Month: April 2010

Why do I really need a membership site?

You’ve heard for years that you need to have a membership site, that you need to take membership software and use it to run it. But what is the big deal? Do you really need a membership site or is it a bunch of hot air? The answer is yes. You do need a membership site because it gives you more stable income, allows you to price more, and gives you an easy and organized place to store your information product downloads.

Membership sites give you a stable income because you can get people to subscribe and then they are billed every single month. Whereas if you have a single payment product, they pay you once and then you have to start all over again to earn that next sale. The most common problem for me when I was starting out with internet marketing is that I would make $2000 one month and only $200 the next month. It was very difficult to predict how much money I will be making that month.

Having some kind of a recurring membership site adds a little bit of stability to your income. That way, you know that you might at least make $1000 this month or at least make $2000 this month and you can plan for your budget and expenses accordingly. So, membership site does add some kind of financial stability because you have a stable monthly income and you have at least a few easy monthly guaranteed sales from people who are still subscribers of your membership site.

Memberships sites also allow you to price more simply because having a protected download area is more impressive than manually emailing somebody a file or having a simple download page. When people go and get access, they have to register their own username and password, they have to log in, and this is the place where they can go and log in forever and get any kind of updates you have in the exact same place. So, it’s more impressive to have a membership site, you can add in more ongoing trainings such as bonuses and as a result, price more because you’re no longer selling an ebook or a report. You are now selling a whole course, a whole ongoing training area.

And finally, speaking of that training area, a membership site is a lot less scary when you think of it as a simple download area. Somebody pays you money, they register for an account, log in, and now, there is the download link. If they ever want to come back to it, they can. If you ever update it, they can go right back to that area. So, it makes a lot more organized for you because you just update your file in one single place and it makes it easy for your paid members because if they want to get back to that place, they simply use the lost password functionality, even if it’s two years from now, five years from now, they can always get back to that membership site.

So, you do need a membership site for those reasons. It gives you a stable income, it’s more impressive so you can charge more, and it keeps you more organized because you can put your information in a protected download area.

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What do I do if people hate my membership content?

Every now and then, people are just flat out going to hate what you have inside of your membership site. This has happened to me. Sometimes you just make sites that end up being flopped. But how can you tell if your site itself is a flop or if you just have some bad member who wants to complain and if your site is a flop, how do you adjust for it – do you throw out the whole site or what do you do instead.

If you ever come across this, figure out why they hate it, if it’s the format or the content, ask what they want instead, and then figure out if it’s just the whole angle or if it’s the wrong demographic. So, this happened every now then. The incident that sticks out my mind is when I took some Private Label Rights content, some articles, and turned them in a video. And the problem with that was simply that the quality of the articles were poor, and so, you take a poor article and you end up with a poor video, anywhere around that. So, when people hated it, they hated the actual content, not the idea of having these daily videos for a membership site. So, all I had to do and this is what I say about time management, I just created new videos about time management from scratch without using that PLR source material and everything was fine.

So, the first question to ask is do people hate the fact that it’s written or that it’s video or that it’s audio or do they hate the actual content? So, once you figure that out, if someone’s complaining or dropping out, just email them one-on-one and ask them what they want instead. Ask them what their specific problem is in the first place. So, people didn’t like that I had all of these videos based on PLR material and they wanted stuff from me directly. So, what I did was I added some longer videos and I made recapped videos for those long videos. I said, “Watching this one-hour video, here’s my three big takeaways,” and I’ll talk for five minutes and that was it. So, I still got the same daily video content but it was the recap of the good information. So, ask people what they want and use them to generate content. Even if someone is asking a question, that makes a perfect title for your article, audio, or video. So, use them to generate the content. But if both of those things fail, then maybe it’s just a bad crowd.

