Month: July 2010

In case you don’t know, an affiliate program is a system where somebody can refer new buyers to you. The reason they would do this is because you give them a percentage, a commission of the total sale. So if you are selling a $20 e-book and you give 50% commission then when somebody refers a new customer to you, you keep $10 and give the remaining $10 to that affiliate who referred the new customer. That sounds great but should your monthly membership site offer a commission and should it offer commission one time or throughout the life of that subscriber?

We need to have affiliate program for many reasons and the big one is that it’s tough to get extra members after your initial launch. You’re probably working very hard diligently adding new content, rearranging the membership site, reminding people to come back and participate

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Before you do anything, before you can think of a name or before you can start making content or before you can even start marketing your membership site or building a list, you need to know what niche you’re in. How do you decide how to choose that one thing that makes you so special that no one else can duplicate that you’ll have raving fans about?

There are three things you can think about. First of all, what are others doing? What do you like to teach and do? And most importantly, what problem can you solve for people? What are other people doing? What are your competitions doing? What are the people you admire most doing? What are they teaching? How are they teaching it? What about it attracted you to them in the first place? If you buy from them what about them makes you buy?

I know you think you’re really special but most people who try to blaze their own trail and try to invent something totally new just fall on their face. Still be unique but take a note of what everyone else is doing and try not to reinvent the wheel too much. Try to repeat what works.

Now that you’ve seen what others do, what do you do? What have you taught? I know you’ve taught something in the past

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I’ve seen many membership site marketers make the same mistakes over and over and I want to make sure that you learn from their mistakes before you make them and avoid them completely. That way, you can save yourself time and shortcut your way to success instead of fumbling around in the dark like most of your competition is. What important mistakes can you avoid today? You could avoid split calls to action, cheesiness and unclear navigation.

What is split call to action? First of all, a call to action is where you tell your website visitors what to do. If you’re on an opt-in page the call to action says, “Go ahead and enter your name and email address in the form below.” On a sales letter the call to action is, “Go ahead and click the button, make your payment and get access to the membership site.”

Inside the membership site, a call to action would be, “Watch the video below, leave a comment below.” It seems kind of silly to have a video on a page and it has to say, “Watch the video below.” But you will be surprised at how many people simply will only take certain steps when you tell them to.

That’s what a call to action is but a lot of people split it up and that’s a big mistake. They will have a sales letter that has a payment button and an email opt-in form. Which am I supposed to do, sign-up for the newsletter or purchase? Or even when there is a purchase button they put two buttons that says, “Click this button to buy it outright or click this button to get on the payment plan.” Don’t offer me when on the other just give me the best one. If you want to offer the payment plan only then great.

Another easy membership site mistake to avoid is the cheesy factor. We’ve all seen cheesy sales letters. They have pictures of palm trees, Ferraris. They have tables about, “Oh, if only you had 1,000 members in your membership site you’d have this amount of money. If only you referred three or four people then it would multiply out to this giant number.” The problem with that is that it’s been so overused, it’s become such a clich

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I hope you don’t get confused when you hear marketers talk about ideas such as upsells, front end offers, back end offers because the truth is a lot of those terms are just terms meant to sound fancy and don’t mean anything really special. I’m going to clear that out for you right now.

When somebody says a front end offer, this means that when someone comes to your website for the first time, this is the offer they see. When they have not yet bought from you this is what they see. You’re asking them to buy maybe some kind of e-book or video course

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Most people who run membership sites price their access way too low and that is a big mistake. You need to price your membership site at a point where there is resistance, where you have to do actually work a little bit to get that sale. And the reason for that is because even when you double your membership price, you usually don’t have to work twice as hard to get that sale.

Imagine if you had a thousand members in a membership site paying $20 a month and you suddenly realized that they would have paid $50 a month. You didn’t have to do any extra work, you just had to change one number and yet you didn’t. So you should be pricing your membership site at the highest price the market will bear. That based the question, “What should you charge for your membership site?”

You should charge at least $197 for live training, at least $97 per month for weekly video training and at least $27 per month for monthly video training. Do you offer live training? If so, do yourself a favor and price at $197 or above. I come across too many people who work so hard and run a live webinars, teleseminars, call-in days, personal critiques and then they’re only charging $47 a month or $97 a month and it’s just terrible.

If you’re doing this kind of a live training course, if it’s monthly, charge $200 a month or higher

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If you’re about to launch a membership site or if you’re even fishing for excuses about why you shouldn’t write or why you shouldn’t make a product, you’d probably go to the old reliable thinking that everybody else has already thought of the things you have to say. That is just the wrong thing to be thinking because all the information anyone would need to know is already out there in the world and on the Internet but it’s up to you to provide the right information and to provide the easiest information.

You’re not in a contest of how much stuff you can pile into your site. You’re trying to pile in the most useful stuff and that’s it. Think about this, all the information that you need is all on Google, it’s all on forms, it’s all on public libraries and yet training courses still exist and yet universities still exist because a lot of the information in libraries is out of date or it’s hard to find or it’s just the wrong information.

You can always pull you own unique spin on some kind of training and make it totally unique. And because it’s your information, because it’s your training, you don’t have any of that bad information. You don’t have any of that old information. You have the step-by-step when everyone else is trying to be the big thick giant encyclopedia.

