quizzes to complete will remain sorted by it.
• A bridge between WatuPRO and EDD is available: http://blog.calendarscripts.info/watupro-bridge-for-easy-digital-downloads/
• [Intelligence module] New attributes “rank” and “personality” let you limit the expand-personality-result shortcode to only a given result. This lets you manually craft the output if you wish.
• [Intelligence module] Added question category in Edit and Manually Grade Test Results page.
• [Intelligence module] In Manually edit quiz taking -> Configure email section you can use the user info shortcodes with argument user_id=”quiz-taker”
• [Reporting Module] When the tests page is shown with shortcode, the “view details” link goes to regular page instead of popup to keep the layout mobile-friendly
• [Reporting module] The Skills chart can now be sorted by proficiency or alphabetic, and be displayed horizontally or vertically
• [Reporting module]. The shortcode watupror-user-cat-chart now accepts two more options for the “from” parameter: “points” (will show the number of points earned per category), and “percent_max_points” (displays the % points achieved from the maximum points in each category). You can also decide to include survey questions in the chart by passing “include_survey_questions=1”. By default they are not included.
• [Reporting module] The Tests page is optimized, paginated, and made sure to include even tests composed entirely of survey questions.
• Integration with Namaste! LMS now allows filtering students by WatuPRO user group
• Minor improvements to the colors of the buttons in the built-in design themes
• Fixed bug: when “Save and reuse” was used on Match/Matrix questions the old answers were not saved in the new question.
• Fixed bug: when contact details were requested at the end of the quiz the page did not automatically scroll up to reveal the contact fields (the problem occurred only on some installations and on long quiz pages)
• Fixed bug: Survey questions should also return maximum possible points for all the reports that use them
• Fixed bug: when importing questions with tags extra | were added around tags even if those already existed

As always, the updated version is sent out via newsletter to eligible customers. If you did not receive your newsletter, feel free to contact us.

If your free upgrades subscription has expired, you are eligible for renewal with 60% discount. The discount code is sent by newsletter but you can also request it by email.

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.

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.

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

You saw me talking about investments several times so far – this thing is large investment, that one is not so large, and so on. But what are all the costs of running a premium content site? Here. Let’s have a look:

Content creation

Creating the content is the most important and unavoidable cost in such business. Some sites may do fine without advertising  or any paid SEO service (or any SEO work at all), but no premium content site can happen without content.

And in many cases this will be the largest investment you’ll make. If you are creating the content yourself you should factor your time. If you hire someone to create it, directly count the dollars.

It’s impossible to give estimate without knowing your exact business model. But we can do a couple of very rough calculations just as example:

• A subscription based membership site with a hundred high quality articles, 10 videos, and a couple of member only tools. Project about $5,000 for the articles (we are talking about quality stuff here), $2,000 for the videos and $1,000 – $2,000 for the tool, assuming it’s a simple one.
• A set of 3 e-courses, about 20 lessons each, with assignments, exams and certificates. Provided you have someone with expertise this is going to be about $3,000  – $4,000 for writing the lessons, $2,000 or so for creating quizzes, assignments and certificates.
• A site selling 3 approx. 200 pages long e-books and a master set of several videos and audios. You need roughly $500 for the creation of each e-book and $5,000 – $10,000 for the videos.

These are of course very rough estimates and are all made out of the blue. They should be sufficient to give you the idea that starting a small premium content site requires $5,000 – $15,000 for the content creation. This is not huge amount for starting a business, but is not like it’s free of expenses either. If you are planning to start a large info site with several thousand articles, multiple the costs accordingly.

Also note, I consider $50 per quality article is OK. Some would say that you can’t buy an expert for this amount and you may need to pay $100 or $200 per article. On the other hand, if you have the expertise and need just the writing, $20 per article will get you a decent enough writer.

Video creation and tools are different matter as a video can be done nearly free if you just speak in front of some charts, or can cost many thousands if it involves actors or effects. Tools / software are even more diverse.

Users acquisition / SEO / Advertising

Sometimes this is the second, sometimes it’s the first cost. Acquiring users can range from free to many thousands of dollars. It all depends on what numbers make sense for you and what is the value of each customer who joins your site.