For example, I also had a membership site that was a failure and the membership site was about traffic, but the problem was the group of people that I was marketing to do not care about traffic directly. They need traffic but they don’t want traffic. So instead, I had to teach them things like product creation and then as an afterthought, add in traffic. Teach squeeze pages and as an afterthought, add in traffic but not make traffic the main attraction. That was the wrong angle.

So, if people hate your membership site content, figure out if they hate the format, which is the medium that is being delivered, like video, or if they hate the content itself, then ask them directly what they want and use their response to generate new content, and then figure out if maybe you’re just going about it the wrong way and you need to find a more clever hook or a more sexier angle to teach people that information.

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Should I give my members downloads and transcripts?

This is a really good question because so many marketers bite me personally to the nail, “Oh I got to give them all the downloads, got to give them the downloads in every single format.” If they make the video – I mean it is possible for you to not just stream a video on your blog but give it in a downloadable .wmv, the iPod file, the mp3 audio, and even the transcribed version. But the question is should you? My answer is no.

The first reason for this is because most of the time, a transcript of a video is not going to be any more helpful. Those will keep them busy. People most of the time who ask for a transcript just want something else to read, and it kind of makes me sad, especially because what they really want are the notes. So, should you give them the transcript? Usually not. Should you give the transcript for every single video? Usually not. If you make a very important video, you might want the transcript, but even then, whenever I read transcripts of audio interviews, video webinars, there’s a bunch of extra stuff in there. I just want the outline. I want the bullet points. So, transcripts are expensive and aren’t necessarily what they need. They might need the notes or they might need something below the video or the audio that says, “Skip to 5 minutes and 32 seconds to get this part of the video, to get section no. 2.”

So, transcripts cost you money and the money does add up, and if you’re doing it just because one single guy is asking or because you want to make everybody happy, then try a membership site or try making some videos where all they get is the video. Try a membership site where they do not get the downloads, and if they are asking for downloads, why are they asking? Are they asking to collect it, are they asking because they’re used to you, because you’ve trained them to get the downloads, or because one guy is just being difficult and is asking you? The thing is they are paying you money in exchange for good information.

You don’t owe to them to put the information in every single modality possible. I would rather promote a good blog post and encourage comments and make the post itself worthwhile than to give them five different ways to download it. And if you make the content simpler, if you make it so it’s just a video, so that it’s right there on the blog, unable to download, the person watching it will have less confusion, less choices, and have more of a chance to comment. And if you really feel the need to transcribe a video in some way, why not take the best blog comments or tell someone to take notes and leave it as a comment and then package that along with the video and there’s the notes, there’s the reduced-down transcripts.

So, I’m not saying transcripts are always bad, but most of the time, you don’t need them, and I want you think about why you are providing transcripts – if you’re doing it because it helps to understand the information or because people are just bugging you because they want something to keep them busy. Think about it the next time you try to transcribe content for your membership site.

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Should I allow my members to interact?

Having a membership site can be a pretty cool thing and having a place where your community, where your buyers can talk amongst each other is cool as well because it means that your site becomes self-sustaining. It means that if you will have problems, there is a whole group of free support that can help them before you even get a chance to look at the membership site, and it means that they can all work together and build stuff and add their own 2 cents to the conversation as much as they want.

So now the question becomes should you allow this or is it too risky because members can take over and be overbearing and be more troubled than they were? So, how do you decide if you should allow your members to comment on your blog and interact? Well, this depends based on if you’re running a small live class, a monthly membership, or a low-ticket membership.

If you’re running a small live class and that means that people pay upfront $200 or more to get trained live on a subject, then you should allow comments without moderation. This means somebody pays you 200 bucks to get access to a membership site and you offer videos that get dripped out or maybe live webinars that get dripped out, teleseminars, call-in days, some way of them to talk to you live as you create the content. Because you’re giving them a lot of stuff in a shorter amount of time, you might not have the extra time to go and monitor the membership site 24 hours a day. So, you would want to leave comments unmoderated, and if somebody becomes a hassle, simply kick them out of the membership site. So, you’re just talking about a small pilot group who pays one single payment for you to run a class. That’s good for starting the class, but what if you turn that later on into a monthly membership site.

