Month: April 2010

Many people teaching membership site marketing have lied to you. They’ve told you it’s only possible to sell a membership site on the back end, meaning as a bonus offer, as an upsell. But you need to know better. And that said, membership sites can be sold on the front end – meaning they can be sold directly, as long as you use the right terminology and the right positioning, so that a membership site looks even more attractive than a one-time payment deal.

So how do you position a membership site correctly? Well, a few things for you to think about. First of all, how do you think people buy cars, homes, things like that? The next thing is to sell them not on the total payment but on the individual payments themselves, what will it cost to get their foot in the door. And finally, instead of selling them a membership site, talk about it like a payment plan, like financing which it is because you’re giving them a fixed-term membership option.

So, the way the whole entire world works, if someone is buying a car, if they’re buying a house, if they’re getting a loan, if they’re paying off their credit card, they have a certain balance and they make payments against that balance until it’s done. And if they stop making payments at any point, then they just simply don’t get it. If you buy a house and you make all the payments except for the final one, then you lose your house. But if you make all the payments for your house, then you own it, it is yours forever.

So, that’s how you have to think about the way you are selling your membership site, they make certain payments. Once they make all the payments, it’s theirs. In the meantime, you are doing them a favor by giving them basically an interest-free loan to go and use your membership site.

That brings me to my next point. If you have a $1000 course and people are making $97 payments for 10 months so it’s all paid off, then they’re not paying $1000 dollars, they’re paying $97 now and then $97 every month for the next 10 months. It seems a lot easier to swallow that they only have to pay a small chunk at a time until they have the whole entire thing.

Now, are some of your customers going to totally step up in their head and think, “okay, well that’s $1000?” Sure. But it’s an easier way of presenting it and they don’t have to make all the payments. They can quit it anytime and just for when they first joined, you’re giving them a much easier way of getting in, a much lower point of entry because they only have to put less than $100 down to get started with your $1000 training course. And of course, the vocabulary, the terminology, the words you use are very important.

So, I like to tell people something like this. You make a payment every month for six months and after that, it’s free. After that, if I add in an extra month, you get that for free. You can get come back to it forever. At any point, you can come back to the site after all the payments are made. Present it as a payment plan. So, even though there’s over $1000 worth of value and people pay $1000 to get in, you’re giving them a plan. They can make smaller payments over time and go at a slower pace and only pay for things as they use it. So, if they need to get $1000 back to pave back their investments, they only have to worry about making more than 100 bucks back ever month.

And above all, it’s financing. It’s if you buy a house, you have to pay a mortgage but a bulk of that payment goes towards interest. You’re being a nice guy, you are not charging interest at 0% interest, and you’re financing their way in.

So, is it possible to sell a membership site on the front end? Yes if you position it in the right way, if you’re a good marketer, and you explain it as a payment plan, as financing, instead of all these extra payments or a total lump sum.

Now that you know how to present your membership site, let’s focus on creating the site, on keeping members, and on writing copy, getting traffic, and doing all the things you should be doing yesterday to market your site. Join right now.

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I don’t care if we’re setting up a membership site or a one-off product, you need a list, it’s just given. If you’re not building a list, then anytime you need traffic, you’re starting from scratch. But when you do have a list, then you can slowly add to it by getting this extra traffic and anytime you want to pull clicks and opt-ins and sales out of from there, simply send a message to your autoresponder opt-in list.

So, there are many ways you can build that list, by paying for pay-per-click traffic, by joining JV giveaway events, by joining SafeList – so the question is, are free methods of list building really worth it? And it’s not a simple yes or no answer but I do have a few pieces of advice for you. First of all, you need not just subscribers but responsive subscribers, you do need to weed people out of your list and you need to focus on high quality sources of traffic, not just the ones that give you lots of numbers.

So, subscribers are great, and you do need to be always building your list because if you’re not building your list, it’s still slowly dying and your monthly income is slowly dropping. I don’t care what your offer is or who you are, you always need to be building your list at least by a little bit. So, you need not just fresh subscribers but also responsive subscribers. I would rather have a list of 100 buyers at any price, even $10. I’d rather have a list of 100 buyers than a list of 10,000 people who have never bought from me – because, at least some one who’s bought from me can prove they have a credit card and they trust me enough to type in those details.

