Month: April 2010

How can a 100% commission membership site get me traffic?

You might or might not have heard of the 100% commission model. You have heard of an affiliate program, however. Right? An affiliate program means that someone sends you new leads, sends you new buyers, and you pay them a certain commission based on the sale. It used to be people would only pay out 10% commission. That means if somebody sends you over a $100 sale, you get 100 bucks but you give up $10 back to the affiliate. Then it came to the point when people started giving away 50% commission. So, somebody pays you 100 bucks, you give up 50 bucks of the affiliate who referred that person, you keep $50. But an even newer strategy is the 100% commission model. If somebody sends you a new buyer and that buyer pays you $100, all $100 get sent to that affiliate.

So, why would you do this? You would do this because now you have a proven buyer on your list, you can upsell them, and you can send them other offers in the future. So, the 100% model is a very proven way of getting new buyers and getting new people on your list, and the good news is you can also apply this to recurring membership sites, even if they are single-payment membership sites. So, how can this model get you traffic? There’s three reasons – it’s juicy and attracting new affiliates, you can always upsell them later, and it makes it a lot easier to get your foot in the door for guest webinars.

So, I explained to you a minute ago that affiliates are used to only getting paid 10% to 50%. So, when you’re selling something, whether it’s $10, $20, or $100, it’s a lot more attractive to affiliates, knowing that if they make a $100 sale, they get to keep all of that $100. So, it makes a lot easier to get affiliates than if you would only give them partial commissions. Then, once they’re on your list, you can do whatever you want with that customer base. You can upsell them to a different product later and not have to pay affiliates for that upsell because the affiliate referred that lead just for that particular product. Now, some affiliate systems allow for lifetime tagging, but on average, the average affiliate system does not count upsells for affiliates.

And which is better, if someone approach you to do a guest webinar just to do it or if they approach you to do a guest webinar and paid you for every sale? Or how about this, what if somebody approach you for a guest webinar and paid you all the sales that webinar created because they just wanted to build up a bigger list of buyers? So, it’s a lot easier to get a webinar or any kind of joint venture by offering 100% commission and a membership site makes it easy to manage.

So, think about having a 100% commission lead generation model to get traffic because affiliates like it, you can upsell your customer to other products of yours, and it makes it easier to get it on better joint venture deals such us guest webinars.

Watch me explain the exact 100% commission model inside the training at www.membershipcube.com. I’ll see you inside the member’s area tonight.

Claim Your Access to Membership Cube Now

How is membership traffic different from product traffic?

I get asked all the time, how do I get traffic to my membership site? What should I do differently to get membership traffic than from a simple one-time payment traffic? I’m here to tell you that it’s not that different. You should be applying the same principles as you do towards selling ebooks and reports as towards your membership site. It’s the same. So, don’t do any of this fancy upsell the membership site. Sneak the membership site in. If you can’t sell the membership site on the front end, then you’re just not trying hard enough.

So, it’s true. You really don’t have to have a one-click upsell to get somebody into a membership site, you don’t need to have a dollars trial to get somebody into a membership site, and in fact, it’s becoming less and less easy and less and less compliant to try to sneak a membership site on the back end. So, don’t sneak on the back end. Treat it the same way that you sell one-time products and be proud of it.

It’s really not that complicated to sell a membership site. They buy, they get access. That’s it. Whether their membership site is a single-payment site, a payment’s plan, an ongoing site, a free site – it’s all not complicated. They buy, they get access. It really can be as simple as that.

But you might be thinking, isn’t it different? Don’t people pay a lot of money if I have a $100 a month membership site as opposed to a $20 ebook? I see your point. If someone has to pay a high price for your membership site, if somebody has to pay recurring fees to keep access into your membership site, all that means is you just need to be a better marketer. Maybe that means you need to get them on a mailing list first. Maybe that means you need to promote a low-ticket product and then get them on the list and use that list to everyday give them one more reason to buy or one less reason not to buy and keep reiterating your marketing message and keep sending them back to that offer.

