006: Marketing, Entertainment, and Value (How to Blend It All Inside Your WordPress Membership Site)

We talk on this program about how you can make money by selling things like your knowledge, your training courses, videos, written materials, software inside a thing called a membership site, which is powered by WordPress and by WishList Member. A membership site is a site where your customers can become members. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to sell high ticket low ticket a month reoccurring forever. You can charge 1 singe payment, and that 1 payment give someone life time access to your membership site.

Today we’re going to talk about specifically making a training course, and how to do it without driving yourself crazy, how to do it so that you have a really good idea, and you get it knocked out as fast as possible, and it basically becomes the best possible version of that training course you wanted to create, and it becomes something that your buyers love and get to use and want to go through over and over again every time they want to get some kind of a repeatable result. Setting up an Amazon business, renting out a home, running a webinar, running a podcast, you will create a training course which …

When someone tells me they’re making a training course, what that says to me is that they’re recording a set of videos, preferably screen capture videos using a tool called Camtasia Recorder, so I can see a certain set of steps on a screen that tell me to use these tools in this order, and maybe use this template, maybe type in this text, click on these boxes, check these buttons, click these links. Then what it builds up to is a goal has been completed. You tell somebody how to get up to a certain goal, which is for example a highly ranked podcast as key state we’re going to be talking about today, where someone wants to know how to make a podcast at all.

We create a sales letter. We have maybe a video on a sales letter saying, “Here’s what you want, podcast is done, podcast is ranked highly.” Then they join and they click to get access to that course, pay us money, get in the membership site, and there are a set of modules. I don’t like to have a bunch of written stuff. I’m not going to give somebody a 300-page document and say, “Here, you go have fun.” I also don’t want to give someone a list of a hundred 5-minute videos. That’s not helpful either. What I’m talking about is a 4-module course. A module is about a 60 to 90-minute video where in the 60 to 90-minute video we show some PowerPoint slide, explain a little bit about what we’re about to do by taking the first step, setting up our podcast, show us some slides, speak out some bullet points, leave PowerPoint, go and click around, do a few things, and then switch back.

That’s all well and good to say, “Okay. Well, I have a podcast set up.” By the way, the course we’re talking about is a real course. You can go and get it at podcastcrusher.com. At the moment, it’s running on WordPress and WishList Member, just like we’re talking about. You can get your free copy of WishList Member in our training course. We buy a copy out of pocket for you at membershipcube.com.

Setting up a podcast. Whether you know how to do it or not, you can probably agree that, that’s a little bit of a technical activity to undertake. We don’t want it to be this kind of course where we say, “Well, I’m going to tell you everything you need to know about podcasting.” Let’s think about this too. If I gave you the restriction of saying, “You have to teach me podcasting, show me podcasting in 4 modules, and it have to be an hour or so each.” your tendency is to say “Aha. I know, the first module will be about how to get a microphone, and the second module would be about how to plan what to say, and the third module would be about how to record their podcast, and then the fourth and final module would be that now they’re podcast is set up and online.”

That sounds like a really boring course. What would be a lot more exciting is if somehow we could figure out a way to get your podcast online in the very first module. I know that another tendency is to say, “All right. I’m going to teach remote podcasting. What I’ll do is I’ll open up my browser and I’ll say, ‘Here’s the microphone to buy, go do that.’ Then I’ll tell them, ‘Here’s the WordPress plugin that get your podcast setup, go get that. Then I’ll tell them, ‘Here’s the website to submit your podcast to iTunes, go do that.’ Then I’ll say, “Here’s the guy to hire to get a cover and a theme song made, go do that.'”

You might think that’s helpful because technically you are pointing them in the right direction. Technically, someone could assemble that all together, but that’s not a very helpful kind of course for you to say, for just to say, “Go hear do that, go head do that.” I’d rather you show me every step of the way. Just because you might have seen it done 100 or 200 times, just because it’s easy for you, I don’t know what I’m even looking at because this is my very first time seeing anything podcast related. When we’re talking about a training course, you want to show people how to combine tools and websites with your templates and steps to get to a real goal, something that they have built like a podcast, a webinar, a website, a rental home, whatever applies for your niche.

Now, the other thing to keep in mind is that, and it sounds a little pessimistic, but a good chunk of won’t make it past that first module, past that first 60-minute video. That’s just a fact. We have to give them a big result, and that means that we can’t … If we’re teaching about membership sites, we can’t possibly wait until the very final module to show them how to have the membership site online. It needs to be the very first module, because a lot of people won’t get pass the first video, and it’s a lot easier to sell a course where we say, “Within X number of minutes, you’ll have a membership site, or a podcast online.” We want to give somebody a big result in that very first module.

The next thing to keep in mind with membership sites, training courses, with these 4 60-minute videos, is that each of these modules has to be build towards them, having something new built. That means that … Well, for example, in our Podcast Crusher Course, in the very first module, they have a podcast episode recorded, like you’re listening to right now. They have a podcast of their very own set up online on iTunes. Then the second module is about them then filling in a few of the gaps. They record episode number 2. They add in music. They add in graphics. We have them host their podcast on the proper place to host podcast episodes. The next module is about how to get a bunch of interview guest for their episode to turn out content. The fourth and final module is about how to use social media and Twitter to get all that traffic to their podcast.

It’s not like we have 1 module where we take a brake and talk about strategy. Every single module out of these 4, give someone something tangible that they have built, really, really important. The next thing to keep in mind is that most of your customers get tired after 4 modules or 4 weeks, however you want to do it. If you’re saying to yourself, “Well, I need to have an 8-module course. I need to have a 12-module course.” that’s not a good idea unless you really, really want to. It’s not a good idea unless you just happen to have so much stuff that it won’t fit, but have a 4-module course if you could help it. If there’s really tons and tons of stuff, then make it 8 modules, but it definitely shouldn’t be any larger than that, because we don’t want to overload people. We don’t have to tell them about every single nook and cranny when it comes to podcasting.

I don’t need to teach someone about video podcasting because, well, I don’t do it and it’s no not that big of a thing to do at the moment. We just have them do some basic podcasting, because that is what most people want. You have these 4 modules and you have this video recording and use a screen capture tool like Camtasia to capture your screen. People see your screen, they hear your voice, you save it in a video, you put it inside of that membership site. Within the 60 or so minute session, where you’re showing someone, for example, in that first module, how to record a podcast episode and the tools to combine to get it in online, we want to make sure that they wake up every 10 minutes. This is another big reason why we like to move to PowerPoint slides and then move off of PowerPoint slides.

Let’s face it, sitting in a computer is boring just like how sitting in a classroom at school is boring, so we want to be more like a TV show. We want to kind of mix things up. I like to make sure to have something fun and cool to say every 10 minutes. I like to repeat important points, but at the same time, I also want to make sure that if I’m going to tell someone, “Well, here’s how you record a podcast episode. We’re going to install this program. We’re going to go over here. We’re going to click the record button. We’re going to say these things I told you to say. We’re going to trim off the edges. We’re going to save this.” That’s a lot of steps. Right? If I zip around it quickly, I could show it all in 3 minutes, but then you wouldn’t explain it.

Then I could also talk for 20 minutes about what I’m going to do, show it for 20 minutes, and then spend 20 more minutes talking about what I just did, and then we would’ve wasted a whole hour just on literally clicking 3 buttons. We need to figure out whatever middle ground is right for you, where you need to repeat the things you’re doing, especially if it’s a brand new unfamiliar screen, especially keeping in mind that most people have never ever seen the screen you’re about to show. At the same time, we want to make sure to keep the length of 1 module under 90 minutes, and we want to make sure we don’t leave too much out.

I need to show people everything in that little video demonstration of how to record an audio file for their podcast and save it. If I find myself running out of time, then I might just skip the parts where I make it perfect. I might say, “Well, just don’t bother about trimming your audio file, if you know what that means. Just record it, save it, and that gets the job done.” We want to keep all those things in mind. Make sure that they stay away every 10 minutes, so repeat a lot to not zip around too fast, but also stay under 90 minutes, and also make sure that we include at least the bare essentials of what we have to click on and do. I guarantee, if you just tell someone, “Here’s Audacity, here’s the program to record audio.” most will just be completely lost. If there’s 1 popup or 1 button they don’t understand, they will be a deer in headlights. They won’t know what to do.

It’s easy for you to say, “Well, here’s WordPress. Go ahead and install it. Here’s how you go add a new posted WordPress. Go ahead and do it.” but they need to see exactly how you did it. We’ve been talking so far in this program about you make a 4-session format for your course. In our podcasting course, the first module is how to get that podcast set up, but let’s think about this now as well. You say … All right. The first module I’m going to show people how to get a podcast on line, and then that frees up a space for us, and maybe the last couple of modules can slow it down a little bit, and we can focus on things like making your podcast right on getting podcast traffic. Now, it’s a much more interesting course.

Even in a 60 to a 90-minute session, that might sound like a long-time. You might be telling yourself, “There’s no way I could talk for 60 minutes.” Well, you really only have room for about 6 steps. I might be talking about, “Well, here’s how to record your podcast. Here’s how to upload your podcast. Here’s how to install a WordPress blog. Here’s how to install this podcasting plugin. Here’s how to add your first podcast episode to your blog, and then finally, step number 6, submit it to iTunes.” That’s just off the top of my head.

That alone will easily, easily fill 60 to 90 minutes, especially because we’re going to have a slide in PowerPoint that says, “Here are the steps I’m going to click on.” Then we go back and we click on those steps, making sure that we’re super slow and we’re not moving the mouse pointed all around. We click on of what needs to be clicked on, then we switch back to PowerPoint slide and explain what it is that we just did. You tell them what you’re going to look for and what you’re going to click, then you leave your PowerPoint slides that you’re recording, and do those steps, and then you recap. You can do the recap much more quickly than when you’re telling them what you’re about to do, but recap what you just did. That way, it really sinks in.

The next thing as we’re talking about PowerPoint slides is I like to have a slide, and I put at the title of the slide, the word today. Then I list about 6 or so bullet points of what we’re going to cover in that 60 or so, or 90-minute or so module. That way they know, just right at the very beginning, the things we’re going to do. Then I make sure to copy this slide throughout my various other slides in my training. That way maybe we’re halfway through, and we can go and say, “Okay. Remember how in the beginning we said we’re going to do these 6 things? Well, now we’re on step number 3 recording your podcast.” That ways, it’s very clear what we’ve done so far, and how far long we are, and where we’re going.

