This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
How much content should you put behind a paywall? Welcome to Side Hustle School, it's Chris Guillebeau here. Got a listener from Boston. She's at this moment that many content creators face, at least if you have a blog or some other kind of content where you have a free version and a paid version. There's this premium kind of thing going on and there's a paywall that people have to, well, pay to get access to whatever is beyond the free content.
And you can usually set that paywall at any point. You can give away a little bit of content, 10% and make 90% of it behind that paywall. You can flip those ratios, you can do anything in between. And it's a decision you have to make of like how do you balance free and paid content on your site so that you can continue to grow your audience while also providing clear value to paying subscribers. You want to gently nudge people to go from free to paid, but gentle is a key word, at least most of the time.
I mean, some people don't care and they just kind of push a hard thing and that can work. But if you want to be a little bit more gentle with it or if you're just trying to figure out how can I navigate this situation, do the best I can and achieve the best possible ratio. Let's talk about it. Let's explore some strategies to achieve the balance. For Nora and anybody else out there, how much content do you put behind a paywall?
That's today's topic, detailed question in my answer coming right up. [Music]
Hi, it's Nora, I'm from Boston and I run a blog focused on sustainable living. I've been considering introducing paywall content to generate revenue, but I'm concerned about finding the right balance between free and paid content. I don't know how much of my content should be behind a paywall to ensure I'm still attracting new readers while still providing value to my existing subscribers. [Music]
Nora, good to hear from you.
I have actually learned a lot about this myself over the past few months. I mean, I've always understood the basics of the freemium model, but I have had a new newsletter that is hosted with Substack and you have the ability to make all kinds of things free or paid or you can set the ratio and such. And so I've done a lot of studying to see what other people do and what is most effective. Number one takeaway is there are lots of ways to make it work. So the first thing you wanna think about is what is your comfort level?
Do you want to give away as much as possible or do you want to be as restrictive as possible? And it's okay to do it either way. Like it's not a bad thing to say, I wanna create mostly paid content and have little teasers and people need to pay to get more. I tend to choose, I tend to kind of flip that and say, okay, I wanna have 80% of things free and 20% is premium or available to those who pay. That's just what I kind of feel naturally comfortable with, but I don't think it's bad as I said to do it the other way.
And you wanna think first of all, why are people coming to the blog? And which posts might be most popular? Where's the true demand? Like what do people really want from you? And that might give you some clues and then you might say, well, okay, maybe the free posts are gonna be about this topic, but my paywalled content is gonna be in-depth guides or maybe some kind of exclusive report or something that is not available elsewhere.
And then you kind of go from there. Then if you're using a platform like Substack, and I think others do this as well, they're really good at letting you tweak different things and they will automatically give you the option of offering people like a seven day preview, like a trial essentially. They will automatically email people at different times when it seems most optimal for them to go from free to paid and so on. So there's a lot of fun stuff you can do. In short, I do the 80/20 free paid, but other people have a different ratio.
And the most important thing is just building the relationships, writing high quality content. If you focus on that, you can always tweak other stuff as you go. Nora, good luck, listeners. Let me know what's up with you, what you're working on, what your ideas are, sidehustleschool.com. We've got notes for every episode, some free resources there.
And of course, a new episode every day. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School. [Music]