But membership traffic is no different from product traffic. You still have to take all the steps you do to market a single-payment membership site. You still need a list, you still need multiple traffic sources, you still need a follow-up sequence, and you still need a well split-tested sales letter to make sure they are getting as many people into your membership site as possible.

So, keep in mind today that membership traffic is no different from product traffic. It’s the same. Find out exactly how to promote your new membership site today.

Claim Your Access to Membership Cube Now

How do I split test my membership site sales letter?

Instead of trying to make all your stuff perfect the first time around, instead of having the perfect membership site, the perfect sales letter, why not put up something that’s shiftable, that’s sellable, and then improve on it later. The best way to be 100% sure that your sales letter is always improving is with this thing called split testing.

Here is the idea of having split testing. You have two versions of the exact same sales letter. Only one thing is different. So maybe one version has a red headline, one version has a single headline, but it’s blue. So, you have a red headline and a blue headline. You send an equal amount of traffic to the red sales latter, and the blue sales letter and whichever one got more people to buy is the winner and then you change the sales letter to be just the winner. So, if the red headline out-pulled the headline, then you delete the blue version of the sales letter and you’re left with just the red headline. Then you go and test something else, but the idea is that you are limited in the guessing, you’re seeing what it gets more people on average to buy from you, and you’re slowly making more and more money. You’re always getting better over time. That’s all there is to it.

So, how the heck do you split test? Especially, how do you split test a membership site, because it sounds good in theory but you don’t know how to do it unless you know how to do it. The service I recommend is a free service from Google that not allowed people to know about, called Google Website Optimizer. And what you do is you physically create two separate sales letters and you paste in the specific code they tell you to paste in, in what sites, and then Google will tell you when to stop split testing and when you still need more work, and it shows you charts and graphs, pictures, numbers, all the data you need to figure out which split test was the clear winner.

So, what you do is you take your sales letter and I definitely recommend that your sales letter is not part of your WordPress blog, it’s outside of your membership site. And you take it and save a second copy of it. So, if your sales letter is on index on HTML, save index 2.html. And then apply whatever small change, just make one change to index 2. That could be changing the headline, changing the buy button, changing the color somewhere. Just a small change so you can see that that one change made all the difference. And then you go and create a new experiment inside Google Website Optimizer and you give it all the URLs and stuff and then it asks you what’s going to be your original page, your variation page, and your thank you page. Your thank you page is going to be the registration page for that membership level. So, in most membership software like Wishlist member, you can list all the thank you URLs for each membership level, choose that one that is your conversion page. Then, it’s going to say, “Copy and paste this substance.” Then copy and paste this code to your index.html, this one here index 2.html, and this one to your registration page.

So, how the heck do you add the conversion code to your registration page? Well, in most membership software, you can go and set custom code to be below the registration form. So, simply paste the conversion code under the registration form and now, you have two versions of your sales letter and Google will figure out which one to send traffic to. When someone buys, it will log that and tell you which sales letter got you that sale. So, go ahead, test it out. First, test your headline, then test your order button, and that way, you can easily split test your membership site using Google Website Optimizer and Wishlist member

Claim Your Access to Membership Cube Now

What are the slow but long-term ways to get traffic into my membership?

If you’ve tried to get traffic in the past, you know that it’s not straightforward. There are a lot of sources that can get you a bunch of clicks but no opt-ins or sales or traffic sources where you pay money in order to get clicks or even sources like joint ventures or forum marketing that get you some short-term traffic, but then once you stop working, the traffic stops as well. So, how do you keep building up the traffic more and more so the more hours you put in, the powerful the traffic that comes in? How do you set up some autopilot stuff, so that you do the work once, the traffic comes forever. My three best sources of autopilot long-term traffic are search engine optimization, video marketing, and affiliates.

Search engine optimization simply means you have some kind of free content available in the search engines. I have written articles and instead of submitting them to article sites, I would put it on a blog, get the blog to ping the usual blog and ping addresses, and this is built in the WordPress by default, so that those pages end up on Google, and if people are searching for those search terms, they will end up on that free blog. They get to the free blog a link to the pay offer, so then I get a slow steady trickle that way. The more pages I have on the blog, the more pages appear in Google and everybody went.

