When you get your recurring membership site started, one question that’s pretty much inevitable is “can I pay you one lump sum and get access to all the content immediately.” Despite your initial instincts, your answer to this question should always be 100% of the time no, and this is for three very important reasons – it trains your subscribers, it prevents overload, and avoids the download collectors.
So first of, you’re always training your subscribers whether you realize it or not. You’re training them to buy at a certain prize, to buy after being told a certain thing, to pay monthly instead of one single time – so, you’re always training your subscribers. And I don’t know about you, but I would rather train my subscribers to pay me a certain amount every single month instead of paying me one single payment. So, even if somebody wants to pay for one lump sum to get all the content outright, that’s still one single payment, and I would rather avoid that and get people trained to pay me a certain piece of their budget every single month. So, the first part of that is training your subscribers to pay you a certain amount every month.
The next reason against the “get it at once” payment offer is to prevent overload. I’ll be in several sites and even if I miss the site for a week or two or if I forget to log in for a week or two, I come back and suddenly I am behind, but imagine if someone was able to get six months or a year’s worth of content and suddenly they have no idea where to start at all? So, it’s hugely overwhelming for somebody to pay one payment and get access to a whole year’s worth of content. Even though it might seem cool at first, it’s just totally overwhelming. And you might be thinking, “Well maybe I’ll have them pay all at once and then they get access for life,” but that’s just as bad because it still kills your monthly payment plus now they’re underwhelmed because they just paid 500 bucks, 1000 bucks and the content is still only going to be slowly dripped out. So, I tell this from experience, when people pay a certain amount of money month after month, they have to justify that purchase somehow and go in and consume your content and participate.
And finally, when you force people to pay you on a monthly basis, it prevents the download collectors. And we all know people like this, they go and they join a site and they download every single thing there is to download and then they quit. Or even if they don’t quit, they just never come back, and you do not want that. The whole reason you created this membership site is to have your community, is to have people flooding to your site whenever you send a message to answer a certain question or respond to something or download something or watch something. You want them to participate, so why would you ruin that by offering this “get it at once” payment deal, so people can just go and download everything and feel like they have accomplished something but in reality accomplished nothing.
So, do not offer a lump sum payment deal. Do not offer lifetime memberships because it will kill your recurring payments. Instead, train your subscribers to pay you every month, prevent overload so they only get new information, they only get new content as they pay for it, and it prevents the temptation of them to download and spider it and save everything.
So, avoid the “get it at once” payment deal and instead, bill people for your membership site month after month. Get your membership training today from Robert Plank who has multiple profitable membership sites who goes against what most of the gurus are teaching about membership sites.