There is no way to give estimates here as variables are too many. In some niches the cost per click can be pennies and placing a banner can be $50 per month. In other niches a single click in the search engine results may go to $20, $30, or even $100.

So you have to calculate this yourself based on your business model and niche. There are few things to consider:

• Are you going to rely on search engine traffic? If yes, how are you going to get it? The best strategy might be building a partly public membership site so at least some of your content is exposed to search engines. Just don’t forget that having content alone does not always mean you’ll get traffic. You may (will) still need inbound links.
• If you are paying for ads you absolutely must know your customer lifetime value. When starting, you may need to assume. For example if you are selling a single course at $199, this will be your customer value because there are no upsells. So you need to figure out how much you can spend per acquired customer. Anything up to $100 is probably OK. So if you are using Adwords and paying $2 per click, you must have at least 2% conversionя on your sales page to make things work.
• If you rely on freebies to draw you customers you still must promote the freebies. Usually it’s easy to get users download a free report in exchange for email address and offers like this will convert at 20% or 30%. But you still have to pay for these visitors. And if then only 5% of the download convert to paid signup (customer), we are talking overall conversion rate of 1% – 1.5%. So this approach may be worse than paying to deliver the visitors directly to your sales page.

We are going to talk a lot more about acquiring users in the next article. Just make sure whatever method you decide to use you make some rough estimates at least.

The Software

The things are very diverse here as well. You can very well spend $0 on software. Just install Joomla or WordPress and get some plugins. There are plenty of membership site plugins and many of them are free (for example our Konnichiwa! or Paid Membership PRO)

The paid ones aren’t that expensive either. One of the most popular ones – s2Member is just $89.

Even if you plan to run an e-learning site you can start with $0 by using Moodle our free WordPress LMS like our Namaste! LMS and a free quiz plugin like our Watu or Slick Quiz. (This article is not meant to be a review of software solutions – I am merely giving examples).

The paid LMS plugins are also affordable especially in their WordPress versions. Just $87 for our Namaste! LMS plugin suite (which works on top of the free version) or $129 for Sensei.

So you can start with less than $1,000 for the technical side of things. Probably consider $500 – $800 or so for some decent site design (more if your site is going to be complicated and less if you’ll just buy a ready WP / Joomla! / Drupal theme).

If paid newsletter is your business model, mailing list / newsletter / autoresponder plugins or scripts are usually less than $100. Or you can go by subscription service like MailChimp. That’s going to be expensive once you go beyond 2,000 subscribers though.

If for some reason you need your site custom built you may need few thousands on this front too.

And that’s that. The technology is important but it’s not your biggest worry when starting such business. Figuring out the good content and acquiring users are.

Hosting & server fees

Hosting is no longer the big expense it used to be. In fact it can be pretty small one – often a shared host for $5 per month is good enough to handle a membership site with few hundred customers. And 500 x $39 per month for example makes almost $20,000 in income. You see, it’s not a big expense compared to the potential income.

If your site is heavy on DB queries like some complex LMS-es are, or you have built many tools, or you are hosting a lot of audio and video files you may need a VPS or dedicated server. Assume $50 – $100 or $200 monthly for this.

Another option is to go with good load-balanced cloud hosting service – they are too many to count so I can’t recommend a specific one. The cost can come about the same or less than bare metal servers for small sites. For larger sites it might be more cost efficient to get a bare metal dedicated server and hire a server administrator.

If you choose to build your site on WordPress you can choose to use some of the managed WP hosting providers. A good review of some is available here. As you see you’ll spend only $10 – $30 monthly on it.

In overall, hosting is not the thing to worry about. Think about your expenses for content creation and user acquisition most.

Speaking about attracting users, this is the next article in the series.

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

Acquiring customers is the most important thing in this business, period. If you know how to get the customers to your premium content site you will find out how to create the content. One or another way, you’ll do it.

Having even the best content in the world won’t guarantee you that someone will find it and pay for it. While content creation can often be the largest expense in this business, it’s never the most important starting point.

You absolutely must have an idea how to attract customers before you get your hands dirty.

So, let’s see how. This is not going to shatter your ground: you probably know all of these methods. So we’ll shortly review them in relation with premium content sites rather than talking about the methods in general.