So, all those recordings you made, all the webinar recordings, and the videos, you can now put them into a site where people get the videos maybe at a slower rate – so they get maybe one video a month instead of one a week or maybe a few a month, but they pay on a monthly basis and it’s probably much lower, say 50 bucks or $100 a month instead of several hundred dollars one time. So, now you have a lower quality of subscribers. They didn’t jump on the class early. They might have a smaller budget because they’re only paying per month, so you don’t necessarily want them to be able to comment on every single thing. So, I would still allow comments but turn on comment in moderation. So, if somebody leaves a comment, it gets put in the moderation area, then you have to log in and approve the comment, say the comment is okay, and then it will be appear to everyone else.

Finally, if you are just running a very low-ticket membership site, I’m talking $20 or cheaper, I would not allow comments because you don’t want to have just one membership site, you’re not going to get reached off just one membership site, and you also don’t want to train your subscribers that 20 bucks a month gives them unlimited access to you. So, for a $20 or less membership site, turn off the comments. And then if you ever create a $50 or a $100 membership site in the future, then you can turn on comments and use that as a selling point to justify the higher price because they can leave comments, they can ask questions, and you will respond.

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Why shouldn’t I just use a free password-protected blog?

A missed “thought of” solution for not having a membership site is to instead take a WordPress blog and password-protect that folder using your web host control panel. I’m here to tell you today that that is a terrible terrible idea. Membership software these days is so cheap and so easy to install that there is absolutely no reason you should be using the password-protected blog solution, and it’s for these reasons – with proper membership software, you can cut off individual users who cancel or refund, you can prevent sharing and you can provide different access levels for different kinds of users.

I have tried the password-protected blog model, and the problem with that is that everybody has the exact same password. So, you might tell everybody, “Okay, go to this site and the username and password are both strawberries. Type the username strawberries, password strawberries.” Great. Right? Until one person leaves the membership site and then I have to say, “Great. Change the password to bananas” and then email the entire membership except for that one person and say, “Okay guys, I’m sorry but the old password was strawberries, now you need to type bananas when you log into the membership site.” So that’s the first headache because that – then you have members emailing you saying, “Wait, I thought that the password was strawberries. You mean it’s been changed?” And then it’s just a big headache.

The next problem is that people can share the password. You have no way of tracking which users logged in if they log in from different IP addresses. So, if the only thing protecting your membership site is a simple password, then there’s nothing to stop people from saying, “Oh hey guys, let’s all go to the site, type in password “bananas,” and now the 20 of us can all get into this site.” But with membership software, where everybody has their own unique username and password, then you can track and figure out if somebody logged in from 3 or 5 or 10 different IP addresses from the same account and then that usually means the person is passing around their membership information and you should cut them off.

Finally, access levels. With membership software, you can provide different users different levels of access. For example, I like to run classes as live webinars first and then turn them into monthly membership sites. So, I’ll create a live level and give people the webinar sign-up links. Give them the direct download to the webinar recordings. But when it comes time to run a monthly site, I don’t want them to have the live webinar links and I don’t want them to be able to download the videos and only watch them streaming on the blog. So, when it comes time to run the site as a monthly membership site, I will create a level called “monthly” and specify only the streaming videos to be allowed to be displayed on the blog. That way, I can give one group of people one kind of content, the other group a different kind, but it’s all the same membership site.

So, that is exactly why you should avoid free membership software, you should avoid the password-protected solution – because with the password-protected solution, you cannot cut them off, you have no control over sharing, and you have no ability to have different access levels.

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Should I try a free membership plugin?

There are so many different membership site solutions out there that it’s very very easy for you to get confused or distracted about which membership software you should use, especially because some of them are free. There are some membership solutions that have a live version, where they will give you some of the features disabled or even add on the software itself and in exchange it’s free, or even it comes with a 30-day free trial, so you install it and then have 30 days to decide if you want to keep using that software or not. I know it’s really tempting to try out free membership software, but there are a few things to think about. Who’s going to support it? Is it any good? And should you really base your business around free software?