Then we keep calling back to that today’s slide as we call it, so that way, we’re not just running around without a structure without a plan. Then at the end of whatever it is we’re showing, we have an item called a challenge. These are just 4 quick questions detailing a small action they’ll take. That means that in our podcasting course, for example, where I show them in the very first module how to get everything set up, the basic set up, then at the very end we say, “Now that we’ve shown you this, we have 4 quick questions for you.” Those questions are number 1, what will your iTunes podcast be named? Number 2, what will you name the first episode of your podcast? Number 3, what URL will you set up your podcast blog? Number 5, what time will your podcast be submitted to iTunes.

That is what a challenge is. That way, the pieces are kind of coming together, because we have an idea for a scope of a whole podcasting course, but then we say, “Okay, well, here’s the very first module.” We get your podcast set up, and then we break that down and say, “Well, today, in the 5-minute podcast module of Podcast Crusher, we’re going to cover the tools and our recording process, the workflow on how to record, save, upload, and publish, the case study where we record our first 5-minute episode right in front of you. Then the setup, we’ll reinstall WordPress, the PowerPress plugin, and then submit to iTunes.”

That’s an example of just doing it a training on how to set up a podcast. By the way, that is in podcastcrusher.com. A lot of little piece to put together there, but I hope that a few of these things sink in, that having a lot of written stuff is okay if it’s, for example, the transcript from a video you created. That way, you don’t have to write a lot of stuff. People only have to read things if they chose to. I honestly think that the most fun way for someone to take in information to see it on video. That way, there’s no confusion about what to do. Don’t just list some websites, don’t just say, “Here go over … Here’s how to record and good luck.” Actually, have a real case study in your membership training and set something up in the most simple way possible. That way, they will actually see it done.

We can’t have just the set up part. We can’t have just the demonstration part. We have to give them some kind of context. We have to tell them how it’s going to fit in. That’s where PowerPoint slides come into play. We can’t teach people everything in PowerPoint slides, but PowerPoint slides kind of tell them what we’re about to do, then we go and do it, then switch back to PowerPoint, and explain to them what it is that we just did. Have a 4-module course where a module is 60 to 90-minute session where you record your screen, so people see exactly what’s on your computer screen, and then you speak it out, and you can use the PowerPoint to say, “Today, we’ll cover these 6 things. Now let me unpack the first thing. Let me tell you what we’re about to do, why it’s important and what we’re going to click. I’ll go leave the PowerPoint area, click on those things, recap it, and then move on to the next module, next module, next module.”

By switching back and forth out of that, it’ll keep it interesting. At the end, we ask for 4 quick questions on how they will then implement what it is we just showed, where we just ask them 4 question where if they answer those 4 questions, they won’t have, for example, the podcast self-setup just yet, but they’ll have most of the decisions that they would’ve had to make in order to set up that podcast.

A lot of stuff to throw in at you. To see it all happen, to see the tools we use, to see how we setup a course on all those fun things, go right now to membershipcube.com. We have a training course for you there, and we buy a lot of different plugins out of pocket for you, like WishList Member, like Paper Templates, like WP Drip to drip your content, like WP notepad to add a checklist to your membership site, and so much more. Go to membershipcube.com. While you’re at it, while you’re going to websites, make sure to go to membershipcube/blog/iTunes. Rate and review the podcast. That helps encourages us to make more, and I’ll see you on the very next episode of the Membership Site Podcast. Thanks for tuning in, and bye for now.

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005: Passive Income with Recurring Monthly Continuity Membership Site

Welcome back to the Membership Site Podcast. This is the online radio program where we talk about you creating a passive income and the life you want and deserve using this powerful tool called membership site no matter what niche you’re in. We said before that a membership site does not mean monthly recurring button. A membership site is a site where one of your subscribers or prospects can become a member. That means that Google and Gmail and YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, those are all membership sites even though they might not necessarily charge something.

A membership site can be free, it can be single payment, it can be multiple payments like a payment plan. What we are going to focus on today is the stereotype, it’s that stereotype of having some kind of a monthly offer. There are a few things that don’t work. I think that a lot of people have the idea that, well they do the math, they get too hung up on the calculator and they fall in love with a number and they say, “What I’m going to do is, I could easily get 1000 people to join something monthly so I’m just going to charge 20 bucks a month and I’ll just get 1000 people to come into my site easily.”

They don’t give much thought to what they’re actually going to charge for 20 bucks a month. The problems is that most things won’t sell or if they will sell, they only will sell to a very very small percentage of people out there. The idea that maybe the lie you’ve been sold is that well you can just kind of throw in some tip. You can just have one piece of content that your members can consume once a month and they’ll just pay 20 bucks and they’ll just get a couple of things to download. I ask, “Well what?”

If I’m in the self-improvement niche, then the answer is, well just go and look up one article per week or per day and post one little tidbit about self-improvement. Or if we are talking about webinars, and you say just have a monthly membership site about webinars and every day or every few days give them a new tip about webinars. What could go wrong? Or they say make a membership site about online businesses and how about make this one 10 bucks a month? Because it’s price is so low, that no one is even going to notice the charge on their credit card go.

Well yeah they will and why would I pay something, why would I pay $10 for a bunch of garbage? They say, “Well make a membership site about building an online business and get a new guest in your membership site every few days and just interview them and get some really high profiled people and ask them a couple of questions and let them talk and record and there you go.” That is your monthly site. Or they say, “Go to a site like Fiverr F-I-V-E-R-R dot com and every few days’ pay somebody $5 to write you up a quick ad something about online business.” The idea here or the misconception is they think they can make the online equivalent of a magazine. That’s a really outdated model.

What we’ve talked about on the past with membership sites, I mean remember what works really well with membership sites is if there is a need out there and someone pays you money and then whatever you put inside that membership site like videos or software actually solves needs. If you’re giving people tips, interviews and articles every month that they didn’t ask for, you’re not really solving a need. That really doesn’t make sense to me. Does that mean that we can never charge a monthly fee for our membership sites?

Well of course not. I charge a bunch of different monthly fees and I do see $100 per month membership sites out there. We charge in some cases $2000 per month for a membership site. What the heck can you charge for on a monthly basis? Well first of all let me just say that if your goal right there is to have a 20,000-dollar a month income, you don’t want to have a show, right? You don’t want to have something where you have to keep scrambling and thinking up some new made up tip every single month or every few days. People aren’t really good at join your site just because you’re sending them a CD in the mail every month. You need to actually solve something.

What you can solve is basically you can give somebody some one-on-one advertise, have what’s called a coaching program. Now this way, instead of just piling on more knowledge, more stuff and more articles they go and find for free by doing a search anyway, now you’re actually giving a little bit of one-on-one advice. I have three models for you that we are going to unpack today. One is the weekly critique, one is the weekly platinum coaching program and one is the directory or certification model. None of these are made up, these are actual ways that people make money.

The first one is the critique model. This one is in the golf niche. A friend of mine joins a membership site, he plays golf and he’s actually my business partner. My business partner plays golf, I’m not very good at it at all. My understanding is, and I’ve seen inside of the site and my understanding is that it’s a 97-dollar per month membership site about golf. Now what’s really great about the golf niche in particular, I mean there is some competition but most of the buyers are guaranteed to be people with lots of disposable income. They have no problem paying the country club memberships, getting the golf lessons, the expensive golf clubs, all that stuff. Great people to market to.

This person is a golf coach and I think he’s some kind of like PGA champion or something like that. The long story long, he critiques the golf stands and swing and posture and everything of his members. What people do is they pay $97 a month to join the site and once a week they can send in a video that they’ve recorded on their smart phones so someone else held the camera and then filmed the buyer of the site swinging the golf club.

What I’ve seen of this particular site is this person, I mean first of all he is a golf coach so he loves what he does. Then when a video comes in, he will open up his screen recorder. To record your screen, a very helpful tool is called Camtasia recorder. It’s a screen capture program, I can’t even calculate the hundreds or thousands of hours of videos I’ve recorded with it and I can’t even calculate or begin to calculate how much money that’s made me.

This is a tool, screen capture recording and it has a 30-day free trial and after that I believe it is $300 or so. If you’re short on a budget, you can get a student discount. Either way write it off as a dang business expense. He records his screen and on his screen he starts playing the video that was sent to him. Then he plays the video and they kind of see how the swing goes and pauses it and takes a little marker out, not a real marker but Camtasia allows you to basically use your mouse cursor and doodle on the screen and then he’ll be like, well hold your elbow here and your arm here and it will only takes a few minutes.

In this few minutes, he sends back advice that for these golfers, it really really improves their golf game. Just think that model first of all $100 a month, people can send in one video per week and then he just records his screen, watches the video and then kind of tweaks it. I mean you could apply this to other niches. Like one thing I’ve always wanted to do that I might be too late, this might be too outdated but I sell a copywriting course. It’s in the membership site at speedcopy.com and still sells but it’s a 497-dollar offer, 497 bucks, 500 bucks.

This is a four modules so about a 6-hour course on how to write sales letters, how to write landing pages that convert. In this, one of the bonuses first of all is that I recorded about the past 30 or so sales letters that I’ve written for myself, for my own business. What I do is I record myself and I say, “Okay, we are about to write a sales letter that are for this offer for this offer webinar crusher, webinar crusher, income machine, whatever it is that I sell. I start from scratch and I just open a word document and list some bullet points and I type out and I explain my thought process.

Now this is stuff I was going to do anyway and it probably would have taken me a lot longer if I was just sitting there and trying to hummer it out. Because I’m recording my screen and talking about what I’m doing, I could have done a lot faster. Another bonus of the speed copy courses is that people can submit their website for a critique. They join this site for 500 bucks, it includes videos, it includes my various headlines, white files and things like that, all the sales letters that I write. Then they can submit their own site. What do I do there?