So, you need people on your list who read your emails, who click on your links, who respond to your emails, and most importantly, actually buy from you and buy from you over and over again. So, starting off by building your list using some of those free methods is fine to start, but you need a list of responsive subscribers, and it’s better for you to have a small responsive list than a large unresponsive list because you can mail it a little faster, you get less spam complaints, and overall, it’s just easier for you.

So, how do you turn a non-responsive list into a responsive list? Email them. See who buys. Mail on a regular basis. Mail consistently. Mail often. And if people complain, who cares? They have not bought from you. They probably would not buy from you anyway. So, don’t be afraid to remove none-buyers from your list who have never bought if you can replace, if you have new leads coming to your site over and over.

So, when you’re replacing those bad subscribers, where do you get the new ones from? Get them from forums. Post on forums. Have a signature link. Write articles. Post them to your blog. Post them to article sites. And most importantly, sell stuff and capture the opt-ins after they buy. Your buyers are going to be way more valuable than your freebie opt-ins. So, ad swaps and giveaways are good to start but don’t live in ad swap and giveaway (03:33) for the rest of your life because you’re not going to get people to buy into your membership site and you’re not going to get people to stay in your membership site if they can afford it or if they don’t care enough to actually purchase.

So, are free methods of list building really worth it? Sort of. It’s a good place to start but move towards better sources of traffic. Because, you do need to be always building a list, always getting new subscribes, but you also need to be weeding out the bad subscribers and replacing them with new ones from better sources such as forums, articles, article directories, and from people who have bought from you.

Now that we have that issue out of the way, let’s get you starting your first or next membership site.

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When you are putting together your membership site and hushing out the exact solution you’re going to provide, you’re probably confused about should you cover everything or should you cover only one specific problem. In other words, should you create one huge membership site or should you put out lots of little ones.

Now, normally when I create one-off products, I just like to say one problem, one solution. But when you’re making a membership site, it can get really crazy, especially if you offer things like upsells and different extra offers. People have to log in to these different membership sites.

The cool thing about a lot of membership software, such as Wishlist member, is that if somebody already has an account and they purchase access to an additional membership level, like an extra product, they can click on a special link and have that extra level applied to their existing account. For that reason, I would recommend to you that for a recurring membership site, I would only create one membership site per sub-niche.

Now, what’s a sub-niche? A sub-niche is a niche within a niche. This means that I would never have a membership site just on internet marketing. That’s too big of a space. But I would have a membership site covering everything I know about list building. So that way, if I have upsells about list building, people use the same exact membership site. That way, I have enough content to charge up to $97 per month for access to that. So, have one membership site per sub-niche.

But the problem with having one membership site for all of your information is that it will be hard to navigate. So, another example, I am also in the programming niche that includes things such as PHP, WordPress, JavaScript. Would I have one membership site for all things in programming? No way. I would have one membership site for PHP, one membership site for WordPress, and one membership site for JavaScript. So, you kind of have to have a membership site that’s not so big, that you can’t explain it, you can’t give an elevator pitch for. So, these would be small enough that you can give an elevator pitch, but big enough that you can store multiple products and charge a recurring monthly fee.

Now, think about this. Think about the drip content. If you give a product that has extra bonuses, extra lessons dripped out, think about how confusing that would be if somebody joined the site about internet marketing, which again is far too big of area for you to have a site about and for the first, where they got list building week one, they got product creation week one, they got article writing week one, they got site building week one, they got AdSense week one – all the stuff that’s flooding into that, it would be very confusing. But if you had a site just about site building, then you could very easily give them week one, week two, and week three lessons.

So, keep those rules in mind when deciding if you want to have one huge membership site or lots of little ones. Pick a niche and then for each sub-niche within that, create a membership site but don’t go too small or too big – because if you make a site too small, people will have to join multiple sites, and if you make it too big, people won’t be able to find anything once they joined your site.