Search engine traffic

With premium content sites SEO is problematic. We discussed this a couple of times already. The typical premium content site has its content hidden from non-logged in users and bots. This makes it exceptionally hard to rank in search engines. You can use some tricks to go around this, especially creating a partially public membership site.

But having the content indexable does not guarantee you search engine rankings. SEO is hard and getting harder even for entirely free to read sites. So by having even partly protected content you are already at a big disadvantage!

There are premium content sites who make it in the search engines. Most don’t. Unless you know what you are doing in SEO, don’t rely entirely on organic traffic in your business planning.

Pay Per Click Ads

Here go Adwords and similar networks. PPC is easy way to bring customers. The hard part is making it bring more profits than expenses. To make it work you must know your customer lifetime value and your sales page conversion rate (CTR). So if you pay $1 per click and your CTR is 5% you’ll be paying $20 to attract a customer. This customer should make you more than $20 to make this process work. There are tons of guides about mastering PPC. I won’t link to any because I don’t know which is best.

PPC is promising for premium content sites because the typical lifetime value of a visitor is at least $50. Since you don’t ship anything physical, every new customer is almost pure profit.

Other Ads

The typical banner ads rarely work any more but the idea is exactly the same as with PPC. Usually paying for time rather than per click, you’ll need to figure out how many visits a given ad brings you per month. Then calculate the cost per visitor and the rest is the same as with PPC.

But unlike PPC where you can experiment with different ads, bids and keywords, the options are a lot more limited with standard ads. This makes them simpler to work with. But also a lot less flexible.

There isn’t much to say about banner ads other than you should not rely much on them. If at all.

Advertising on Social Networks

This mostly means Facebook and sometimes niche social networks. Sometimes LinkedIn in case your content is business oriented. But I’ll focus most on Facebook ads because they are probably the most powerful ones.

There are two main ways to use Facebook ads and each of them has its pros and cons.

a) To advertise your premium content site directly. This is as simple as placing an ad pointing at your sales page. So it’s similar to Adwords. But very different too. Because Facebook lets you select demographics and interest. So you can target your ad at people who probably have long-term interest in your ad rather than someone who just happened to search a given keyword at the moment. And more: some advanced FB marketers create different sales pages for different demographics / interest groups and place different ads for them. All of this can work exceptionally well if done right.

There is also the advantage that people in Facebook are usually in mood to consume content. And what are you offering them? Content. Not some expensive product they are not searching for.

b) To advertise a FB “fan” page of your business. This is a more indirect approach and the initial conversion ratio is lower. You are paying to get your FB page in front of the user’s eyes and hoping they will hit the “Like” button.

But this can work, because once you have a fan you can expose them to your content multiple times. So long term an user of your FB page can be more likely to convert into paying customer than someone who was sent to your site directly.

And more: if you are sharing interesting stuff on your page you can get the viral effect and attract more fans for free because your current fans like and share your content.

A working strategy that we have tested here is to get a page rolling with several hundred fans using paid ads. Then we just started sharing interesting stuff and new likes come naturally in magnitudes higher than the paid ones.

Don’t base your entire business strategy on FB page however as you never know what the rule maker can change. It’s best to mix both approaches of advertising on Facebook and include other social networks if possible.

Affiliate marketing

There are not many specific that to make affiliate marketing different for premium content sites than for any other product. Of course selling content gives you the advantage that every sale is almost 100% profit, so you can go as high as giving 50% or more to your affiliates.

You can combine affiliate marketing with freebies given only to your affiliates to distribute and thus make it more efficient.

Freebies

Providing free reports, free e-book, free tools, or whatever for free can be a good first step in your sales funnel. When a freebie successfully go viral it can be your primary source of customers.

But doing this is not easy. And usually you’ll have to advertise your free stuff to get some traction. It’s important to do the maths: if you are paying for clicks to your freebie you’ll need to consider both visitor-to-download ratio and download-to-customer ratio.

If your freebie never goes viral, this equation usually is not going to work. So to maximise your chances ensure that:

• You are giving away high quality stuff. Just “free” is not enough.
• There is good call to action in your freebie so whoever downloads it is inclined to visit / join your premium content site.
• Your free stuff is closely related to your premium content site. It makes no sense to give out a guide on fishing if you are selling language courses.