I open up my Camtasia screen recording software and I record my screen and I just load their site and I do a couple of things. I first will say, “Well here’s my first impression of the site.” Then there are a couple of things that I look for. Like I look for well is it makes sense, do I want to stay on this page once I get there? Does everything make sense? I go to the bottom, I say, “Is it clear what I’m supposed to do? Which is usually to buy something.”

Then in many cases, I’ll just read part of the sales that are allowed. I’ll look at the headline, I’ll look at the first bit of text and I’ll do my best to put myself in the mind of the prospect and apply all of the little copywriting techniques and things. Many times what people have in the sales letter is that they have it out of order, like things that should go before other elements in that landing page or they use words that discourage me from buying. Like they shoot themselves in the foot and say learn or work or there’s too much of the problem explained not enough of the offer. Or there’s ways to kind of jazz it up, make the offer more exciting.

Or even if they have all that, then I can say well, what I would do is I would split test, I would try out seeing what happens if this sales letter doesn’t have a video. Or you have a video, I would see what happens if it automatically plays. Even if it’s a perfectly good and done sales letter, I still give them ideas. Even if the sales letter sucks, I can still look at the basic elements, skeleton and I can say, “Well basically you could break the sales letter down, these five steps. I would still say these five things but not in this badly worded language. Or I’d focus on the design or whatever.

This is a critique model and what I could do if I had more of a copywriting kind of list, is I would have some kind of a monthly site where again for 100 bucks a month, people could just submit one sales letter per week and I could critique it and record and post it for everyone to see. Or maybe double that for it to remain confidential. There we go, that’s the critique model.

Now next, let’s move on to the platinum coaching program model. This is now something and we make some good money from this. This is a real thing that I do. What we do is, every now and then, every few years we host live physical events, live seminars at hotels and things. We have an offer where we pass out a piece of paper and we say, “Well for the first it was 800 bucks a month then it’s 1000 bucks a month and then it was 2000 bucks a month, now is 2400 bucks a month. The offer is that we will meet with whoever signs up, we’ll meet with you once per week for an hour. We will meet with you, we’ll throw you screen, a thing called a webinar. We’ll throw you the screen and will work on any aspect of your business.”

If you have nothing and you need help planning out product, we’ll do that for one hour per week. If you have a sales letter that’s not selling, we’ll knock that out. If you need help with a book, we’ll walk you through the steps. If you want a membership site built, we’ll walk you through those steps. By the way, if you want to join a site like that, the place to go is a doubleagentmarketing.com/platinum. That’s our platinum coaching program but we might not let you in.

There’s application process but we want to make sure that you we’re a good fit first. Anyway the point of this, is that we meet once per week and knock it out. For a while, I would also still use this Camtasia program. We would meet with the person and we would record that meeting session. We don’t do that anymore, but when we were first getting it started, some people liked it. They could go back and review the things that we talked about. The other thing too as a bonus, is that they would get all of our other products for free.

We sell products like membershipcube.com is $1000, webinarcrusher.com is $97 a month, double agent marketing is 47-dollar a month site where we meet as a group. We have also different like how to get monthly programs and when they join platinum for $2400 per month, they get all in one plus we meet once a week. To handle the meeting, we is GoToWebinar for this. We also use Google calendar. When we use these two tools together, we can set a recurring meeting. We can say every Tuesday at 12:00 PM Eastern, we’re going to meet for one hour. You can set what’s called a recurring calendar appointment and a recurring webinar and just say, “Cool, every Tuesday at 12:00 PM, that’s when we’re going to meet.

That is the platinum coaching program model where we give all of our products for a few thousand bucks a month and we also meet once per week. I think the really important thing about this, is that we only sell this, well usually I guess I just mentioned the URL, we usually only offer this at our live events. That’s where we get a good class of people.

Then finally, there is the directory model. One of our platinum students, his name is Dr. Charles Runnels he had a way to explain this. He teaches a specific plastic surgery procedure and involve stuff like needles and things like that. He has trademarked the procedure. Basically so this procedure, they once called the O-shot and the Vampire Facelift and I think the vampire facial Kim Kardashian has undergone this procedure not from him but from one of the other licensed doctors.

He uses this thing called PRP or platelet rich plasma where they take blood out of the patient, put in a centrifuge, do something to separate some kind of yellow goo and then inject it back into that patient. He didn’t patent this. Anyone can do a thing called PRP but a thing called the O-shot or the vampire facelift, this is the term he has trademarked. Anyone can do PRP but to do the vampire facelift, this is his trademarked procedure.

He licenses this out and so people pay $97 a month to get the training first of all on how to do this. Then they can come to one of his workshops and get the hands-on training on how to do this. Then there are videos in the member’s area for him on how they can better market their practice and this new procedure. This is really cool because this is one of those procedures where it only takes a doctor 5, 10 minutes to do but then they can charge $900, $2000 even more just to do that. A way easier procedure for the time and effort and money as opposed to other things that a doctor of that nature can do. I’m not an expert doctor things or any like that but it’s a win-win for doctors.

There’s all these different things that they get in the members area, but the big draw is that there is a directory which I built using a plug-in called WP Kunaki which you can get in our membership cube course. Someone joins his site and they’re now listed in a directory and it just lists these doctors and their phone numbers and addresses and websites. People can locate the doctor closest to them by state or can even locate the doctors near them. They can say here’s a list of doctors within 100 miles of you.

When someone is looking for this procedure, when Dr. Charles is in the news, he shows up on local news stations a lot, if someone is watching somewhere, then they can find the doctor nearest to them. Here’s what’s really cool, is s said that many times the procedure cost $2000 and up. Think about this, if someone joins the O-shot membership or the vampire facelift membership, a doctor does and then they get just one or two new client’s patients per year from this, then that’s completely worthwhile, that’s completely worth the membership fee.

If they pay $97 per month that’s what $1200 per year. If they’ve if they just get one the patient’s per year than they’ve double their money. They can potentially get more than that because it gives them all this different training material. The biggest reason out of all the reasons why someone stays in this monthly membership site, is to have a listing in this directory. The tools for this are Word Press, WishList member and then our plug-in called WP Kunaki.

It’s weirdly named plug-in but it creates shows a directory of your members. In this case it’s doctors but you can imagine this will work for any kind of niche. Think about this, they get this extra traffic and this huge benefit just for staying a member and the big reason for not canceling is because if they do cancel, the will be automatically removed from that directory where they get new business.

What can we learn about our discover or have fun with or play with in the lessons from today’s training about recurring monthly continuity? Is that you don’t want to pile in a bunch of stuff because I mean what’s the point of that? People won’t necessarily buy from you just because you’re selling something that’s so cold cheap. Just because something has a dollar trial and then a monthly fee. They’re not just going to buy just because it’s $9 a month. They buy because it’s going to solve their problems.

An easy way to answer that question on how to solve people’s problems, is how do you deliver more value than what they pay. You might’ve heard that before, that might be a cliché but it’s true. I mean I think about the, okay there’s two types of monthly things I pay for, right? The ones that I absolutely need like electricity bill, water bill, cell phone bill, insurance, things like that. Then the things I voluntarily pay for monthly e where I get more out of it every single month.

There is an 80-dollar SE, search engine tool that we pay for that allows us to track our websites and see how they’re climbing and the rankings. That is worth $80 for me because that’s a software that runs over and over again. I pay monthly for things like website backups. I bought a monthly service years and years ago called the traffic geyser which was a tool where I could upload a bunch my videos and it would drip, schedule them out to various video sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion and more.

A better alternative if you can’t figure out how to add in either like a coaching elements or a must-have component so that they’re going to be really upset if they cancel, or something with software, or something automated where they get more out of it every month. If you can’t figure that out, then a fixed term membership site where it’s just like a payment plan, a 5-plan payments and it’s done for selling information, that might be right for you. I mean I pay monthly to make Skype calls, to make phone calls over the Internet. I pay monthly for the ability to automatically schedule office hours.

There is a calendar and this is called time trade. There’s a system where someone can see spots where I have three meeting dates in a calendar. They can choose one of those and that sets a meeting with me. There’s a service called eClincher that automates posting of social media and that is worth paying whatever the monthly fee is for that. There’s another service called Zapier if I post on my Facebook fan page, it copies that post on to other Facebook accounts of mine.

Those are all software that I’m happy to pay for monthly. If you only have information, a fixed membership site might be better for you to avoid the monthly tips, interviews and articles trap. Give them a good reason for staying in not just more stuff to download. Although one exception that I would say could work, is a thing called resell rights. As I’m winding down this call, we don’t have a lot of time to unpack this.

Resell rights means someone, let’s say if someone pays you $37 a month. In exchange for that, they get 20 new businesses in a box, 20 new info products where they can put up done for you sales page, done for you download page and a PDF or videos or something like that; where their buyers can then download that thing, right? You say, “Okay well this month we have a book, like a digital book that you can sell for weight loss, a digital book you can sell for overcoming anxiety.

There let’s think this. If someone’s paying $37 a month for this and they can easily justify that setting up these done for you businesses in a box, get some $500 a month or an extra $1000 a month even, then that’s by far worth the $37 per month. Then for you, let’s say you have even a handful of members, let’s say you have 100 members in that site, to use small numbers, that’s $3700 per month. Maybe out of that, maybe you use half of that, right? Maybe you use $1400 that’s your budget to go and get those businesses in a box made, right?

You can hire someone to make a sales letter, to make a product to package together. Or you can even use that $1400 and buy other people’s resell rights. Maybe you go and whatever $1400 is divided by 20, you go and buy up different other resell rights or master resell rights materials and then now you’re basically buying up a couple thousand dollars’ worth every month of businesses in a box. Then the end-user is only paying 37.

Think about it in terms of those kinds of mindsets in delivering way way more value than what they paid whether that is a critique membership site, a coaching program, a directory site or even some kind of a business in a box like we said. In order to get your membership site set up, you need to have a couple things. You need to have the tools to do it and the guide in the video formats to get you there. The course for that is membershipcube.com M-E-M-B-E-R-S-H-I-P-C-U-B-E dot com.

I want to give you the training on how to make a membership site, I want to give you the WishList member software and I want to give you all of our plug-ins on how to drip content and gamify your sites and even make a directory like we said using the WP Kunaki plug-in. You can get it all at membershipcube.com. I’m Robert Plank from the Membership Site Podcast, thanks for tuning in. we’ll talk to you again very soon.