Now that you have your membership idea, I want you to type in to your browser right now, www.membershipcube.com, to take that idea and turn it into a reality by setting up a membership site of your very own.

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If we ever have used an email autoresponder, you know that you don’t have just one list. You have multiple sublists. The idea is that if you have multiple products, then if someone buys your first product, they end up on your first list. If they buy your second product, they end up on your second list. That way, if you want to mail to just one of your sublists and send out an update to just one of your products you can. But if you want to send a broadcast to all of your sublists, you can do that as well, which gives you the most control.

But then, I hear around, “Well, should I create a sublist for different levels of my membership site as well?” And the answer to that is usually but not always no. Most of the time, you just make a separate sublist for each individual product. But if you have a membership site with different levels that are drastically different, then you would make a sublist for that.

For example, let’s say you had a membership site, you had a full level and you had an advanced level. And when they join the advanced level, they get an extra bonus for signing up but that other than the extra sign-up bonus, both levels are exactly the same. For that situation, I would have just one sublist for both of those because when somebody joins, they can just get a generic message telling them where to go. When you get updates, the updates after that initial purchase are going to be exactly the same. So, in that scenario, I would only have one autoresponder sublist for the different membership levels.

Now, what if the levels were drastically different. Let’s say you had an audio version of your membership site, so you had the level called “audio,” and then you had a video version of the membership site – now, let’s call it video – and they are different prices. One of them is audio only, one of them is video only. In that case, the videos might have a different content or you might use a different language like “watch this video versus listen to this audio.” So, for that reason, because all of the content is going to be completely different depending on which package they’re in, in that case, I would have a different sublist for the audio and video levels.

So if you have completely different products, that’s a separated sublist. If the products are similar enough so that your email updates can apply to either one, then don’t even bother setting up a sublist. There is such a thing as having too many sublists in your autoresponder, especially if you hardly have any subscribers in each one. You want to keep your autoresponder structure as easy to manage as possible, so only make the bare minimum number of sublists that you need to manage your individual products.

Keep in mind that this also depends on how often you’re mailing. Do you mail a once-per-week reminder or do you give out a daily update? If you have a simple once-a-week reminder, you might be able to get away with combining more of your sublists; whereas with the daily update, you probably have to have more sublists than with weekly reminders. So, one more time, sublist different ones for different products. If the products are similar enough, have the same sublists.

Now, having different autoresponder sublists is going to require you to first have a membership site. Let me show you how to set that up.

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If you are the kind of person who has a membership site or wants a membership site, you probably like to have fancy stuff, like to have the bells and whistles. And if a certain feature exists, if a certain marketing tactic is possible, you’re definitely going to want to try to pursue it. Right? Wrong. You need to keep your site simple – because most people who will avoid keeping their site simple never get the site launched in the first place. So, the answer to most of the fancy stuff such as split testing emails is you do not want to do it and there are many reasons why.

First of all, instead of split testing your emails, you should be focusing on split testing your sales letter. You could spend all day testing and tracking and figuring things out, but at the end of the day, you have the same 24 hours that everyone else in the world does. So, why would you waste it testing out silly things?

If somebody is on your email list and you’re going to be sending out emails to them regularly and you’re going to be launching a product properly, meaning sending out 5 to 10 emails whenever you launch something, then they’re going to open up your email and click on your link sooner or later. And if not, then they are simply not a responsive subscriber. So, it doesn’t really matter if you split test emails just so you send out a lot of emails.

What about open rates? Let me tell you something from a technical standpoint. When you test email open rates, what your autoresponder service does is embed an image in your email messages. Unfortunately, spammers also use this technique to figure out if the junk mail messages they send are actually opened. For this very reason, many email clients block these types of trackers, so your open rate tracking is not going to be very accurate at all. If you get a 50% open rate, that doesn’t necessarily mean that only half of your subscribers have opened up your email, the number could be much higher but the tracking image is simply blocked in their email client.

So, things like subject line split testing, things like open rates are not very accurate anyway. So, just stay away from the fancy stuff. As far as integrating autoresponders with your membership site, you should integrate an autoresponder with your membership site. This is one of the things that is very important.

