Month: May 2010

My number one favorite way to get members participating in a community but does not involve anything boring like homework is to create a membership challenge. After you teach your members something, simply give them an easy 4-step task to complete that includes a deadline and let them do and report back on when it is completed. It might take a little bit of training at first, but once a few of your members start completing the challenges over and over, the social proof factor will kick in and you will have more testimonials, then you will know what to do with.

So, how do we set up this challenge? It’s very easy. Create in your blog post a new membership area that directly relates to what you just taught them and ask them four questions that will help them complete this task. For example, let’s say you’re teaching a class on how to get joint ventures. Your challenge post would explain to them why they’re going to get joint ventures and then ask them to answer a few questions. The questions you could ask could be for example, “Name the four people you’re going to contact.” That’s question one. And then question two could be, “Tell me the exact offer you’re going to offer them.” For example, you could tell them to do an ad swap, you could do a joint webinar together, you could do a guess blog post – that could be just choose one of the three things. Then answer number three could then be, “What time and date will this be done by.” And then at the end, say before a certain deadline. So for example, “Before June 1st at 4:30 p.m.” Then ask people to simply leave a comment under that post answering the three questions.

If you’re having trouble getting people to fill out the challenge, follow up with them. Keep mailing about it and even, impose a deadline where they have to answer the challenge within 48 hours. After 48 hours, disable comments on that particular post, so they can only participate by posting their intentions first. This has the weird commitment and consistency effect of making them follow through and actually complete what they have promised. After they have promised that and completed the task, and most of them will, you now have a set of easy testimonials. You now have some reviews you’re going to add to your sales letter. You’ll also have some measurable results you can show the person how they progress from the beginning of your course to the end, you can measure their progress along the way, and after the course is completed, you have a very simple before and after picture for that particular person.

If you have trouble getting people to participate, there’s a very simple solution – offer them some kind of a bribe. Purchase re-sell rights, make a bonus video, or hold a live Q&A call and only make that available in a protected post that a certain level, for example challenge one, can access. Then if your members complete the challenge, add them to that challenge one membership level and they can view the reward post. However, after a few of the challenges, it turns out you don’t even have to bribe your users, they will just do it out of habit.

So, when you’re putting together some kind of a training course, strongly consider having a membership challenge instead of homework. It’s a great way to make your people take action on what you teach immediately and you can measure the results and they’ll give you some case studies to use when marketing your site.

Now, here’s your challenge.  Find out exactly how to set up your own membership site with built-in challenges. Go ahead and do it right now.

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When I explain to people about the idea of membership site where you control access to a download area, it pretty much makes sense for everybody. But membership levels are slightly more difficult to grasp and I want to make sure that you understand them right here and right now.

Membership levels basically allow you to take the same membership site and give different users different access to parts of it. Here is where I can explain it – is you might have a silver and a gold level and you could see the silver post, if you are silver, but if you’re gold, you can see even more extra content. So maybe you posted as the membership creator, you post one silver and one gold video every week. If somebody was on your silver level for say 10 bucks a month, they would see one video a week. If they were on your gold level, then they would see two videos per week. Does that make sense? I hope so. So, you could create the cheap level maybe for beginners and then the more involved level, which costs a little bit more but is for the more advanced people.

What’s really cool about membership software, especially the software that I use is that you can partially protect posts. For example, let’s say that you want to not only do the two videos per week idea but silver members cannot download the video. So, what you would do is you would make a post and paste on that post the streaming version plus the download link but protect just that download link for gold members. So, silver members would see one streaming video per week, and gold members would see that streaming video plus a special one just for them, and the gold members could download both of those videos. So, even though they get double the videos and the cost is double, it seems like they might be triple or even quadruple the amount of value, and you didn’t have to do any extra work.

So when you create your membership levels, what should you name them? Well I always start with the level called “full” just out of habit because we don’t want to create a fancy membership site out of the game. Create an average membership site now and add to it later. So, set up your membership site, create a level called “full,” and put all the stuff you want to put on to it for your single payment site. Then if you want to go and add information later, create a level called “monthly” and then that will be the level that your monthly users can join and get the content dripped out for them in that fashion.

The key to this is not to think of a bunch of extra membership levels just because only add to them as you need them. So in that example, we started off with the “full” and then later on added the monthly.

So, if you have a different group of members that you want to see more or less videos, create a membership site group. If you want to charge a little bit more to give different kinds of access to the site, have a different membership level. But other than that, I hope that you understood the idea behind membership levels and that you can take some of your posts and make them visible only to certain levels and obscure only parts of your posts, for example, make the download link itself protected. Once you have this membership level concept completely understood, you can have a lot of fun with different levels of access, live and monthly levels, leading offers all within the same membership site.

Now you understand the why of membership sites, do you want to know the how?  Find out exactly how to apply what we learned today in your membership site.

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