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004: Wishlist Member, Paper Template, and PayPal (The Exact Tools I Use to Host My Membership Site)

You have to get your membership site up as fast as possible, even if it is ugly, even if you hate it because then you can improve on from there. It’s really easy, it’s really tempting to have some picture in your head about what your Membership Site will look like. You are going to have a beautiful landing page when someone logs in. There’s all kinds of content and it’s all dripped out and beautiful dashboards. That’s great and that’s a wonderful goal that you should aspire to build up to, but it’s not going to happen overnight.

You need to get over your inner perfectionist and get something, anything online even if it is an ugly landing page with nothing but a payment button on it. Even if someone pays you even $10, $100 one time. Even if they log in and create or register an account with your Membership Site, and there’s only one video or one report on it, that’s a great place to start because then you have something that is functional. You have something that could potentially make you money right now. If you’re building a Membership Site for a client or something at least you now have proof of concept and you can show them what you are heading towards. It’s way, way easier to edit crap than air. We’re going to talk about the exact tools I use to create all my Membership Sites. You can get it all in one place at membershipcube.com. Whether you choose to join us there or not, I’m still going to dish all the tools that I personally use.

We’re going to break today’s program down into three components. I’m going to talk about just getting the WordPress side of things getting set up. Now WordPress is a free blogging tool or a way of making an online journal. This is a very convenient way for you to create any kind of a website. A landing page, a Memberbership Site with content, anything like that. Then we’re going to move on and talk about how to make money and how to put what’s called a payment button on your website. Then finally talk about the stuff that needs to be talked about and get it out of the way, this thing called web hosting.

I really don’t think that you should use someone’s else’s platform to run your website. One of those platforms where they promise to host it all off for you because the problem is all you eggs are in one basket. If your business depends on someone else’s business, what are you going to do if their business fails or they decide to go out of business? That is kind of a scary thought. I’d rather not think about that. Anyway, we are talking about WordPress. WordPress is the ultimate point and click way to set up a website. You don’t have to upload files, you don’t have to set up a database. The way that I do it is I first of all get my hosting at doubleagenthosting.com. They have videos and things like that where you can log into your backend, or what you call your C Panel, and then there is a icon called Quick Install. So if you even looked up on Youtube and looked up a video on C Panel Quick Install WordPress, you can find out how to click a button and install a WordPress blog.

Now what would that give you? That would give you a way to add journal entries. That’s not quite yet a protected membership site but it’s a start because you can paste articles in there. You can paste links to PDF documents and upload those. You can paste in videos or your private or unlisted Youtube videos, but the point is that you can use C Panel Quick Install to install this tool called WordPress. Now, if you happen to be unlucky enough to be on a web host that doesn’t have C Panel, you’re still in luck but it might take a little bit of a technical know how. If that’s your situation you can go to wordpress.org. We’ve got all kinds of options here. Even if you say, “I’m not very technically inclined,” then I would recommend that you go to a site called fiverr.com and search the term install WordPress and hire someone for literally $5. They will ask you for your log in details to your web host. They’ll ask for usually your password to the entire account.

That will get them access to upload the files they need and set up the database just that one time and then once they are done, change the password on them so then that way they’ve been paid their $5 and for them is five minutes of work. Now you got something accomplished for $5 that otherwise might have taken you a couple of hours to fumble around and figure out. The point is we install WordPress. Whether you download from wordpress.org and install it manually, that’s one option. If you have a web host such as Hostgator, which you can join at doubleagenthosting.com, then they will give you a C Panel area, it’s called, and a button called Quick Install where you can install WordPress.

Once you install WordPress, that gives you the ability to write some posts. Which are basically journal entries. We need a way to protect that content so that only the people who have paid us money have access and those people that have refunded or cancelled recurring payments do not have access. The tool we use for this is called Wishlist Member. We give you a free copy of this. We buy a copy for you at membershipcube.com. Now, Wishlist member is a plug in that installs on top of WordPress. That’s what I like about it, there is not a lot of confusing technical steps involved. You have WordPress, you installed this tool called Wishlist Member. Now you have WordPress, you have installed Wishlist member.

Now what is the next step? The next step is to create a membership level. The way I usually teach clients and students how to make a membership site is to create a level called Full. That is F U L L. What that means is that whenever you make a new post or paste on your WordPress site, Wishlist Member is going to add a special check box. Say, “Do you want to protect the content from the outside world?” Yes. “Do you want to apply it to a membership level?” Yes. The level is called FULL. This way if someone is not a member of your site, which means they are logged out of your site, they don’t see any of your content.

I guess potentially, you could add in one or two free articles and things like that for the public to see. To make it simple, let’s just say that if they’re logged out, they see nothing in your WordPress blog. If that member has an account and they can log in and they belong to that FULL level, then they can see all of the content of your site. That’s the basic idea, is that we have WordPress, we have Wishlist member, we created a level we called FULL, and then we say that all of the journal entries in my WordPress blog belong to that FULL level. If someone’s logged out, they can’t see my journal entries. If someone tries to log in but they are cancelled from that level, which means they are refunded, then they also can’t see my journal entries.

It’s very simple. It’s just an on or off situation. Now how do we get them to join our site. The easiest and quickest, dirtiest way to do it, a down and dirty way, I guess you could way is use paypal.com. Maybe you’ve heard to it. Everyone I know has a Paypal account. With Paypal, you can accept payments. You may need to upgrade your Paypal account to a business account, it’s called. The point of a Paypal account is that there are no upfront costs, you don’t need to connect it to- I think you do connect it to a bank account but you don’t need to keep a bunch of money in a bank account like you would with a merchant account. You don’t need to go through this big approval process, or anything like that. They just take a small percentage of your payments to handle it. The same way you would process credit cards, that’s the way the world works.

You take payments using Paypal and you can literally be up and running within a few minutes. You use WordPress, you use Wishlist member. There are instructions in the Wishlist member member settings called the integration tab on how you can log into Paypal and take a few steps and then you can begin to take payments. You can take payments for literally any price you want. $10, $100, $1000, you can take recurring monthly payments, payments once a week, payments every six months, every year, any combination of that.

The point is that you can basically, in a way, connect that Paypal button, no matter what price you are charging to the FULL level of your Wishlist member site. That means if someone goes and they see your Membership site, they can’t get in. You have a web page, let’s say for now you had a website with nothing on it, but a button to click and buy something. They click the button and if they happen to have their own Paypal account, they can pay through that. If they have a credit card or even more recently, if they have a bank account, they can pay through bank account or credit cards or things like that. Then they pay you money and it ends up in your Paypal accounts, you haven’t moved it out of your bank account just yet, but they pay you money. Then they are sent to what is called a registration page.

This is where they choose a username and a password to later log into your site. They fill that out and then they log in and they have access. So this is great for a number of reasons because if they refund, that username and password they used before will no longer function in your site. If they ever come back six months or a year or two years later and they forget how to find that video or that report, or that home study course they paid for, then they can click on a link that says lost password and recover that or maybe even email you and you can reset that for them.

The point is they click on the Paypal button, pay you money and then are sent to a page where just for the first time they create an account. They choose a username and a password. That is how they are able to log in and this way also, they don’t have the ability to pass around your download page or your download link because they have to literally type in a username and a password to then log in. We said that if you had a plain web page with just a payment button on it, that’s a good start, but that’s kind of ugly.

You’re in luck because in our membership cube course, we also include a plug in for WordPress called Paper Template. Paper Template was created on the idea that most web pages have a white background and more or less look like a plain piece of paper. Some web pages are wide enough so that you don’t see the edges of the piece of paper, but if you look at sites like Google, Amazon, Ebay, Craigslist, most of them are very plain looking or just plain white space, it’s called, and that is the idea behind Paper Template. You just have a clean, simple web page and even if all you had on that web page was a headline telling people what they were buying and a list of even five quick bullet points telling them the reasons they should buy your course on stock trading or weight loss with a button down below, that’s pretty much all you need to get started. You can get a professional copywriter who charges a big upfront fee and asks for royalties to go and improve that later, but the point is for now is the minimum, viable product. Whatever it takes to just get the most simple, bare bones basic site online that someone could buy from you.

To recap so far, we tell you to install this tool called WordPress. You can do it yourself, you can click the button to do it, you can hire someone to do that for $5. You install a plugin in WordPress called Wishlist Member that we provide you for free in our membership cube course. You take a Paypal payment button and you place it publicly on the internet so that someone can click on that button and pay you money and get access to your membership site, whether it’s low ticket, high ticket, recurring, whatever. Also, in membership cube we include the Paper Template plugin so that if you want to add text or make your web page look a little better, you can do that.

That’s all well and good. I tell you these tools to put in your web site, but what if you don’t have a web site. I really would stay away from any kind of free options for web sites. There’s Wix and Weebley, and all these. The problem with these free web sites is they look very unprofessional because they say, “Hey, this web site’s free. Do you also want a free site?” If you’re trying to make money, even if you’re only asking for $10?” It looks like you’re broke, it looks like you’re poor of you have a free website. It’s like having your site on a geocities web site back in the day. We don’t want that.

You want to own the .com version of whatever your name or your product or your course that you are selling. Own something .com not .biz, not .info. Own something .com because that makes you look more legitimate. You can grab a .com name at doubleagentdomains.com. That takes you to a domain service named Name Cheap. I believe it’s about $9 per year for you to go and grab whatever it is you want to sell .com. My sites are robertplank.com, papertemplate.com, membershipcube.com. Then you get an account at doubleagenthosting.com and this is called Host Gator. This is the place where your actual files are stored, your actual websites are stored. These are two different components. You have the place where you own the .com of your name and then you pointed over to the place where your web site actually lives. Your web hosting or host gator.