So, have an opt-in box inside your membership site and have some kind of auto-subscribe functionality to automatically get somebody who buys into your membership site to get on your list and this is included with most membership software such as Wishlist member.

Now, why would you want to have both? Why would you want to have the auto-subscribe feature plus the manual subscribe feature inside the membership site? There are many reasons. Somebody might join your membership site and then accidentally unsubscribe from your autoresponder sequence and they want to get joined back in. So, make it easy so they can log in, enter their name and email address one more time and get back on the list. Another reason is that some people have one email address dedicated only to processing their payments and another towards receiving emails. So, if they happen to use their payment email when they sign up for your membership site or they just type in the wrong email and for whatever reason, they’re not getting your messages, they can opt in using that form on the inside to the email address they are used to for receiving messages. Pretty simple.

So, most fancy things like split testing emails and tracking open rates are not important but some fancy things, the basics, like integrating your membership site and your autoresponder is very important. It’s one thing to be told how to do some of these things, but wouldn’t it be nice to see a real how-to step-by-step video, taking you by the hand, and walking you through every step of the way? I think so.

To get access to those videos, visit www.membershipcube.com right now.

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If you’re on more than a few people’s email mailing lists, you’ve seen people do a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong. I want to shortcut your success by just telling you exactly what you should be doing with your autoresponder opt-in list and what you should be avoiding like the plaque, especially when it comes to promoting membership sites.

Do create free and paid lists, separate free and paid lists. It’s really going to help if you only market within one specific niche and your different offer and your list are in sub-niches related to that, but the idea is that if somebody is on one list, you could try to upsell them to some other offer. So, for every product you have, for every membership that you have, create a paid list for updates and a prospect list for free promotions. This way, you can mail to just one or a small group of sublists or you could mail to the entire bunch of sublists. It’s up to you. But this should go without saying what I see all kinds of marketers trying to get by on just one list for everything and it simply does not work.

Do update regularly and be consistent. Again, a big tragedy is marketers build up a giant mailing list and then they let it go for two, three, or even six months. If your mailing list is neglected for even a couple of weeks, it will very clearly wither away and die. People forget. They forget that they know you, that they signed up for your list, even if they bought from you. So, it’s up to you to be interfaced and in their mailbox as often as possible.

So, send messages to your email list. If you’re good at writing follow-up sequences, do that. If you have a lot of say and you want to simply broadcast everyday, do that. Here is a secret. If you broadcast on a regular basis – let’s say a few times a week or even once per day, you can later on save those sent messages and schedule them as follow-up sequences in a specific list. So, you think of the message now, send it out now, but then see save that for later. So, anyone new coming onto your list gets those emails as well.

And it’s also important that when you do update, you update on a very regular basis. If you’re the kind of person who updates every week, then always update every week – because if you change it to once a day or once a month, you’re going to have people either overwhelmed or forgetting about you. I personally prefer everyday. So if you can manage it, email your list every single day, at least until they purchase.

Don’t try to announce to all the different lists separately – because if you’re a good marketer, if you have upsells and follow-ups in place, then people should be on multiple lists of yours. So, when you send out a broadcast, your autoresponder should have a D duplication feature. This means that if someone is on the list for products 1, 2, and 3 and you send an email to all the lists at once, they only get one email and not three copies of the same email. So, when you go and try to send a different message to each list, not only is it time consuming, but somebody might get the same email multiple times just because they are on this different list.

Don’t chicken out and limit yourself in the terms and conditions when somebody signs up. I see all the time in opt-in forms, “Oh don’t worry. I will only use this list to notify you of updates for this product. I will never try to upsell you.” Why not? You worked hard to get that sale, to get that opt-in, they’re on your list, let them know upfront that you will be giving them other offers in that same niche that they will be interested in. There’s nothing wrong with being a good marketer.

So, when building a list, when marketing to that list, make sure you create separate free and paid list, make sure you update regularly, but avoid announcing to small lists. If you want to announce something big, send it to all the lists and don’t chicken out, be a real marketer. Tell them upfront that you may be sending them future offers.

Build a list, get traffic, and get recurring income.

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