You can also use this on your paid membership sites. Here’s the way a regular membership site setup works. If someone logs out, if they don’t have paid access, they don’t see anything, they don’t see any of the posts. But if you partially protect it, meaning you leave all the posts out in the open but only protect the part of that post with a download link, that means any written material, such as explaining what the video is about, show up to non-logged in users but the there’s an error message and they have to log in to be able to watch the video or download the material. The advantage of this is that every single time you make a blog post, even for a free product, that gets indexed in the search engine minus the download link. So, when people find your site, they see that blog and have to register or log in to get access to it. That way, if your membership has 500 posts, that’s 500 more pages you have in the search engines on top of all your free content.

Something that’s even easier to put together than written materials are videos. You make a video and you can use a service tubemogul.com that will post to sites such as YouTube, Revver, Viddler, and DailyMotion, the top 4, and you make one video that ends up on all these other video sites. YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world. When people are looking for instructions, more often than that, they search to YouTube first because it’s better to get a video showing something than some written material explaining something. So, as long as your videos are live action videos, that’s you standing in front of a camera, they make for great YouTube content. And at the end, mention your URL and watermark your URL in the video itself so that people can easily find you.

And finally, get affiliates. Have a pre-written email that affiliates can mail to their lists, set up an affiliate program such as with ClickBank, and offer people 60% commission for referring sales. 60% might seem generous but keep in mind that these are for extra sales that you would not have had otherwise that these people brought to your site. So, those are my favorite slow but long-term autopilot ways to get traffic at search engine optimization, video marketing, and affiliates with solo ads.

Now that you’ve got your traffic on autopilot, it’s time to set your membership site on autopilot.

Claim Your Access to Membership Cube Now

How do I keep members in my site participating and communicating?

I see a lot of membership site creators kind of cross their fingers and hope that their site reaches that critical mass level, the level where their members just start talking amongst each other and they really don’t have to do a lot of the work. If there are questions, the member of the community answers them. If there are new videos that should be made, the member of the community creates them or at least asks those right questions.

So, how do you keep members in your site participating and communicating? How do you get it so that when they join, they don’t feel left out in the cold, they feel like they’re getting their money’s worth, they’re getting this added bonus of the community? We’re going to go over that right now how to get people to not just participate but communicate as well.

So first of, how do you get them to participate? How do you get them to take any kind of action whatsoever? You need to start making it a habit to add what’s called a call-to-action at the end of all your membership blog posts. This means that if you do a video, then at the end of the video, tell them to leave a comment asking another question or tell them to leave a comment thanking you or tell them to leave a comment if you taught something where they set it up. Same thing with written materials or audio materials, ask the questions and encourage the comments.

Another boost that helps me to get some extra participation in my site is don’t give the downloads to everything. I mean that seems kind of silly, but if you have a video and people can watch it directly on your site, there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s no reason for you to provide a download version as well, and in fact, it’s better because what usually happens when somebody can download a video? They download it and get started their way on some folder. But if they can watch that video on your blog, they’re already going to be there and they’re going to be in the exact right place to go and leave a blog comment.

Also, run some kind of contest for the first person to respond or the 10th person to respond, or the first person to actually set up what you’ve taught somewhere. So, now that you have them kind of participating, you get the one way, how do you get the two-way communication going? A plugin I use is called “subscribe to comments” that will send – if somebody leaves a blog comment on a particular post, it will send them updates to future comments left on that post. So, if people reply to them, they will get an email and they can go back and respond further. This only gives them the response on that particular thread, not on the entire blog. Also, just respond to them. If somebody leaves you a comment, then respond with another comment. Don’t necessarily email them – because I come across this all the time where if someone has a question or they want to show me something, they email me and I say, “Don’t email me. Go and post it on the blog. Let’s get all the communication on the blog and not on email.” That way, the other members of the community can respond and say “good job,” things of that nature.