If you use WordPress at all, I want you to think for a second about how many thousands of WordPress plugins are out there. And if you ever try to find the right WordPress plugin to do what you want to do, think about how many times you found some old plugin that’s broken or a plugin that simply did not work on your web host and when you tried to get support, there was none to be found because it was a free plugin. Think about how many millions of software titles are available for free on download.com but many of them are old and broken. And again, if you try to get support, it’s nowhere to be found because it was a free piece of software. So when you’re paying for a software, a lot of what you’re paying for is the support. So, that’s something to keep in mind. If you ever get stuck, if you ever want a feature added, or if you’re simply having trouble installing the membership software on your particular web host, it really helps to be able to email somebody or even call somebody on the phone and get that issue resolved. Free software is not supported. Paid software is supported.

Next, think about, is the software any good? Everybody knows in their mind that OpenOffice which is a free Office suite, will never really be as good as Microsoft Office simply because it’s just not valued as much, it’s not updated as frequently and it’s not used by as many serious businesses to warrant putting tons of time and effort into it. There’s no reason at all for free software to be any good. So, that’s something to think about. Free software is usually much worse than paid software. So, even if you happen to be able to find some kind of support for free software, it probably won’t have all the features you want as it comes in paid software.

The final thing to think about is are you running a business or aren’t you? If you are trying to make any amount of money from a membership site, then you are running a business, and therefore, you should invest in that business by purchasing a membership site software. I always find it funny that people try to pinch every penny and try to get $10 off here, 10 cents off there, and yet when it comes tax time, they wish they had more write-offs. This is your write-off, get membership software.

Those are the reasons why you should avoid free membership software like plague. The only advantage a free membership site software has is that it’s free, but everything else sucks. Free membership software is usually unsupported, it usually has less quality than paid membership software, and it’s not something that you can invest in for your business. So, go ahead and use a paid membership site software right now.

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How do I take payments for my membership site?

If you don’t have a paid membership site yet, you might not yet know the big picture about how are you going to take payments, how people are going to get access to the content, and how are you going to be taking even more payments month after month, and I want to explain to you the components of taking payments on membership sites and the exact process somebody goes through when they purchase from you.

So, here’s what happens. Somebody goes to a webpage of yours, it’s called a sales letter. This is where you convince people why your membership site is so good and why they should give you a chance. They click on a button. Let’s just say that you’re taking PayPal payments. They click on a PayPal button, they get sent to PayPal, they go and either log in to their PayPal account or enter their credit card details manually. Then they click on the finish button and they get sent back to your site. At this point, they have paid this third party provider – in this case, PayPal – and now, they are on the registration page for your site. Now, they can fill out their username, first and last name, email address, and password. At this point, their email address and first and last name are already filled out for them. It’s up to them to figure out what username they want, which usually is just the first and last name, and what password to put in, which they’ll just put in twice. After they fill out their username and password, they’ll click the “next” button and get logged to the membership site, and now, they have instant acces. They also get an email, a confirmation email, where they can pick up and get their username and password at a later date, so they can now log in at any time.

So, the key to that is that they went through what’s called a payment processor. They were on your site, they were on the sales letter, they clicked over and left your site, went to PayPal, processed the card, then got redirected back to your site, at which point PayPal said, “It’s okay. They’ve paid,” and the membership software handles that. So, this second part of it is called the integration. After you set up your membership software, they’ll usually give you instructions, step-by-step instructions, on how to create what’s called a payment button in PayPal. You log in to your PayPal account, generate a button people can click on and just copy and paste this directly to your webpage. You follow about three simple steps, and if you add in certain codes and numbers, so that when somebody pays you money, the information gets passed back to the membership software that says, “Okay. They bought this particular product from the membership site. They joined this particular level in the membership site.” So, that integration allows membership software to process the payment and say, “Okay. They paid this through PayPal, now what do they have access to?”

