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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