So, if they participate, give people a clear call-to-action, ask questions, reduce downloads, and then to get them to communicate, respond to them on the blog, not on email and use the “subscribe to comments” plugin.

I want to give you a membership site of your very own.

Claim Your Access to Membership Cube Now

How Do I Know If I Have Too Much Membership Content?

Most marketers don’t realize it’s very easy and very dangerous to have too much stuff in your membership site, especially when it is dripped out too fast.  If you drip out your content too fast, people will be overwhelmed and they will always be behind in your content, they will never get caught up because you’re simply giving them information at such a fast rate.  And the big problem with this is that the people who actually want to consume your content will drop out, but those people who like to collect and never watch your content will stay in forever.  You want to have the people who are fans of you, who consume your content, and to do that, you need to drip your content out at a much slower rate than you would probably like.

[audio:A9-TooMuchContent.mp3]

How do you find out if you have too much?  Well, the first give-away sign is if people are dropping out.  If you seriously have good content that is helpful, that is easy to understand, that is exactly what they need, but people are still dropping out, then the problem might be that there’s too much content.  Ask them.  If they say that they’re overwhelmed, if they don’t know where to start, if there’s too much stuff, that means you need to deliver your content at a slower pace.  Good content but low retention rate is a dead give-away of having too much content.

The next thing I would do is join yourself.  Add a new member as yourself and see what somebody who just came in has access to.  If you just joined and there’s access to pages and pages and pages of content, it might be too much.  If there is too much stuff, then that could be a sign that you have too much content.  And a way that I like to tell this is if somebody came on the site and they only had one to two hours per week, could they reasonably go through all of your videos, all of your articles, all of your content, or would it take them more like five or more hours per week.  I mean the average person really works 20 to 40 hours but in reality, they really only 5 to 10 hours of real work time and then when they join your site, they’re only in it for a fraction of that as well.  One to two hours per week of consumption is about what you should be aiming for.

And above all, just use common sense.  So, be aware that it is possible to have too much membership site content, it is possible to overload your members, so you’re not necessarily doing people a favor by giving them tons of information upfront, but you can be doing them a favor by dripping out or scheduling out much of your content and splitting up the payment.  So, that is one more reason to create a membership site.

Duplicate my success.  I want to show you exactly how I set up a membership site of my very own and how you can too in a very short amount of time.  Go to www.membershipcube.com to claim your 100% free details right now.

Claim Your Access to Membership Cube Now

How Do I Create A Membership Site out of Private Label Rights or PLR Materials?

PLR materials are a great way to populate a membership site of your very own because the work has already been done for you.  Somebody else has already gone out and figured out what questions need to be answered, how to answer them, and they have also gone into trouble of writing it all down.  It’s a fantastic way of filling up a membership site, but the problem many people face is why would people want to join my site when they can find this information elsewhere, and the key to this is to make the information your own, which you can do by finding it from the right source, niching it down, dripping it, and using the WordPress blog to your advantage.

[audio:A8-PLRMaterials.mp3]

The first thing you need to do is try to get rights that are high-priced or limited in quantity.  I’m sure you’ve all seen things where you could pay a dollar and get 7,000 different products, and that’s no good, because then the value of that thing you’re buying is not a lot.  On the other hand, if someone is offering the rights to a product for 200 bucks and only 10 people get it, that is a much better investment because not a lot of people will have the ability to sell that information.  Fnd a good place to get the rights, preferably something where it contains a video or audio component because many times the rights will be sold for $20, $30 or more instead of $1 or $2, so less people will have it.

Also, niche it down.  Don’t fill up a site with a bunch of different rights materials.  Pick a specific topic.  For example, maybe you’re buying and selling just recent rights materials about copywriting.  If you’re going to be doing that, then don’t also put information in there about search engine optimization or AdSense.  Just stick to your one topic.

And finally, use your WordPress Blog to your advantage.  You’re making a membership site using WordPress, so you can put these different topics into categories.  If you were creating a membership site about copywriting, you might have some prize there about squeeze pages, some about copywriting with video, some about long form sales, that in that way, when somebody logs in, then you click on one category and get exactly what they want.