If the free stuff can be distributed through some free and efficient way – like a popular directory – it’s worth trying anyway.

Know Your Customer Lifetime Value

Imagine having an ad that brings you 10 new customers every day. Great! You can certainly spend $500 daily on such efficient ad, no?

Maybe yes, maybe no. It all depends on the lifetime value of your customer. If you are selling a $19 e-book without any upsell spending $500 to get 10 sales won’t get you too far. You’ll probably have to file bankruptcy faster than it took you to read this article.

Now, same ad with the same success rate looks very different if you are having a membership site charging $19 per month. Sure, you won’t recover your costs in the first month. But if your average customer remains subscribed for 18 month, this means you are making $342 from each customer. Now spending $50 on sale looks a lot more efficient!

The key is that you must know how much each customer will bring you for the whole time they remain a customer. Whether the value is formed from a single sale, multiple upsells, or monthly recurring fee, you must have at least a rough idea how much it is. Then, based on that, you can figure out how much you can spend to acquire a customer. Simple maths beat guessing.

Version 2.7 of the WordPress drip marketing suite Arigato PRO has been released. Highlights between versions 2.6 and 2.7:

• Added report by email domain for newsletter and autoresponder message reports.
• Added option to manually move subscribers from one mailing list to another.
• Added server-side email validation for cases when the JS validation is skipped.
• Added filter by signup date on the Manage Subscribers page.
• Now you can pause autoresponder messages. Pausing is like deleting them: they will not be sent accordingly to the schedule. But instead of deleting you just pause and can re-activate them at any time.
• Blacklist management is available: you can specify email addresses and IP addresses that will not be allowed to sign up for the mailing lists. You can also use wildcards to mark one or more characters.
• You can now configure the content of the new member signup notification email sent to admin.
• Implemented version 2 of Google’s reCaptcha (“No captcha reCaptcha”). You can use either version but we strongly recommend version 2.
• Added variable {{list-name}} for newsletters and autoresponder messages. Will be replaced with the name of the user’s mailing list.
• The “placeholder” attribute can be added to shortcodes of text fields and simple textareas to generate a HTML placeholder. Example: [bftpro-field-static name placeholder=”Your name”].
• You can now specify different email address to receive your test messages (in “Send test” feature for newsletters and autoresponder emails).
• Further improvements done to prevent sending duplicate emails (such issue has happened to a small number of users).
• Fixed bugs with presets and sending test emails with them.
• Fixed bugs with custom fields (checkboxes) when used in Filter / search subscribers.

As usual, the latest version is sent by newsletter to eligible subscribers. If you have not received it, feel free to send us email. If your free upgrades subscription has expired, you can renew with 60% discount.

Some customers of of the drip marketing suite Arigato PRO can’t run cron jobs on their servers for one or another reason. But this is not reason to worry:

Arigato Pro does not require cron jobs to send scheduled emails. We just recommend setting up cron jobs because this method is more reliable and less resource intensive. If for some reason you can’t set up cron jobs, there are alternatives:

a) Use the option “I will rely on my blog visitors to initiate the email sending”. You’ll find it on the Arigato Pro Settings page:

b) Use some of the many web based cron job services. For example this one is free, and there are many more free or very reasonably priced ones. Do a search for “web cron jobs” and choose a service you like.

Saying all this, please have in mind that cron jobs are not some kind of luxury or high-tech service. They are provided even by the cheapest web hosts. If your hosting service cannot provide such basic feature you should probably consider changing it.

From version 2.7.4 Arigato PRO supports shortcodes that will display information from selected subscriber’s profile on a page on your site.
The most common scenario to use this is to create a dynamic thank-you page which is prepopulated with subscriber’s data and shown to them right after subscribing or after email confirmation. In order to make this work we have also added an option to automatically prepend user ID when doing redirects. Read on to learn how to use all this:

Using The Shortcodes

Use the shortcode in the following format:

[bftpro-user-field field=”field_name” default=”Default value”]

This format expects that user ID will be sent in the URL as argument called “arigatopro_id“. This can happen automatically after registration as explained in the second part of this article. If you are using some other configuration you may need to take care for prepending the user ID yourself. An alternative to this is to add the shortcode parameter “user_id” in the shortcode like this: [bftpro-user-field field=”field_name” default=”Default value” user_id=5]

Where does the field name come from? There are four fields presented in every mailing list: name, email, ip, date. Use the names exactly as shown here. You can also include custom fields the same way – just pass the field name (not label) to the “field” parameter.