We have these separately and I believe host gator is about $7 a month or so. We tell you to get the baby account and there you go. Grab the .com at double agent domains that are pointed to dubleagenthosting, then install WordPress, then install Wishlist Member, and then install Paper Template. Those are all the tools you need to get it all basically up and running. I know I threw a lot at you. I know that it’s difficult to understand this without seeing it and that’s why in membership cube, we hold your hand every step of the way and we show you in video format. You can print out the PDF documents and screen shots. Whatever way you are most comfortable with. I want to literally show you how to set up your membership site by you going to membershipcube.com. Go there right now membershipcube.com. I’m Robert Plank from the Membership Site Podcast. Make your membership site today and be sure to go on Itunes at membershipcube.com/blog/itunes to give us a five star rating in review. I’d really appreciate it and go out there and make your membership site. Have a great day and bye for now.

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003: Robert Plank Explains Magic Trick Marketing with Your WordPress Membership Sites

This is where we talk about making money, getting your membership up and online as soon as possible using WordPress and WishList member. Getting not only your first sale, your first buyer, but a steady influx of sales and buyers whether you’re charging a monthly forever site, a single payment site, a fixed term site or anywhere in between. I have five quick questions for you as were getting started here.

We’re going to talk about magic tricks in your marketing. The whole point of magic tricks as you might’ve heard different clichés and things like that that will as time goes on, especially on the Internet as we have things like Twitter and Facebook and text messaging, that messages get shorter and that people’s attention spans are become less and less. I mean I guess that’s true. Why would we fight it and why if that all is true, if attention spans are a lot less than they were even a couple years ago, then why are you having big long sales pitches and things like that?

Why are you listing all the different bullet points and all the different things that are in your site especially on say like a live webinar or things like that. Why are you going on for 3, 4, 5 hours when maybe there is some kind of a version of a 5-minute or 30-minute presentation where you just give me the good stuff. Or you can even explain to me the hot thing that will get me to join your site.

For example my name is Robert Plank. Me and Lance Tamashiro have a course called membershipcube.com. This is a course where you can get your membership site online tonight. I could go on and on talk all the different plug-ins you get and all the different trainings and how the hours of stuff and how much we labored to create that. Why would I? What’s so important about me? What’s way more important is you and what you’ll do with that training.

Out of all the possible things I could talk about with membership sites and why you should join our membership cube course, the number one reason why you should join our membership cube course is that we give you everything to set up your membership site and get it online tonight in literally in just a few clicks. We’ll give you a membership site clone that includes a plug-in called WishList member, that includes our plug-ins like WP Drip, WP Notepad, WP Kunaki, which I’ll explain as his podcast moves forward. The point is, you get it set up tonight.

Now why am I telling you this? Why am I giving you basically are a commercial break? Because I want you to think about your own offers whether they exist or whether you’re going to set something up. What thing could you tell me in five minutes or less that will get me to jump on it right now? If it’s something that people want like you can set up the membership site tonight. If it’s that you can set up drip content, whatever it is, give me the quick demo, give me the hot item that pushed me over the edge and gets me to buy.

I’ve had all kinds of arguments with people who think that they need to have a three and a half hour long sales pitch or five hour long sales pitch. Maybe worked really hard on that. If you’re talking for five hours straight, I don’t care if it’s in person, on a webinar no one’s going to stay around for all that. No one’s going to listen for all that. The point is that we need to conform a little bit to this shortened attention span and have a quick demo. If you have software, if you have a system, if you have a checklist that he can show me, a huge result that I’ve never gotten and dude in just a few minutes or seconds even, that is huge and that should be about the goal and the focus of any kind of selling that you do.

My five quick questions are these; number one, what can you demonstrate for me? Not just list all the different features and benefits and all that kind of tired stuff in your offer, what can you demo for me? There was another different person who was creating what’s called an email autoresponder or I can email broadcast service where you can get people to join a newsletter and then when it comes time to talk to those say 20,000 or 50,000 people who joined the newsletter, type in one message, send it out.

This person was so fixated because they had “worked super hard” on their email or autoresponder and broadcast system that they seem to need to explain that, well you can create all these kinds of cool forms, you can send all these kinds of cool messages, you can send messages on a delay. I’m thinking you’ve lost me, you’ve list so many things. If I get to item number seven I’ve forgot what items one through five were. What can you demo? What can you show me on a screen, click a few buttons, boom. Now these emails get sent out.

Or boom now these emails gets out to one part of the list. Or boom it creates this whole email sequence so that maybe somebody joins my newsletter and if they don’t confirm their registration, I’ll send them another email. Or I can send an email to them if they don’t open the link in that email within 24 hours, maybe you can send another email to them saying, “Why didn’t you open the link?” Cool stuff like that. Or if they click the link but didn’t buy, maybe your system send an email to me saying, “You clicked the link but didn’t buy.” Little cool things like that where there’s no way you’re going to list all the nooks and crannies of your offer, but you can have this quick demo.

Question number two, what to do you have that’s proprietary? This is all about being unique and standing out from the crowd and all that good stuff and what we have that’s proprietary usually is the speed. Maybe it’s the speed, simplicity, ease-of-use, maybe you include some kind of a software or there is a result that people can’t get any other way. I’ll give you another example, I use a service called eclincher.com. I’m just a sponsor, I don’t get a commission from that. What I’m just saying, I use a service called eclincher.com.

This is a service where I can load up a queue or a list of items that I would like to post to my Twitter account. I mean these kind of things exist where you can saw time delay tweets and things like that. What’s unique about eClincher is I can then recycle my post. For example, I can load up my list or my queue with about 200 of my old blog posts with about 87 of my podcast episodes with different links I found useful. Then it minute will maybe once every six hours post one of those links to my Twitter feed. Just that alone saves time. Then once that list is used up, its exhausted maybe 30 days later it’s gone through all the items in that list, then it starts all over again and begins posting to Twitter a new. That’s not only a cool demo, but that’s also a quick feature that maybe a lot of people are asking for but no one else really provides other than this service called eClincher.

Question number three, what can you give away that most people charge for? When we’re talking about giving things away, what we’re talking is for example may be you’re selling a course on how to publish a book on Amazon. That’s always a really good example I like to go to. If everyone has a book about how to get published on Amazon, maybe you could demonstrate that. Once you have the book done, how to fill in the form on Amazon and get it done. Or one thing that we do many times is we will brainstorm or organize the table of contents in the book we’re going to create.

This is like we can attack from a couple different angles when we can say, “What are people having problems with? Where do they short link? If the struggle that they have a book and they don’t know how to get it out there or maybe even more people have the issue of they don’t even have a book to begin with. Then we can make fun of all the clichés and all the things people assume. Like maybe we say that well people think that writing a book takes six months, takes 12 months. Maybe we can look up the statistics on how many books get published every day.

I don’t know if it’s like 10,000 a day but it some huge huge number and how were you even going to get lost in the noise and that number is only going to enlarge. Or we say what is the average amount of money that people make from their books? Especially if they’re self-published maybe it’s $5, maybe it’s zero dollars. Then we can demonstrate how to get over this little stumbling block. What I like to do is give away a little more than I’m comfortable with.

The reason for that is that it’s already being given away. If you go on YouTube right now and you search for how to publish a book to kindle, how to publish a book to create space, you might even find some of my videos on that. Give away something that most people charge for. You give away this thing that you see your competitors charging for. In a lot of ways it discounts your competitors, it makes your competitors maybe not worthless but diminishes the thing that they’re selling. Because well they can go and buy from someone else for 500 bucks or get it from you for free.

How do you win in that situation? How do you teach what others sell and give it away for free and still make money? Because you still have remember question number two, something that’s proprietary. Maybe we have some kind of a Kindle software, Kindle cover creator, a way to monitor and increase your Amazon ranking or we don’t actually show how to dictate and edit the books. Those are pieces of the step-by-step course that we show. There’s definitely something to having a membership site, a members area where you have video training and you have a very clear step by step system.

You say, here are the steps to getting a book created. I’m going list you the steps, I’m going to go and perform the steps, I’m going to perform an actual case study. Then once I’m done, I will list the steps over again and that’s one module of my membership site. We create the membership first and then when it comes time to promote it, then we find little pieces of things that we can give away for free that many other inferior marketers and teachers and trainers will charge money for.

Question number four, what must-have tool will your buyers login to access once a day for 30 days? This could be anything from if you’re selling an email marketing course, you could include a list of your best swipe files. If you are teaching a course about blogging or writing a book, you could include a list of daily writing prompts. We have a plug in for this which you can get for free as part of membershipcube.com and is called WP Notepad. This is a plug-in that installs with WordPress and runs with any WordPress based membership plug-in.

We recommend WishList member and we include WishList number. We actually buy licensed a copy for you out of our own pocket when you join the membershipcube.com. The point is we use this plug-in that we’ve created called WP Notepad and allows you to do a number of things. It allows you to create a checklist list on your membership content where somebody can view a video and then go and check off boxes as they have completed these tasks. It allows you to add a special note taking area underneath videos and things in your membership site that way people can type in their quick notes, they can they can write down like if they watched half of the video, where did they you left off, they can write down the important things that they thought were important and then come back to that.

Your member’s area saved those notes for them. The best part about the WP Notepad is that it also includes fill in the blank forms. When we provide things like templates or we say things like copy and paste this into this website, then we can have the written template in front of them with little pieces, little phrases and sentences where they can click and then edit and change those phrases right there in front of them, so that they have their own personalized template there. Let’s say that let’s keep going with that book publishing membership site, right? We say here’s how to publish a book and maybe one of the final modules is and then how to promote the book.

Then maybe part of that involves interviewing other similar authors for you. Maybe we say, what we want you to do is go and find the other book authors in your niche and go look them up and contact them. Then we can’t just say, send him an email ask them for an interview because I’m not sure what you mean by that, I’m not sure what the exact wording is, so we exactly word in the email to send to people but then we leave little blank spaces for people to fill in their name, their niche, their book. Then that way it is a customized template.

Then the final question for you today is what can you do for your customers within the first 48 hours after they join? In Membership Cube, we get your membership site online tonight. In our webinar crusher course, you run your first webinar and the very first module. In our podcast crusher course, your podcast is online the very first module. In our makeup product book creation course, your book is dictated and ready to go in that very first module within 48 hours. I’m asking what can you provide, what tangible results can your buyers have, not within the first 30, 60, 90 days that sucks.