Another bonus is that this is searchable.  All WordPress blogs are searchable.  So, if you put a little description of each product you have inside of your membership site, then they can go to the search box, then type in exactly what they want.  You can also schedule out your post in WordPress.  That way, they get a bunch of stuff when they join, but over time, they get a little bit more hand-fed to them, so they have a reason to stay in.

That’s how I would create a site out of PLR or Private Label Rights materials.  Find it from a good spot, niche it down, drip it, categorize it, and search it, which is all built in if you use WordPress as your membership site.

If you can watch TV, then you too can use WordPress as a membership site.  See how I do it at www.membershipcube.com.

Claim Your Access to Membership Cube Now

What Do I Do If I Don’t Have Enough Membership Content?

The content you have in your membership site should be one of the least of your worries.  Let’s get your content problem solved and out of the way, so that we can focus on marketing that membership site and getting new people into your membership site and keeping them into your membership site.  To create membership content, I usually use Private Label Rights materials, interviews and webinars, and videos that I’ve made myself.  Those are the only sources of content you really need.

[audio:A7-NotEnoughMembershipContent.mp3]

First, what the heck are Private Label Rights materials?  These are books, reports, videos, software, even articles that you can purchase the rights to and either use as is or re-write in your own words or maybe some kind of a combination of the two.  If you purchase some articles that aren’t really so great, go ahead and edit them yourself to make them as good as you want them.  I have also done more creative things, fore example, take Private Label Rights articles and record them as a video, but the thing to remember about this is that if the original source material sucks, then your videos are going to suck too.

Next, interviews and webinars.  If you know how to have a conversation, then you can create a membership site content.  What I like to do is find someone who’s an expert in a certain area and schedule about 20 minutes with them and think of four questions I’m going to be asking them throughout the conversation.  These might be questions such as “where did you get started,” “what’s your big idea right now,” “what’s your next project going to be,” and “what’s your biggest mistake and how can we avoid it,” things like that.  And if you don’t get to all the questions, that’s fine.  If you run 25 minutes or 15 minutes instead of 20 minutes, that’s fine.  The important thing is that you have a conversation, you take a couple of notes, so that when you end the conversation, you can kind of tell people what to do next and wrap up the conversation and say, “We covered this, this and this…”

Webinars are the same idea where you talk to someone, but in a webinar, you show the screen instead of just interview.  So, in an interview, it will be audio only but in a webinar, you might actually be demonstrating the thing that you’re talking about.  If you’re talking to an expert about how to post a listing on eBay, you could open up your browser and tell the person, “Tell me exactly what to do to post a killer popular listing on eBay.”  And finally, make videos on your own.  Use a software called Camtasia and show, demonstrate things in a browser, demonstrate things using a software, create Powerpoints and show those in full screen, and that is a great way of creating some bonus content that maybe even just recap things that happened in your PLR materials, your interviews, and your webinar.  If you don’t have enough membership site content, use PLR materials, make videos of your own, anything about audio interviews and video webinars.

Claim Your Access to Membership Cube Now

How Much Content Should I Really Provide Per Day Inside A Membership Site?

Chances are if you are thinking about creating a membership site, you probably have the idea for two or three articles in your head.  Maybe you already have a good chunk of the membership site content written but if you have 5 or 10 articles, how much time does it really buy you in the membership site?  I am here to clear that issue up for you because a lot of people get it wrong.

[audio:A6-HowMuchContentPerDay.mp3]

There are three things to think about when creating membership site content.  First, you want to combat both overload and boredom, you want to offer one big thing per week, and just give them one week of content upfront immediately when they join.

Combattng overload and boredom.  Most people only think of this from one direction.  They think, “I want to combat boredom.  I don’t want somebody to join my site and only get one post a month.  So, I’m going to give them one post every single day.”  So, they combat boredom, but they don’t think about the overload.  They don’t think that if somebody joins the site, leaves for a week then comes back, they’re going to be so behind that they will never get caught up and then they were left wondering why everybody dropped out of their membership site because they all became overloaded.  I prefer to post less than once per day, but more than once per week.  Somewhere in that range is good because if you post once per day, it’s too much, if you post less than once a week, it’s not enough.

