Author: RobertPlank

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.

Claim Your Access to Membership Cube Now

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.

Claim Your Access to Membership Cube Now

You’ve heard for years that you need to have a membership site, that you need to take membership software and use it to run it. But what is the big deal? Do you really need a membership site or is it a bunch of hot air? The answer is yes. You do need a membership site because it gives you more stable income, allows you to price more, and gives you an easy and organized place to store your information product downloads.

Membership sites give you a stable income because you can get people to subscribe and then they are billed every single month. Whereas if you have a single payment product, they pay you once and then you have to start all over again to earn that next sale. The most common problem for me when I was starting out with internet marketing is that I would make $2000 one month and only $200 the next month. It was very difficult to predict how much money I will be making that month.

Having some kind of a recurring membership site adds a little bit of stability to your income. That way, you know that you might at least make $1000 this month or at least make $2000 this month and you can plan for your budget and expenses accordingly. So, membership site does add some kind of financial stability because you have a stable monthly income and you have at least a few easy monthly guaranteed sales from people who are still subscribers of your membership site.

Memberships sites also allow you to price more simply because having a protected download area is more impressive than manually emailing somebody a file or having a simple download page. When people go and get access, they have to register their own username and password, they have to log in, and this is the place where they can go and log in forever and get any kind of updates you have in the exact same place. So, it’s more impressive to have a membership site, you can add in more ongoing trainings such as bonuses and as a result, price more because you’re no longer selling an ebook or a report. You are now selling a whole course, a whole ongoing training area.

And finally, speaking of that training area, a membership site is a lot less scary when you think of it as a simple download area. Somebody pays you money, they register for an account, log in, and now, there is the download link. If they ever want to come back to it, they can. If you ever update it, they can go right back to that area. So, it makes a lot more organized for you because you just update your file in one single place and it makes it easy for your paid members because if they want to get back to that place, they simply use the lost password functionality, even if it’s two years from now, five years from now, they can always get back to that membership site.

So, you do need a membership site for those reasons. It gives you a stable income, it’s more impressive so you can charge more, and it keeps you more organized because you can put your information in a protected download area.

Now that you know why a membership site is so important, you need to get your hands on the best membership site training on the internet.

Claim Your Access to Membership Cube Now

Every now and then, people are just flat out going to hate what you have inside of your membership site. This has happened to me. Sometimes you just make sites that end up being flopped. But how can you tell if your site itself is a flop or if you just have some bad member who wants to complain and if your site is a flop, how do you adjust for it – do you throw out the whole site or what do you do instead.

If you ever come across this, figure out why they hate it, if it’s the format or the content, ask what they want instead, and then figure out if it’s just the whole angle or if it’s the wrong demographic. So, this happened every now then. The incident that sticks out my mind is when I took some Private Label Rights content, some articles, and turned them in a video. And the problem with that was simply that the quality of the articles were poor, and so, you take a poor article and you end up with a poor video, anywhere around that. So, when people hated it, they hated the actual content, not the idea of having these daily videos for a membership site. So, all I had to do and this is what I say about time management, I just created new videos about time management from scratch without using that PLR source material and everything was fine.

So, the first question to ask is do people hate the fact that it’s written or that it’s video or that it’s audio or do they hate the actual content? So, once you figure that out, if someone’s complaining or dropping out, just email them one-on-one and ask them what they want instead. Ask them what their specific problem is in the first place. So, people didn’t like that I had all of these videos based on PLR material and they wanted stuff from me directly. So, what I did was I added some longer videos and I made recapped videos for those long videos. I said, “Watching this one-hour video, here’s my three big takeaways,” and I’ll talk for five minutes and that was it. So, I still got the same daily video content but it was the recap of the good information. So, ask people what they want and use them to generate content. Even if someone is asking a question, that makes a perfect title for your article, audio, or video. So, use them to generate the content. But if both of those things fail, then maybe it’s just a bad crowd.