I’m talking about the first 48 hours if not the first one hour if you can handle it. Very important though is I’m not saying that you’ll learn stuff. By the way you should remove the word learn from all of your marketing. No one likes to learn. Learning is from school, learning means you get a bunch of useless facts and figures, you don’t actually get something out of it. Instead of learning, what will we actually have created by the time they’re finished with that first module. Notice how I didn’t say you join or make a product course and you will learn how to publish a book, you won’t have the history of Amazon or the overview of getting a book out there, you’ll have a book. Just like in Membership Cube, you’ll have a membership site.

Let me recap for you those five quick questions that you should ask yourself whether you are going back and updating a membership site or creating a new offer for people, what can you demo? What do you have that’s proprietary? What can you give away that most people charge for? What must-have tool will they log in to access once a day for 30 days? Finally what can you do for them within 48 hours that is not learning but is instead a tangible thing that they have created? As I’m winding down this call, I want to remind you that you need to have some kind of a system or an end goal in your training.

You should be building towards something. A certain amount of traffic in social media, a book is published online, a membership site is online. They actively trading stocks and maybe they’ve grown their portfolio by 10%. They bought a rental property and they are now renting it out. Whatever that niche is, be building towards something and whatever your you’re teaching, have it systematized. Which means that even an idiot could do it, even a 10-year-old could do it, just by going through the steps. Let’s say that you’re teaching traffic, let’s say you’re teaching how to set up Facebook and Google ads as part of your course.

Well you might think that there’s a certain amount of judgment eyeballing but anything you do, you can always look at and say, “Well if I’m creating a Facebook ad, let me just show you how I do it. Here are the eight steps to creating a Facebook ad.” For me doing my research, choosing keywords, choosing a title, choosing a URL now I’ve created the ad. Then I can go back and look at the ad and I can know if it’s performing or not, if I’m paying too much. Then here are the steps I take to tweak that ad. We want you to have a four part process, four milestones from getting someone from point A to point B.

Each of those milestones will probably take about 60 to 90 minutes to explain and show and it usually involves about six steps. We have some PowerPoint slides, we say I want to show you how I set up a Facebook ad. Here’s PowerPoint slide, here’s the bullet point and how I do it. Then leave the PowerPoint slides and open up your browser and actually set up some Facebook ads so they understand the case study. It’s not just theory it’s not just test ad one, test ad two, you’re setting up some real actual Facebook ads.

Then at the end of that milestone, you give them a challenge, you give them action items, make it exactly four that way you don’t have to overload them. List four quick action items that they should now take after they view your module about Facebook ads. We’re talking about having some kind of a system. I want you to avoid the copout of saying, just go to this site and get it done, right? I’ve seen a lot of people do this. They have a course on Facebook ad, they say, “Well you want to go to Facebook.com you want to go to click, create new ad. See here’s what the screen looks like, buy now.

That sucks. Or if you’re publishing a book about Amazon or having a course on how to get a book published, then a lot of crappy membership site training says, “Well here’s Amazon’s page, you’re welcome.” I want to know what site do I go to to get the cover made. I want to know what tool I used to record me dictating out a book. I want to know what site I go to to hire someone to get the words I’ve spoken out transcribed into written words. Then now we are combining how I record a book. Then how I go and get someone to transcribe it for me.

Then how I get someone to edit it for me. Then how I go and get someone to create a book cover for me. Then I can take all that and then go to Amazon and publish it. Even then, now this is where the templates and checklists come in. Because you can say when I create the title for my book, here are the steps I take. When I list the keywords and description, here are the steps I take. Here’s what you should price your book at. That way it removes the guesswork. Remove the guesswork when people are not only in your training and going through it, but also when people are about to buy from you. What this magic trick avoids are a couple different things. It avoids you having the tab by tab explanation.

Let me explain. Membership Cube shows you how to install software tool called WordPress on your website, how to install a plug-in called WishList member, how to add in your first content and how to create a button to charge money for access to that site. That’s all in the first module. Notice how we say the end goal is this, the end goal is the site’s up, you can charge some money, now only focused on exact screens and clicks to get to that goal. There are probably 100 different screens and clicks that we avoid looking at because we’re only concerned with, go here, click this, click that, you’re done the step-by-step process. Conversely, is that a word?

I think so, a lot of other membership site training says, “Well here’s WordPress. Here’s one where you could install WordPress. Here’s a second where you could install WordPress. Here’s a third where you could install WordPress.” Now I’m already overloaded because now I already have to choose one out of these three options. Then you say, “Well here’s WordPress and now it’s installed and see there’s this one tab, you probably won’t need this, but let me just show you this tab.

Here’s the media, here’s the links tab, here’s the settings tab, here’s the plug-ins tab.” You’re showing me tons and tons of things and you think it’s useful because your brain is playing tricks on you. Your brain thinks that because you’re putting in the time and all that energy, that’s useful but it’s not. You’re opening up. Like I had a list of maybe five questions and you could have answered them but now you’ve opened up 50 more questions for me. Don’t do the tab by tab, only show me the things I need to click on.

Also avoid the overload. I’ve bought courses where there were some useful video training and stuff like that. Let’s keep with the example of book publishing on Amazon. As a bonus it also included something like 20 interviews, now 11 hours of interviewing some other authors. I could get what they were going for, they were going for where you want to have a book on Amazon, cool, buy my course, watch some videos. Then once you’re done, every now and then you can just tune in and listen to some cool interviews with people. Then I look at that 11 hours and I’m thinking I’m never going to complete this. I’m never going to listen to 11 hours of audios.

Even if I do, I’m going to get so off on different tangents and some of the advice with these different people you’re interviewing is conflicting and I’m just overloaded. Instead of the tab by tab and certainly overload, give people everything they need in one place. That is the advantage to having a membership site. Whether it’s single payment or multi-payment that you’re charging for, high ticket low ticket, the advantage is that someone buys from you, pays you money and they create an account, they can always go back to log into.

They log in and you can dump in whatever stuff you want and organize it inside your WordPress membership site. In whenever your teaching, whether it’s real estate, stock trading, knitting, raising a horse, becoming a veterinarian, souping up your car whatever, include whatever necessary software, templates or copy and paste elements. The best way to do that, well first of all is have the right mind-set of not overloading people and instead selling them on the idea of joining your membership site with the cool magic trick. Preferably log into your site and click around and show them some cool stuff.

We have another, it is a membership site but it’s a service called website remote which allows you to remotely manage all of your WordPress sites all in one place. When I promote that, I log into the website when I say check this out, I can see all my WordPress sites, blogs and membership sites by the way, all the sites in one place. I can click one button and I can update all my sites. That’s really all people need to see. They need to know what’s the hard way that takes a long time, it’s not fun where I’ve been struggling versus the easy shortcut way where I can click a button and all that stuff I hated now it’s fun again.

You have that mind-set and also use our tool called WP Notepad to include whatever kind of checklist, fill in the blank forms, or step-by-step system you have and join us inside of membership Q to claim your axis to not just WordPress but WishList member and our various plug-ins including WP Notepad to make your training fun, to make it quick, simple and easy so people can get to that end goal because that’s what the heck they were paying you for, right? They had a problem, so it could have been they have trouble setting up a website, they see your solution, they buy it and they get that result from you.

I think that’s pretty simple. Let me know by emailing me at robert.plank@gmail.com. Go to membershipsitepodcast.com/iTunes please and rate and review our podcast. It helps us rise in the rankings and it motivates me to talk to you more and help you out with your own membership site. This has been episode three of the membership site podcast. Robert Plank explains magic trick marketing with your WordPress membership sites. Be sure to subscribe rate and review and I’ll talk to you very soon.

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002: Start Your WordPress (and Wishlist Member) Membership Sites With a Bang

Membership Site Podcast, episode 2. Start Your WordPress and WishList Member Membership Sites With a Bang. I’m Robert Plank, and welcome back to the Membership Site Podcast. My website is membershipcube.com. We’re going to talk today about how to make your membership sites interesting. When we’re talking about membership sites, we’re talking about you creating an online course, that e-learning kind of platform where somebody has a real marketplace need.

Somebody needs to find out how to code webpages. They need to know how to use Microsoft Word, and Excel, and QuickBooks. Whatever the reason, they want self-help. They want real estate, and for whatever path that brought them to you, they join your membership site. They go do what’s called a “sales page” or a “sales letter.” You can see one of those at membershipcube.com. They click a payment button, and after they check out or pay you money, then they have access to fill out a form where they can choose a username and a password, and also in that process, enter an email address for them to log back in, but this is huge.

Membership sites don’t have to be recurring, and they shouldn’t be recurring at first. If you have something to sell, if you can package it into something that’s $10 or $100, that’s something that you will actually be able to complete as opposed to having this pie in the sky dream of a $5 a month or a $10 a month membership site, and you say, “I’m going to update it every single day. I’m going to fill it with interviews. I’m going to get 10,000 members.”

I would rather see you charge something that’s a single payment site and maybe a little bit out of your comfort zone, maybe a little bit where there’s marketplace price resistance, or maybe you charge 100 bucks, 200 bucks, 500 bucks where you aren’t normally used to selling at that price range, and it’s a lot less work to make the amount of money that you need to live a comfortable lifestyle, and because you are providing these videos, or these written materials, or whatever you have in mind inside a membership site, you don’t necessarily have to pile on a ton of stuff.

Now, I want you to write down 4 quick things. I want you to write down the words: want, need, long-term, and Q&A. Why did I have you write down these 4 things? Because this is the structure we’re going to talk about today. In our course Membership Cube, we give you all the tools you need to set up a site, and that is mainly WordPress and WishList Member, which is a plug-in that installs on top of WordPress that protects your content. By doing that, you can take payments using PayPal, or Stripe, or ClickBank, and then control access to some or all of your content.

Instead of trying to pile in tons and tons of stuff, we want you to follow this format, which I’m going to unpack for you today, which is want, need, long-term, Q&A. What we want you to do is to create what we call a “4-module membership site.” Now, the reason someone is going to buy from you is because they are stuck. They have a real legitimate problem, and your training, checklists, materials, coaching, and all that stuff, that solves their problem, and we want you to solve that problem in 4 easy, manageable milestones, in 4 modules.