Here is the how the thank you page that you get after signing up for our demo list is done:

Using default values is recommended because someone could be visiting your page without the proper URL parameter.

Prepend Subscriber ID On Redirect

To make using the above shortcodes simple we have added a new option on the Add / Edit Mailing List page next to both redirects:

This way you can be sure the ID is passed and can make a page like the one from the example in the previous section yourself.

This free bridge is for customers who manage their mailing lists and newsletters with Campaign Monitor. Similarly to our MailChimp bridge, this plugin will let you automatically subscribe users who take quizzes to your mailing lists in Campaign Monitor.

Download version 0.4 (~300 KB)

The bridge will respect Campaign Monitor’s double opt-in settings for the given mailing list. There is no way to overwrite this.

To use the bridge you’ll need your Campaign Monitor API keys and the IDs of the mailing lists you want to use. Please don’t ask us why finding out the ID is so complicated Campaign Monitor does not allow a method to select all lists so you have to use the ID instead of seleting the list from a drop-down:

If you’d rather not pay monthly fees and leave your mailing list data in someone else’s hand, we recommend you our premium WordPress Autoresponder / Drip marketing suite. It comes with one-time fee and optional yearly upgrade fees, and there is also free bridge for connecting WatuPRO.

What happens with existing members when you add a new email to a sequential autoresponder series in Arigato PRO?

The answer is simple: the email will be sent only to the users who are registered exactly X days ago (and will of course be sent in the future to the other new or existing members when the right day for them comes). It’s important to know that emails will never be sent on wrong dates, i.e. if existing member is registered more than X days ago, they will not get this newly added email. Here is an example to make things easier to follow:

If you add “1 day after registration” email on Oct 29, on the same day it will be sent to existing members registered on Oct 28 (provided that your cron job runs after adding the email). On Oct 30 it will be sent to members registered on Oct 29 etc. Such email will never be sent to members registered on Oct 27 or any earlier date. This is very logical and it is the way it should be.

If you want to send email to older members, you can send them a newsletter.

WatuPRO version 5.3 is out with a new set of improvements and bug fixes:

• A new page will give you the submissions on all quizzes in chronological order.
• A new field for internal comments to the quiz is added, so admin / staff can add notes to each quiz. The notes will then be shown on the admin Quizzes page under the title.
• You can now specify spacing between questions and between question and its answers from the WatuPRO Settings page, without writing any CSS. More design configurations like this are coming soon.
• A new “completion criteria” feature on the Advanced Settings tab of the Edit Quiz page lets you define which grades will mark the quiz as “completed” on the user’s dashboard.
• The shortcode [watupro-result] now can print the whole “final screen” from given quiz taking by passing “details” to the “what” parameter (see the internal WatuPRO Help page for more details).
• Added variable %%POINTS-ROUNDED%% to show the points collected on a quiz rounded without decimals.
• Added variables %%START-TIME%% and %%END-TIME%% to be used for the time when quiz was started and completed.
• You can optionally collect the source URL where the quiz is taken and filter by this data in the “View results” page. This could be useful if you are publishing the same quiz on multiple pages on your site.
• Implemented reCaptcha v 2 (“No Captcha reCaptcha”).
• Added option to select what number of quizzes and questions to manage per page.
• Added 3 new color schemes for quiz designs.
• [Intelligence module] In case of a tie on the top personality types, the personality quizzes will now display all matching ones.
• [Intelligence module] ”Treat this question” as a whole option added to multiple-choice questions.
• [Intelligence module] Coupon codes can now be limited to a selected quiz and have an expiration date.
• [Intelligence module] Coupon codes will now work for non logged in users too.
• [Intelligence module] You can now set text to be displayed at the final screen in case of premature quiz ending (See Intelligence module settings tab in Edit Quiz page).
• [Reporting module] Stats per question page & shortcode now support date interval filter.
• Fixed bug in the questions import, WatuPRO advanced format (answers were not properly importing after adding two fields to the export file).
• Fixed UI issues with the “See answer” buttons when “Answer to each question can be seen immediately” is selected.
• Fixed bug: the “stats per category” in Reporting module did not work correctly when the quiz reused questions from several quizzes.
• Fixed bug: when copying questions in existing quiz the question were not placed after the original questions of the quiz, but inserted between them.

