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Selling access to members-only area of website

by johners
4 replies
For a few years I have developed an educational tool (What2Learn Virtual School). Based on learning through interactive games, it has thousands of learning activities. Much of the site requires a user to log in through either a 'premium' account or free (but ad-supported) one.

The challenge I have is to maximise the revenues earned. Currently it is earning revenue through Adsense (generally positive results despite low CPM due to nature of the website) and through sales of accounts. It is this second area that I need some advice on.

Account sales are for individual student accounts, teacher accounts or bulk purchases for schools. A publishing company was doing this for me by posting flyers to schools but they were not highly effective. Now accounts are being sold on the site through PayPal but with only limited success as I am obviously only selling to people who are already using the site.

The advice needed:

What is the best way you have found of maximising sales of a virtual product such as this? I think I'm correct that I cannot sell such accounts through Amazon but have people tried alternatives such as Ebay? Would selling it through an affiliate scheme such as clickbank be the way to go?

I have spent a LOT of time on SEO-related tasks and the website grows organically with new content added daily by teachers. I am at a point where I think the best returns will be to focus efforts on getting sales from the millions of people NOT on the site rather than the thousands who do visit it!

Any advice given greatly appreciated.
#access #area #membersonly #selling #website
  • Profile picture of the author ColdWritingLLC
    Originally Posted by johners View Post


    The advice needed:

    What is the best way you have found of maximising sales of a virtual product such as this? I think I'm correct that I cannot sell such accounts through Amazon but have people tried alternatives such as Ebay? Would selling it through an affiliate scheme such as clickbank be the way to go?
    .
    You could sell accounts through Amazon as a "gift card" type product, where you ship a 'promo' code that runs as a coupon through your system, wiping out the costs but still using the same avenue registration. It might be time consuming to create individual codes for each purchase, though, so you might have to either run the risk of code sharing or keep each code to a max of, say 5-10 uses.

    From your post it seems like you have the ad supported edition getting decent traffic though, so I have to ask - why would a user, aside from removing the ads, want to pay for it? I didn't notice any additional benefits listed but perhaps that is something you should focus on. Most people have to deal with most of the internet covered in ads so one more website probably won't be too frustrating for them.

    I guess as a corollary you could also make the ads more intrusive and hope that will lead to conversions instead of losing customers altogether, but trial and error will guide you through that.
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    • Profile picture of the author johners
      Thanks for the quick reply - very helpful too! The Gift-card approach through Amazon sounds interesting but I'm sure I've read somewhere that it needs to be an actual physical product (no e-vouchers). If it does need to be a physical product this would eat into revenue and be very time consuming.
      As for the paid-for accounts, they do have quite a few more features than the ad-supported ones (e.g. ability to unlock more sets of learning games, link to friends, etc).
      Thanks again.
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  • Profile picture of the author Peter Lessard
    The issue will not be how to sell paid subscriptions, the issue will be if after the effort involved in selling paid subscriptions are you profitable.

    Lets face it you can buy traffic anywhere. Google, Facebook, Banners.
    What you must do is buy traffic in the way of people that should be interested in your product, see what happens and do everything you can to increase conversions.

    At the end of the day you will determine if you have a winner or loser based on profitability.
    This will be determined by how good your product is, if people WANT (not need) your product and what it costs you to introduce them to it and finally what your conversion and retention rate is.

    Also in regards to the marketing end of things your message and targeting is key.
    Imagine these two messages on Facebook

    Message 1
    "Sign up for free to play thousands of learning games."
    This falls in to the who cares category. You will lose your shirt.

    Message 2
    "My son Jason is 4 and suffers from a learning disability. I was so amazed that 1 free game helped him so much I am now a paid subscriber with access to all the learning tools at blah.com"

    Good luck.
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    • Profile picture of the author johners
      Plessard - thanks for the two example messages - a really powerful message there and one that shows the importance of narrowing down a target audience and aiming at them. As the resource covers most subject area for children in grades 6-11 this lack of focus has been a hinderance rather than a help at times.
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