That brings me to how much you post exactly.  Well, here’s what you do.  Post one big thing per week, and by big thing, it could just be one 15-minute video, one 15-minute audio, or a download or a piece of software or something like that.  Have one big thing a week, but in the meantime, offer reminders.  Have a post or an email message, saying, “This post is coming tomorrow.”  Have a thread the next day where they can ask a question or leave a comment.  Have it next day where they just watch the video stream on your site that the day after that, they can download it.  Deliver one big thing a week but then have reminders afterwards.  So, maybe you posted a 15-minute video but then later in the week, offer a 3-minute recap audio, so that if they press for time, they can just listen to the audio.

And the final thing you should know about providing content is give people one week’s worth of content at the start.  I used to provide only one day’s worth of content at the start when I first joined, but the problem with this is that when somebody first buys from you, they are the most excited, they are the most interested.  They’re not going to be okay with just waiting around because they just thought they want that instant gratification.  When somebody buys, give them at least one week’s worth of content at the start and then start dripping out your content from that.

When you’re thinking about how much content you should provide per day, how to schedule or stretch out the content you already have, combat not just boredom but overload as well.  Post a few times per week but not once a day.  When you post, post one big thing a week, like one video and in the meantime, have reminders, have recaps, ask questions, offer the download to kind of keep people busy but not overwhelmed.  And when they first join, give them one entire week’s worth of content upfront.

Your membership site content and your membership site setup are both the easiest parts.  Find out why and how at www.membershipcube.com.

Claim Your Access to Membership Cube Now

How Do I Get Others to Write Content for Me?

Let’s face it.  A lot of people simply are not writers, and even the people who are writers, even the best writers get writer’s block from time to time.  So, how do you create enough content to fill up a membership site without getting stuck, without getting bored, or without getting frustrated?  I have three simple solutions for you.

[audio:A5-WriteContentForMe.mp3]

First, promote user comments into full posts, look for a columnist and outsource your writing, outsource your content creation.  The easiest way I create membership site content that’s free is to simply look at user comments.  I host membership sites inside of blogs.  I make a post, you just can comment.  If a user leaves a particularly good comment or an important question or even if I post a video and they take notes in the form of a comment, I will copy their comment, paste it as a new post and set the author of that post to that person who left the comment.

What do I end up with?  I end up with a review post that somebody else wrote, that I did not have to pay any money for, that someone else will probably find useful.  I only do this sparingly, but every now and then, if you have a blog in a membership site and it usually leaves a really video response or takes really good notes or leaves a very insightful comment, consider molding that comment into an entire post.  Now, if that person leaves you lots of content over time and they become a trust source of authority for you, consider making them a columnist, the person who leaves multiple posts on your blog.  The cool thing about WordPress that a lot of people are not aware of is that you can set user access levels – meaning you can set some of your regular subscribers to be what are called “contributors.”  If they want to make a new post, they go and they submit it for approval, you approve it, it becomes live.  It’s a very easy way to allow users to write their own post on your blog, but they do not become live until maybe after you’ve edited them and finally put a stamp on it for approval.

And finally, if you’re really stuck for ways of getting content, simply outsource it.  Hire an article writer if you found someone who’s writing they like, but what I prefer to do is record an audio about what I want to say, hand it off to a transcriptionist, and then they create the article for me.  Not everybody can write but everybody knows how to at least talk on the telephone.  If you can talk, you can write.

And those are my three favorite ways of getting other people to write membership site content or me.  First, promote user comments in the posts.  If there is a repeat user who leaves a lot of good comments, make him a columnist using the user access levels in WordPress.  And finally, outsource your content into article writing or transcribing.

Go ahead and create your membership site content right now, then pilot into a membership site using this training at www.membershipcube.com.

Claim Your Access to Membership Cube Now