As always, the updated version is sent out via newsletter to eligible customers. If you did not receive your newsletter, feel free to contact us.

We have just released version 1.3 of the Pro addon to Namaste! LMS. Here are the new things since version 1.2:

• Added leaderboard generator for leaderboards by points, grades, num. completed assignments, num. completed lessons, and num. completed courses.
• Added new criteria for the leaderboards: limit to users who belong to a selected group / class.
• Added option to automatically replace your theme default next / previous links on lesson pages (thus no need to use the next / prev shortcodes).
• Enabled simple shopping cart for buying access to premium courses and classes .
• Implemented the Paypal PDT option for paid class signups.
• Coupon codes can now be restricted to specific class or course.
• When a course is added in a class / group even teachers will be restricted from viewing its lessons unless the course belongs to their classes.
• Added class filter on the gradebook so when non-administrator is assigned a class manager role they’ll see only students in their class.
• The views / templates can be customized the same way as in the free Namaste! LMS plugin.
• Built-in integration with WP Simple Paypal Shopping Cart. You can  get shortcodes for all your courses and classes from the internal Help page.
• Fixed bug: class permissions of teachers were not applied to Protected files.
• Fixed bug: when there were multiple class sign-up buttons on the page it was enough to click one of them to sign up for all classes.

The upgrade will be sent to eligible customers. If your free upgrades subscription has expired, you will be sent 60% discount code for optional renewal.

While this post is mostly pointed to customers of Arigato PRO, it can be used as guide for everyone who has problems with delivery rates of their outgoing newsletters and auto-responder emails.

Here are two very important steps to take that will greatly improve the delivery of your emails:

Use SMTP. PHP mail works… sometimes. It sends emails but doesn’t construct the envelope too well and generally isn’t too reliable. Setting up SMTP is really easy and takes few minutes. Every paid hosting service provides email accounts with SMTP access. Ask your provider if you are not sure about this. If you are not happy with their quality and delivery rates you can use affordable services like Amazon SES, smtp.com, SendGrid etc. Heck, you can even use Gmail as free SMTP service.

Arigato customers and everyone who sends from WordPress can install some of the free plugins like Postman SMTP, WP Mail SMTP etc. Arigato will automatically send through them.

Please do use SMTP, it greatly improves delivery.

Use sender address from your domain name. For example if I send you newsletter from this site, it will be sent from someone@calendarscripts.info. If I use domain name different than calendarscripts.info this will reduce my success a lot. Many email servers will block the incoming email due to domain mismatch. In many other cases the email will end up in the spam box.

If you are using SMTP account from other domain (like Amazon SES, or Gmail) your sender’s address must be the same as the SMTP account. So if you are sending from SMTP someone@gmail.com, use the same as sender address.

Version 2.8 of the WordPress email marketing suite Arigato PRO is out with some very important improvements and fixes:

• Added option to bulk delete mailing lists and newsletters.
• Added feature to export / import an autoresponder campaign with all its messages. It can be used to copy the campaign into the same site or into another site running Arigato PRO.
• Improved protection against duplicate emails (using lock files).
• Newsletters can now be scheduled for a date in the future.
• Shortcodes to use in a “thank you” page and other pages of your site + option to prepend user ID when redirecting – learn more here.
• “Subscribe by email” can now connect to SSL POP 3 accounts and there is an option to fetch the signups while testing the connection.
• Added “copy email” feature for autoresponder emails so you can easily duplicate them.
• Added “hidden” field type in custom fields. The hidden field can accept values from GET (URL) or POST and can have a default value.
• The raw email log can be filtered by receiver’s email.
• New shortcode allows you to output the number of active subscribers in any mailing list.
• The cron job can now be accessed as a PHP file (for hosts that do not allow cron job as GET requests)
• You can now set language code when using reCaptcha v.2.
• Reworked the Ninja Forms integration for compatibility with version 3+.
• The contact form integration checkbox can be hidden by adding a new attribute to the shortcode. Do this at your own responsibility.