The final component of the membership payment site integration is called the IPN or Instant Payment Notification. All this means is that if somebody cancels their monthly subscription or they refund their one-time payment, it will cut off user’s access to that thing they paid for. So basically when you set your payment button, using the instructions your membership site software gave, it will notify that membership software if somebody cancels PayPal, will do the notification on its own. So that way, even somebody cancels your site, even logged into their PayPal account, PayPal will hit your script, will contact your membership software directly, and it will say, “This guy right here cancelled his access.”

So, those are the three steps in taking payments for your membership site. First, involve a third party payment processor like PayPal. Second, involve membership software, such as Wishlist member, to process the payment. And third, and this should be built in after you’ve created the button, is have what’s called IPN or Instant Payment Notification enabled in your PayPal account, so that if somebody cancels in PayPal, it will cancel their membership level access in your membership software.

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Why should I use a membership site instead of a simple download area?

There are many scripts available, many pieces of software that provide simple product download management. Somebody pays a one-time fee and they are sent to a special download page where they can get their ebook, report, or video for the next 24 hours. So, if a software like that adequately manages your download links, why would you use anything else? What is the big idea about having it on a membership site? I’m going to explain that to you today.

My big reasons for that is the lost password functionality, the ability to have membership levels, and the ability to cut off access, and the best part is that many membership software already allows you to expire your download links. So, the big advantage for me is that I don’t have to give people their lost download URLs, I don’t even have to reactivate old expired download links. They could simply click on the lost password button, and even if they don’t know their username, they can fill out the email address they used to pay and WordPress will not just create a new password for them, it will email that password to the email address they used to purchase. And even when they log back in, there is the ability to change their own information. They can change their contact email, their name, their URL – any of that stuff is all managed without you having to do anything. It’s all managed in WordPress. So, that is the number one reason for me why I prefer membership sites over download areas because they can recover a lost password.

Next is the ability to have different membership levels. So, imagine you had five different one-time products, somebody could buy five different things from you. You could put each of those things on your membership site as a different page of your blog. Then set those pages onto different levels. And then set up your payment buttons so that if they bought your first product, that would get them onto one particular membership level and give them access to that product. Now, if you wanted to go and add bonuses later on, just add those bonuses onto that same membership level. So, when somebody buys the one product, they get the product plus the bonuses.

The cool thing about different membership levels is that much of the popular membership software, such as Wishlist member, allows you to set an expiration date on your membership level. So, if you are paranoid, if you want the same functionality as many download managers and cut off access to a download after two days or seven days, you can set that level to expire after several days, if someone purchase this, they get access, they can download, but after sever days, their access is expired and they are now canceled from that level, and they have to contact you to get access again. So, if you want to duplicate the same exact functionality as a download solution, you can do that in a membership site.

And finally, if you decide to refund somebody or if they ask you for a refund or for any reason, if you want to add them to a specific level as a bonus, you can make one click in Wishlist and it adds into that level. If you want to remove or cancel somebody from a level, you can do that in a few clicks as well; whereas with many download scripts, it’s a long and tedious process. With a membership site, it’s just a few clicks.

So, that’s why I prefer a membership site over a download area for the lost password functionality, the ability to have different membership levels and expire any of those levels you want after as many days as you want and add or remove access to different levels and different products for a particular user anytime you want.

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What should I look for in a membership software?

I realized that you have a choice in what membership software to use. I am extremely happy with my selection of membership software, but you might have your heart set on some other solution. If that’s the case, I want you to be aware of some specific things to look for when choosing a membership script, and those things are drip content, protected downloads, membership levels, and autoresponder and payment integration.