Now, a module is about a 60 to 90-minute video training session. We’re not talking about lots of goofy little 5-minute videos, but we’re also not talking about having a huge 8, 10, 20-hour training course. We’re talking about 4 hours total, 6 hours at the most where you give someone some real actionable stuff, and this is key, actionable. We’re not teaching the dictionary. We’re not un-turning every rock. We’re not giving people the history of real estate or every possible facet of hypnosis. We’re giving them this solution broken down into 4 modules to their very common problem, want, need, long-term, Q&A. Keep that in mind as we’re moving forward today.

Now, here’s the big reason why this is important because most people only think about generating the content that they’re going to have inside of their members area, right? If I’m telling you that you should have a 4-part hypnosis course … and by the way, you should, of course, have a membership site about knowledge that you already have. If you don’t have any knowledge, then partner up with someone who does, but I would rather that you take some skills that you can already prove, and show, and talk about fluently for lack of a better term as opposed to trying to learn, and make it up, and reach as you go along.

The good news with that is that if you don’t have the knowledge quite yet, you can either partner up with someone or do a thing called “resell rights” or buy private label rights where you can for, sometimes, $10 or $20. Buy the rights to a video course that you can then put into a membership site, and so the whole reason behind this is while you might get hung up on creating the content for your site, and I’ve known a few people. It’s not just one person, but I’ve known people where the person comes to me and says, “Okay. Well, I’ve got some content made, but I need to make 6 months of content. I need to make a year of content. I need 2 years of content before I can start selling it.”

I’m thinking, first of all, that you’re putting up obstacles in front of yourself making money. If you already have any amount of months of content for a membership site, then you should put it online and at least slap a payment button on a sales page to see if it gets some sales, and so here’s the thing is that … So, you make a sales letter. I don’t want to unpack all these stuff about making a sales letter today, but what you can do is make a simple webpage that explains to someone first why they’re here.

Have an attention-grabbing headline and tell them, “Well, are you stuck when it comes to flipping real estate houses?” I don’t know if that’s … Should I call them real estate houses? “Are you stuck when you’ve installed the dream that you could just buy a house and turn it around or rent it out and just have all this free money?” or, “You’ve been told that you can go and find a house for $50,000, and fix it up, and then sell it for $120,000. Isn’t that the dream, but it wasn’t so easy, was it? Well, I tried that too. I tried this. I tried that. I tried all these different things that didn’t work, but finally, I stumbled on the formula, and I had to do these specific steps.”

“By doing that, I was able to, for example, flip this property, rent out that property, and I’ve taken the skills I’ve developed, and I’ve taken the system I’ve refined over the years to flip X number of houses for Y amount of dollars, and I call my package the ‘Super Real Estate System Course,'” whatever you want to call it. You say, “It’s the best course for anyone who wants to make money from rental properties, make money from flipping, stuff like that,” and then we can list the 4 modules and list why they’re important to our buyers.

Now, what are these 4 modules? How are we going to break down this huge problem of buying and selling homes in real estate? I’m sure you can think off the top of your head of some easy ways to break it down, right? You can have one module where you show someone how to use … I don’t know, use some website or use some software to narrow down the neighborhood, and maybe a list of 10 possible homes that they could scoop open by if it meets a certain criteria. Maybe, at the same time, get approved for some kind of online financing to buy that house.

Then, the second module could be how to actually buy the house and go through the paperwork, and how to own it in the proper way. Then, the third module could be how to then rent the house out, and then the fourth module could be how to then sell the house once it meets some other kind of criteria like if the value of the home rises to a certain amount you were expecting or if the house is too much work or something along with whatever you think of along the way.

Now, what did I just explain to you there … By the way, after you list your 4 modules, you say, “Now, here’s all the really exciting and emotional reasons to buy my real estate course, and here’s some bonuses,” so maybe you add a one-on-one coaching call. Maybe you add some extra videos you make or you have your checklists and templates. You say, “There’s a 30-day money-back guarantee. If for any reason you don’t like this course, you can get your money back. Now, here’s the button to buy it.” That is a formula for what we call a “sales letter.”

Now, I want you to pay attention that when I listed … At first, explains the problem, then the solution, and the actual solution was the course as a whole, this super realistic course, imaginary thing that we’ve just dreamt up. Then, I unpack the individual modules of this course where we start off from the beginnings, the basics.

The first module is tricky because … We don’t want to overload them, but we also at the same time want to give them bigger and better results than they’ve ever experienced in their entire lives at this point when it comes to real estate because here is the thing is if you are thinking about making a membership site, or you’re in the process of making one, or you’re stuck with the chore of having to update a monthly membership site, here’s the problem is if you say, “Well, you can join my site called ‘realestatemonthly.com,’ and in this Real Estate Monthly site, we’re going to share some tips. I’m going to interview some successful realtors. What’s in the course? Well, don’t you worry about it because we haven’t made any of the interviews yet, but just believe me, it’s going to be fantastic.”

Also, a lot of high-profile internet marketers and people like that have had a lot of success with this model, and the reason is because they have name recognition, right? If some big name marketer sells anything, people are going to buy just because they like that person, want to be around them, want to hear what it is they have to say, so like if … I don’t know. If like Carlton Sheets who’s a huge real estate person … By the way, I don’t know anything about real estate, but if Carlton Sheets made a real estate course, a lot of people would buy from him.

Heck, I might buy from him just because I know that name, but you’re not Carlton Sheets. You’re your own person, and the problem with listing and unpacking the things in your membership site is … If it’s a monthly site where you keep on adding in new tips, and interviews, and things every month, what do you say when there are some really, really good stuff about 5 months down the road? If you say, “In month 1, you’re going to get all this stuff. Month 2, some even better stuff. Month 3, even better stuff.” But then, once I looked at what’s in month 5, I’m thinking, “Now, I’ve got to pay you money, and I’ve got to wait 5 months, and I’ve got to pay you money every single month just to get to that one thing I wanted to get to in module 5.”

Then, on the other hand, if you say, “Okay. Well, I’m just going to put all my best stuff and module in month 1 and 2,” then they’re going to buy and get a bunch of stuff, and then I look at month 5 on the sales letter and I say, “Well, I’m not going to want to be around the site in 5 months because all your good stuff is at the beginning,” so the answer is to not make your first site one of those monthly sites, to make your first site be something single payment, probably high-ticket, 4 modules, and it starts off where the first module gives them an immediate result.

You notice how I said that in this fictitious, realistic course that we could create. The first module, first of all, finds them a list of homes that they’re going to look into buying and gets them financing. Now, why didn’t I just say, “Well, the first module gives them an intro, an overview of real estate?” Why I didn’t say that the first module of your real estate course shows them how to gain an account to search MLA real estate listing? Because the reason is that sucks. The reason is that I believe that a certain percentage of your buyers are not going to get past that first module.

No matter what you do, they’re just going to get that first module, so why not pack in the biggest bang for your buck? Instead of building up and saving your best stuff for the end, put some really quick stuff you can do in 24 hours or the first 48 hours, let’s say. They join your site, and what’s like some of the craziest stuff that you could help them, and not just teach them, but help them to accomplish within the first 48 hours?

For example, we have another membership site, which is single payment or has a payment plan, but does not have a monthly forever option, and it’s called “incomemachine.com.” This is a course that shows you how to set up a lead capture page, a sales letter, get traffic, get a download page, set up a blog, have this whole functioning system, but if I said that, “Well, by the end of 6 months, you’ll have a blog,” that’s boring. Instead, I say, “You’ll have everything finished in the first … I think in that one, it’s 3 days.”

In our Membership Cube course, in the very first module, we show people how to set up their website, install a WordPress, install WishList Member, which is the plug-in that we use, and on top of all that, have a button where someone could click and buy from you right then and there. Now, do we say we’re going to add in drip content, add in a bunch of different pop-ups, and levels, and even the sales letter at all? No, but because we front-loaded a lot of cool stuff in that first module, when it comes time for me to sell it on a sales letter or on a webinar, then I can say, “You’ll have your membership site online tonight,” and that takes out a lot of the confusion, just, “You’ll have it online tonight.”

What we want to avoid is something called the “big box of crap,” so excuse my language there, but the “big box of crap” means that, first of all, you don’t need to log in and add a new download or video in your site every single day. I used to think I had to do that. I used to think that if somebody joined any kind of membership site, monthly forever or single payment, that if I didn’t go in and add something new every couple days, they’d get bored and refund or cancel. Not true.

The other problem too is this issue of drip content. Drip content means that … Let’s say that you had 20 different modules or videos potentially in your site, and someone joins, and they only have access to one. They went a couple of days, they get access to module number 2, video number 2. Video number 3 a few more days later, and this sucks especially because your buyers are going to be the most excited about not only learning, but also implementing from you in that first 48 hours and especially in the first 7 days after they buy your course, so why would you make them wait around?

The other thing too is I see a lot of people where they will … They’ll make it a point to drip something out every 2 days, 3 days, 4 days, and I’m thinking, “Give them a month’s worth of stuff,” and so if that means that you have a 4-module course, give it to them all at once, and then maybe if you have some other bonuses like a 30, a 60, and a 90-day bonus, those are all extra afterthoughts, but you don’t need to geek out on drip content. In the same way, you don’t need to geek out on creating the content itself.

Then, that also leads us to some evil internet marketers, let’s just call them, where the trend that I’m seeing go away, which is good, but still there. The trend is for people to just add in and load up the membership site with so much stuff every couple of days that there’s no possible way that any buyer could get through the whole course before the end of the refund period. I bought a course a few weeks ago off ClickBank, and it was a $67 course, but it was $7 now, and then I think I waited like 7 days, and then it was $67 more.

If it had just flat up been $67, I’m honestly not sure if I would’ve bought, but I said, “Okay. Well, this is just a little $7 product.” I got in, and there were lots of little videos I had to click through, little 5-minute, 10-minute, and then I had to go through a written part to the next video, and then I forgot about it for a week, and then I was dinged 60 bucks, and I said, “Oh, I got dinged 60 bucks. I guess I better go in and check out the rest of this course.”