Eligible customers will receive the update with the newsletter.

This is a long time requested feature for Namaste! LMS now live. Although in beta stage it’s functional and covers the most important requirements to sell course access to schools, groups or resellers.

We recommend reading about it on documentation page.

This update of WatuPRO came a bit faster than usual. There are a lot of feature and improvement requests some of which quite good, so we implemented them:

• Certificates can have expiration period. After X months or years a configurable message that the certificate has expired will replace the original certificate contents.
• Added option to manually award certificates.
• Added strict exact match (case sensitive) mode on open-end questions.
• Added two more optional contact fields on the “Ask for contact details” section.
• Showing “Question X of Y” or “Page X of Y” text is now configurable from the quiz pagination settings.
• New option lets you mass update questions to: Required/Not required, Survey/Not survey and Important/Not important. These properties are also shown on the Manage Questions page under “Type” column.
• You can now enable Unselect button on single choice / multiple choice questions.
• New option lets you choose the text on the Submit button for each quiz.
• From the WatuPRO Settings page you can define what word to be used for “Quiz/Quizzes” within the plugin interface. Please note that we are slowly implementing the defined word usage on the pages so it’s currently only partial. This process may cause a bit of extra work to plugin translators as some of the previous strings will need to be translated again.
• Added variable %%SHORT_ANSWERS%% for the final screen. This variable will display the question along with user’s answer without checkmarks or feedback. The variable is suitable for surveys or similar tests that do not have correct or wrong answers.
• The design adjustments now allow you to choose buttons design and text sizes within the quizzes without editing CSS.
• You can also choose to use textual checkmarks when emailing results instead of graphics. Nowadays most email programs do not show graphics by default so this can be useful to avoid confusing the respondents.
• When question choices are displayed in 2, 3, or 4 columns you can set a fixed column width for achieving the best layout on the specific question.
• Added button to “Save & Add New Question” to save time when adding many questions.
• You can select WatuPRO user group also on the Add New User page.
• Added variable %%WRONG%% to show number of wrong answers on the Final screen.
• Added “Save & Add New” button on the pages for managing question categories and test categories.
• [Intelligence module] New option: Let user choose what questions to answer (based on predefined criteria). Similar to the User Choice addon.
• [Intelligence module] Quiz bundles can now have expiration period of X days after purchasing the bundle.
• [Intelligence module] Updated the Stripe payment library.
• [Reporting module] Stats per category page now also includes per-question tag report. The reports can now be filtered by user login / email address.
• Fixed bug: the variable %%MAX-POINTS%% was not properly calculated on checkbox questions.
• Fixed bug: The setting “Do not show correct / incorrect checkmarks on unresolved questions to avoid right answers being revealed.” did not work without the Intelligence module.
• Fixed bug: the {{{points}}} variable in the question feedback area was not properly calculating the cases when points should be discarded in some question types.
• Fixed CSS issue: when showing multiple-line answers in bullet lists the bullets were aligning bottom to the text.
• Fixed the CSS on compact format questions.

Eligible customers will receive the upgrades with the newsletter. If your free upgrades subscription has expired you will receive 60% discount code for optional renewal.

This feature is available from WatuPRO version 5.4.1 and above.
It lets you include several groups of checkbox answers into one “multiple choice” question.
This lets you structure complicated questions like this:

Such question will be treated just like any regular “multiple choice” question: it can be calculated as a whole or not, it will be counted as one question in all the calculations for percentages, correct/incorrect answers, category based reports, etc. Grouping the checkboxes is a presentation feature, it’s not a change to the logic. If you want to calculate each group as different question, then you obviously don’t need the feature. Simply create several multiple-choice questions.

How does it work

Once you select “Multiple Choices” for question type, the following checkbox will appear and you need to select it:

After you select the checkbox the answers to the questions will receive an additional box where you can enter group number:

In the contents of the question use the {{{group-N}}} variable to mark where you want each group of checkboxes to appear. Replace N with the group number:

This results in the following output:

And after selecting some answers and answering the quiz:

And this is still just a single question! Nice.

Please note that this feature is available only for “Multiple Chocies” questions. It can’t be applied to single choice questions (radio buttons) because if you can select one choice in each group, it’s no longer a single choice but multiple choices.