The biggest thing you need to look for is protected downloads. After someone pays you, do they have a way of creating their own membership account, where they log in with their own unique username and password, that no one else in the membership site has? If the answer is no, then you do not have a membership site. So, definitely look for some download protection. And in fact, most modern membership software also has sharing protection. So, if somebody is passing around their username and password, the system will notice that they are all logging in from the same IP address and will shut off their account for sharing.

The next thing to look for are membership levels. So, can you create a silver and a gold level, where the gold level gets twice as much content as the silver level or vice versa? Can you make one level a free level and one level a paid level? This is definitely very important when having membership site software.

Next, does your software drip the content? Can you schedule a bunch of information ahead of time and when somebody joins your site, they get a little bit at a time until they had completed the entire course? That’s very important, but it’s even more important that if somebody quits your site and joins up later, they do not have access to all the information they missed out on. If somebody joins your site, they start at the beginning of the training and the longer they are in your site, the more they get, but if they quit and come back, they begin right back at the very beginning.

The final piece of the puzzle that you should look for in a membership software is integration with third party services. If you are going to have a paid membership site, you need a way to accept payments. It’s just that simple. The most popular source of payments on the internet in internet marketing is PayPal. So, make sure that your membership site at least supports PayPal payments. So, if somebody can click a button on your site, pay you instantly either with their PayPal account or with their credit card, you get the money and they get their instant access. This should not be a requirement for you to manually add users. This should be built in and integrated with the membership software, so that when somebody joins, it is completely on autopilot and 100% hands-off on your part.

And finally, make sure that the membership software supports third party autoresponders as well. An autoresponder is a mailing list software, a mailing list service. The most popular one is called AWeber, and the membership software you have should have the capability that when they join your membership site, it automatically subscribes them to your email autoresponder mailing list as well so that you can send notifications via email to your entire subscriber base.

So when looking for a membership software, check for protected downloads, membership levels, drip content, PayPal integration, and AWeber integration.

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What membership software should I use?

The simple fact is that no matter what your ideas for a membership site, you are nowhere unless you have a membership software. So, which membership script is right for you? There are literally dozens of membership solutions out there and they all behave in different ways and I want to tell you exactly the way I set up my membership sites. It involves three components: WordPress, Wishlist member, and a Drip plugin.

Let’s first cover WordPress. When people log in to your membership site, they need t go somewhere. Right? In the past, the membership login used to be a separate component than, for example your WordPress blog. The idea was that somebody could charge for access just to a forum or just to a WordPress blog. But recently, developers have figured that usually people want to end up on a WordPress blog, so you should definitely use WordPress to host your membership site content. This is great because with WordPress, you could have multiple authors, you can schedule posts, categorize posts, make posts searchable, embed video, allow others to comment on that post and more, and best of all, it’s free. A very small minority of membership sites run on Joomla, but I definitely would not recommend Joomla simply because it’s slightly more complicated than WordPress and not as mainstreamed. So, use WordPress as the blog inside your membership site.

Once you have that blog, you should install a WordPress plugin to keep the wrong people outside of your membership and allow the right people in. My favorite WordPress plugin that runs a membership site is not my plugin, but it is called Wishlist member. Other solutions such as Rapid Action Profits or Digital Access Pass require you to install multiple plugins or modules just to get the basic membership site running, but Wishlist member is one simple plugin that you install and now you have a membership site. It allows you to have different levels, it provides sharing protection, sequential content, autoresponder integration, and more.

Finally, install a Drip plugin to make sure that your membership site acts more like a training course, like an autoresponder. Without a Drip plugin, you control the access to your membership site, but if somebody leaves and comes back to your site six months later, they can see the entire archive of six months that you posted in the meantime. With a Drip plugin, however, it changes the way WordPress behaves and makes it so that when somebody joins on day one, they see day one worth of content. If they quit and come back in six months, they are still back at day one. So, the longer they are in your membership site, the more content they see.

What membership software should you use? You should use WordPress for your blog, Wishlist member for the software, and the Drip plugin for the training functionality.

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