How Political Wire built its successful subscription offering

When Taegan Goddard launched a paid subscription product for his blog Political Wire, he had been running the site for close to 16 years. By that point, the site was attracting millions of pageviews per month and generating a healthy amount of revenue through advertising. But Taegan had long wanted to diversify his monetization and create a product for his most loyal readers.

So he installed Memberful and announced the membership to his audience. At first, members got access to extra content, but over the next few years Taegan rolled out more and more member perks. Today, Political Wire members get access to op-eds, extra newsletters, a podcast, and an ad-free experience.

In a recent interview, Taegan walked through every aspect of his subscription product including how he announced it to his audience, what he does to drive conversions, which perks are most highly valued by his subscribers, and how he reduces his churn rates:

I was there in that hotel room. I had been thinking about it on a four-hour drive to get to where I was going. And then I got to the hotel, I installed the software, I got the whole thing working, and then I wrote the blog post introducing it. It was probably nine o'clock or ten o'clock at night, and I described what I was trying to do. I described what you would get in return for a paid subscription, and I just pressed publish.

And I went to bed and I closed my computer, and the next morning I was really pleasantly surprised by how many readers immediately saw the value in that, immediately wanted to support Political Wire through a subscription. And I had dozens and dozens of memberships within the first 12 hours. It was a pleasant thing to wake up to.

Watch our interview in the video embedded below:

If video embeds don’t work in your inbox, then go here.

How to listen to a podcast version of this episode

As a paid subscriber, you get access to a special podcast version of this episode. There are two ways to listen to the episode.

1. Visit the episode page on Substack and listen to it either on the Substack website or app.

2. Visit the episode page while on your mobile browser. From there, just click on the “more options” button. This will create a pop-up menu that will allow you to plug the RSS feed into your podcast player of choice. Once you’ve imported the feed, then all new paid episodes will show up in your podcast player for as long as you remain a paid subscriber.

I posted two screenshots below to show you how it works

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