The plan that a lot of its marketers put out is to pile in so much content inside a membership site that you’ll join it, and you won’t even get through half of it before the refund period comes up or the re-bill period comes up. I’ve heard of people saying, “Well, you need them to have half of your video on day 29, and then the other half of your video on day 31 after they’ve been re-billed.” It’s all just silly, so avoid the big box of crap. Instead, go for the 4-part membership course.

Now, the most important part of this is that you give them an immediate 48-hour result, so we show them how to get their payment button and membership site online within the first 48 hours. They run their first webinar within the first 48 hours. They have books spoken out within the first 48 hours, and then in future modules, we can have a module where we take that recording that they have, and they get it transcribed. Take the transcription, and then put it online on Amazon, or even better, if we can find a way to swing it where in the first module, they plan and speak out their book. In the second module, they get it transcribed. When that comes back, they publish it to Amazon as is.

Now, that’s really cool, right, because we can say that if you have 56 minutes free coming up this week, then you can speak out a book this week. Then, if you have another few more minutes in a couple days once the transcript comes back, then you can have a book with your name on it up and running on Amazon in the next 7 days or less. Now, that’s way cooler than some of these other sites you might see where they say, “Well, by the end of the second month, you’ll start to have a handle on making a book.” That’s really boring. Give me the 48-hour immediate results.

Circling back around to what I told you to write down at the beginning, can you remember? Did you write it down? It’s want, need, long-term, Q&A, so the first module delivers on that want, right? Delivers on something big, so maybe it’s to have their book done. I think that for authors, that’s the toughest part is to just have the book done, so we have a system at makeaproduct.com where you can speak out the book, have it done.

The second module is to then sneak in what they really need, which is to get the book published, which isn’t super glamorous, but that’s going to be awesome once they have it done, and then we can say, “Like we said, the book is done in a couple days. The book is done tomorrow at the latest, and the book is online by this time next week at the latest.” That’s the second module where we sneak in what they really need.

Now, the third module is a big, long-lasting result, so we can say that in this Make A Product course … I don’t have it open in front of me, but for a book publishing course, we could say that a third module is then to get a cover made, to get it proofread, to get some reviews, get some ads going, get some traffic, so now, that’s really important, but we can’t just sell a book just about Kindle traffic. We want the whole complete system.

Then, finally, the final module ends up almost creating itself, and it ends up being somewhat of a cleanup session where all the little things that were important are now in the final module, and so my thinking, like I said, is to cram in as much action-packed exciting stuff as possible, but we only have about 60 minutes, 90 minutes at the most to explain it, and even in a 60 to 90-minute session, we really only have time to show about 6 things because we need to explain why we’re all here, we need to explain what’s coming up, and we need to explain, “We’re going to go to this site. We’re going to click on this button. We’re going to go to this link.” I list that, then I show it, and then I explain what I already showed.

With all that fanfare, there’s really only enough room for about 6 different things, and so if we’re saying they’re recording a book, let’s think about this. We have to say, “Here’s the hardware you need. You need this headset, this microphone. Here’s the tools you need. You need this software. We need this other software to plan out the book,” and then number 4 could be, “Well, here’s how to use the initial software to plan out the book and figure out the structure.” Then, number 5 could be, “Now, here’s how to speak out the book,” and then number 6 could be, “Here’s how to hand it off to a transcriptionist.”

Already, that’s easily going to take 60 to 90 minutes to show all that, and even that’s cutting it close. Even with that will be flying and screaming, and so there’s lots of other things that we might want to talk about later on in the future like how to go back and improve your book, expand your book, make a multi-book series, how to get a physical book made in addition to a Kindle book, so we can put that on to the final module.

Now, we’re going to glamorize it. We’re not going to call the final and fourth module “The Cleanup Module,” but anything that was a nice-to-have and not a must-have in your previous sessions, you put that in the fourth and final session, and now, this becomes a really awesome, a really action-packed course. There is a light at the end of the tunnel for your prospects and for your buyers because now, they’re going to actually get the thing they wanted. They’re going to get a book published on Amazon.

You know what too? If your objection to me right now is, “Well, I can’t do a single payment site because … where I only have 4 modules because I want to have this passive income. I want money over and over again.” You’re going to make a lot more … Your sales are going to be a lot easier if you’re selling even something high-ticket as opposed to low-ticket continuity, and if something else comes to mind, then that’s your next course, so you could have a course about how to get published on Kindle, and then your final module explains how to also put it on CreateSpace.

But then, you could say, “If you want to put your book on iTunes and Audible, then this next course is for you,” so they almost voluntarily go and buy the next course, the next logical step, which in itself is complete, right? That course is all about getting an audio book online and selling, but someone could buy just that. You don’t have to reference things in the original Kindle publishing books and things like that.

When we’re talking about content creation as we’re wrapping up today’s podcast episode, we’re talking about content creation. A lot of people have the mistake of thinking that content creation is written PDF documents or it’s a lot of live action video where it’s professionally lighted and it’s all scripted. You know what? The best video you could create is something that is a screen capture video where I see your screen. We use a tool called “Camtasia” to do this, but think about that. Show me something. Show me what the end result is, and show me as much as possible of you clicking around doing things on the computer as opposed to just giving me facts and figures because that doesn’t help me.

Think about what kind of a checklist that you could base out of your training, so first, worry about the training. First, worry about how to show them how to buy a property and rent it out or flip it, or whatever, but then go back and say, “Out of the things I showed you, could I put that into some kind of a step-by-step checklist so that even if they’ve watched the video, if they come back 6 months later, they can just go through the checklist and still get those steps taken care of?”

Anyway, that’s a whole another subject. That’s a whole other can of worms, but I want you to use WordPress. I want you to use WishList Member. I want you to have a membership site, and the training for that is at membershipcube.com. Start your membership site with a bang. Have 4 modules leading to an end goal, and those modules encompass, first of all, a want, then a need, then something long-term, then the Q&A, then whatever questions people have or whatever cleanup items you left out of earlier modules. I’m Robert Plank, and that has been Membership Site Podcast, episode 2. Check us out at membershipcube.com to claim your free copy of WishList Member. Get your membership site online and ready to take orders tonight, and I’ll see you on the flip side. Bye for now.

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001: Membership Sites Don’t Have to Be Recurring

My name’s Robert Plank, and we’re going to talk about how to create a passive online income just by using the knowledge and just by clicking around and setting up some of those websites.

My name’s Robert Plank, and my website is at membershipcube.com, and that’s the place to go to find out how to get your membership site up and running tonight, today without it taking six months or a year or longer of your life. I’ve set up a bunch of membership sites, and the number one problem I see people having is that they’re making it way too dang complicated, and I want you to have your membership site up and running as fast as possible. That way, you can make money as quickly as possible.

What I do, the majority of my income is to create what’s called a training course. You might have some kind of knowledge or some kind of skills that you can show other people how to do some of these different things. You can show somebody how to trade stocks. You can show somebody how to lose weight. Maybe you’ve seen people’s videos, blog posts, and books that kind of try to show people how to lose weight, but they don’t show it as good as you do. What you need to do is create a training course. We’d like to choose four milestones that we can break up this weight loss journey into, for example, fixing someone’s diet, getting someone’s exercise routine going, and maybe some other kind of lifestyle changes. It helps so much for you to deliver results and teach people stuff if you know ahead of time what goal they are striving towards, right? We don’t want to just have a site where we share some monthly interviews about weight loss or some monthly tips. You want to say that if your goal is to lose twenty pounds before your wedding or your goal is to lose twenty points before your high school graduation or you want to lose that baby weight, you need to join my membership course that shows you how to lose the weight in thirty days.

This is a great way to make money by just taking your knowledge and having this one to many relationship so that you don’t have to repeat yourself every time that you have something to say. You also don’t want to give away all of your information on YouTube or on blogging. You can give away some of that, but we want you to have your best stuff, your exact step-by-step checklist and system to be behind a pay wall, to be in an area where if someone wants to pay you a hundred dollars to get access to your meal plans, your step-by-step checklist, your extra videos, you can just pile them all in one place. I used to make videos and toss them on a web page, and charge money for them, but it got out of hand. It got really complicated and crazy really fast, so a way better solution is to make what’s called a membership site where you can charge somebody money, they pay you money, they get an account or they get a user name access to this area.

Maybe you only have one video, maybe you only have one PDF document, or maybe you have a collection of videos, but having a membership site is great for this recurring passive income because I can record it and put in the effort and do the work one time, and then get paid over and over again. In your case, you might be recording a training series on how someone can lose twenty pounds in the next couple of months. You put it behind closed doors in a members area, and then it opens up all this free time because you don’t have to teach people the same thing over and over again. You just email your email list if you have one of those, you just post to Facebook or your Facebook fan page if you have one of those, but this way you teach it once, and then you just get paid over and over again.

I want you to have a membership site, and the big takeaway that I want you to get from today is that membership sites don’t have to be recurring. It’s really tempting to say I’m going to make a membership site and I’m going to charge twenty dollars a month for some weight loss advice. I’m just going to get a thousand people to join and that’ll be an easy twenty thousand dollars a month for me. Well, the problem is no one is looking to join a site with a bunch of weight loss tips. They’ve already tried the weight loss tips, and if they want tips, they’ll go and buy a book at the bookstore for five dollars or they’ll go to Kindle Books for ninety-nine cents.

What you can get to people is get them to some kind of an end goal, and this can just mean that you charge one single dollar fee for that. You say for ninety-seven dollars, I’m going to show you, I’m going to give you a meal plan, exercise routine, everything to get to that goal of losing weight. This way, this makes it easier for you as well because this avoids the trap for you of making a membership site that just gets bigger and bigger, and you end up adding two years of content, and it’s still not online. Just get it set up. Create a membership site where you charge one single dollar amount one time for lifetime access, and get somebody to some kind of an end goal in a short amount of time as possible with as little work as possible.

The tools we use to do this are WordPress to host the blog and WishList Member to be the gatekeeper and to control access, and we want to include all of this for you in membershipcube.com. That’s membershipcube.com. You join that site and we’ll give you access included to WishList Member. We’ll show you how we structure our websites. We’ll show you how we generate the content. We’ll show you how we market it, and so much more. Go ahead, do it right now. I’m Robert Plank from the Membership Site podcast. Go to membershipcube.com and claim your access right now, take your membership site, set it up right now today.

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