If you still don’t believe me, think about the last time that you’re willing to pay money to figure something out. Maybe you couldn’t figure out how to get your VCR to work. You couldn’t figure out how to make an AdWords campaign profitable. Think about that.

If you could figure out how to make AdWords make you $100 a month, wouldn’t it be worth paying $50 or $100 to get to that information? And yet many cheapskates go and try to find the answers on Google and spend days if not weeks and never get what they’re looking for. What you’re really providing is the step-by-step shortcut to solve their problem. If you think of your training in that way that you’re solving someone’s specific problem then suddenly you’re on a whole different level than the Google results and the public libraries and the forms.

You are an expert in something. There’s some kind of skill you have that’s somebody else doesn’t have. I’m not saying you need to train somebody to become an expert in AdWords but even if somebody just doesn’t know what stuff to click on to set up an AdWords account, you can make a video showing them that. Just get them started, just push them in the right direction and teach people something that you would’ve paid money to find out if you didn’t know it. That way, you can trade the access to your membership for dollars and not your time for dollars.

Let’s get your membership site set up right here, right now at www.MembershipCube.com

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Do you need a trial to have a membership site? Do you need to have your $20 a month offer, give people 14 days for just $1 and is it even legal anymore? My opinion is you definitely do not need to trial for your membership site.

I found from a personal experience that whenever I have a trial offer in my membership site, people tend to not stay as long. They tend to complain more, they tend to be more high maintenance. Whereas if I just sell people on the monthly payment upfront with no trial, they stay in longer, they actually watch the videos I provide, they actually listen to the instructions I give them and they don’t find anything and everything to complain about.

If you’re so dead set on having a trial offer, maybe you’re just scared. Maybe you just need to be a better marketer and justify your $20 or $50 per month instead of trying to sneak in that extra payment.

The problem with trials is if it’s actually $1 trial is you have to compare both prices. So if somebody pays $1 for half a month and then the cost goes up to $20 per month, you now have to convince people that your offer is worth ten times as much because they now went from paying $1 for 14 days to $10 for 14 days. Suddenly, there’s disconnect. A lot of people are just tired of kickers who went in and paid their dollar just to see what was on the inside and then had no intention whatsoever under any circumstances of paying the full membership site.

I’ve had trial offers for $1 and for $5 where the quality of the subscriber was so low that they fought tooth or nail to get their dollar back, to get their $5 back from the trial months and months after the trial had expired and they had already quit. You’re going to find with your marketing that when you charge more for something, you’re going to have a much better subscriber and that definitely still holds true with trials.

Trials are not magic things. The same exact logic towards if someone pays you a little bit of money, they’re going to be a hassle and if they pay you more money, they’re going to be a much better and responsive customer that still holds true.

I’m against having a trial because it’s hard to justify that price. People are more likely to cancel if they have a trial. All you need to do is just be a better marketer, just give a stronger argument, just have more follow-ups, write a better sales letter, have more proof. That way, you can get more people in your membership site and they will stay in your membership site much longer.

So, a trial is definitely not required in your membership site. Just go without a trial and you’ll discover that people are much less likely to cancel. They will stay in your membership site for longer and you might have to be a slightly better marketer to avoid the trial but that’s where you should be headed anyway.

Find out exactly what the price for your membership site. Figure out how to make all the content. Figure out how to set up all the technical stuff right now at www.MembershipCube.com.

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There is an easy way for you to introduce your membership site to the marketplace for a low price while also not discounting your offer or looking like a cheap marketer and you have an easy way to test the market, see if people will buy so you can then charge a higher price for your access. This is all thanks to the Seven Dollar Bump Strategy. This strategy allows you to start low and test the market and means you don’t need to have a lot of content out of the gate and it becomes better later as you raise the price and course correct.

What is the Seven Dollar Bump Strategy? This strategy is where when you first launch your membership site, launch it at $7 a month. Then once you have a few members, once your sales letter has been split tested, once you have a little bit more content added into the membership site, increase the price. Charge $17 for new members. What happens is your initial buyers are grandfathered in forever at $7 a month then you increase the price to $17. Remember this is almost triple the price and then market it some more.

This has a couple of advantages. First of all, it shows that you’re not dropping your price, you’re raising your price. You have social food because people have already bought at $7 per month and introduces scarcity because you’re about to raise the price to $27 per month. A great way to start low and test the market, see if people are actually willing to buy at any price and then you can just start increasing the price.

It is also good that you don’t need to have a lot of content out of the gate. If people are only paying $7 a month, they only need a couple of videos for the first month. You don’t have to market it very hard because $7 and $17 are impulse by price points. This means that people will buy this on impulse just because it’s a low price.

I’ve had plenty of sales letters that charge a product for $7 that convert at over 12% that had no guarantee, that had no proof. It just made a compelling argument and asked them to buy. If you’re in a hurry, if you’re just starting out, it’s an easy way to get some initial sales. Just have a simple sales letter, just have a simple membership site, charge $7 and then as you add to it as you get more excited about it then increase the price for new members.

This is really good because as you get people in your membership site, they can start asking you questions and you can start creating better videos. You can start recording live webinars. You can start making the site last three months, six months, nine months and then justify your raising of the price.

That is how the Seven Dollar Bump Strategy works and it’s just that simple. Launch your membership site at $7 a month, test the market, add to it, increase to $17, $27, $37, $47 and finally, $97 a month which is where your membership site should be sitting at anyway.

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