For example, I also had a membership site that was a failure and the membership site was about traffic, but the problem was the group of people that I was marketing to do not care about traffic directly. They need traffic but they don’t want traffic. So instead, I had to teach them things like product creation and then as an afterthought, add in traffic. Teach squeeze pages and as an afterthought, add in traffic but not make traffic the main attraction. That was the wrong angle.

So, if people hate your membership site content, figure out if they hate the format, which is the medium that is being delivered, like video, or if they hate the content itself, then ask them directly what they want and use their response to generate new content, and then figure out if maybe you’re just going about it the wrong way and you need to find a more clever hook or a more sexier angle to teach people that information.

Now, it’s time to get up and create your own membership site. Right now, go to www.membershipcube.com to find out how you specifically can create your very own membership site filled with paying members.

Claim Your Access to Membership Cube Now

This is a really good question because so many marketers bite me personally to the nail, “Oh I got to give them all the downloads, got to give them the downloads in every single format.” If they make the video – I mean it is possible for you to not just stream a video on your blog but give it in a downloadable .wmv, the iPod file, the mp3 audio, and even the transcribed version. But the question is should you? My answer is no.

The first reason for this is because most of the time, a transcript of a video is not going to be any more helpful. Those will keep them busy. People most of the time who ask for a transcript just want something else to read, and it kind of makes me sad, especially because what they really want are the notes. So, should you give them the transcript? Usually not. Should you give the transcript for every single video? Usually not. If you make a very important video, you might want the transcript, but even then, whenever I read transcripts of audio interviews, video webinars, there’s a bunch of extra stuff in there. I just want the outline. I want the bullet points. So, transcripts are expensive and aren’t necessarily what they need. They might need the notes or they might need something below the video or the audio that says, “Skip to 5 minutes and 32 seconds to get this part of the video, to get section no. 2.”

So, transcripts cost you money and the money does add up, and if you’re doing it just because one single guy is asking or because you want to make everybody happy, then try a membership site or try making some videos where all they get is the video. Try a membership site where they do not get the downloads, and if they are asking for downloads, why are they asking? Are they asking to collect it, are they asking because they’re used to you, because you’ve trained them to get the downloads, or because one guy is just being difficult and is asking you? The thing is they are paying you money in exchange for good information.

You don’t owe to them to put the information in every single modality possible. I would rather promote a good blog post and encourage comments and make the post itself worthwhile than to give them five different ways to download it. And if you make the content simpler, if you make it so it’s just a video, so that it’s right there on the blog, unable to download, the person watching it will have less confusion, less choices, and have more of a chance to comment. And if you really feel the need to transcribe a video in some way, why not take the best blog comments or tell someone to take notes and leave it as a comment and then package that along with the video and there’s the notes, there’s the reduced-down transcripts.

So, I’m not saying transcripts are always bad, but most of the time, you don’t need them, and I want you think about why you are providing transcripts – if you’re doing it because it helps to understand the information or because people are just bugging you because they want something to keep them busy. Think about it the next time you try to transcribe content for your membership site.

How should you set up your membership site? What should you use to make the content? What plugins are best? How will you get members? Find out the answers to all these and more at www.membershipcube.com.

Claim Your Access to Membership Cube Now

Having a membership site can be a pretty cool thing and having a place where your community, where your buyers can talk amongst each other is cool as well because it means that your site becomes self-sustaining. It means that if you will have problems, there is a whole group of free support that can help them before you even get a chance to look at the membership site, and it means that they can all work together and build stuff and add their own 2 cents to the conversation as much as they want.

So now the question becomes should you allow this or is it too risky because members can take over and be overbearing and be more troubled than they were? So, how do you decide if you should allow your members to comment on your blog and interact? Well, this depends based on if you’re running a small live class, a monthly membership, or a low-ticket membership.

If you’re running a small live class and that means that people pay upfront $200 or more to get trained live on a subject, then you should allow comments without moderation. This means somebody pays you 200 bucks to get access to a membership site and you offer videos that get dripped out or maybe live webinars that get dripped out, teleseminars, call-in days, some way of them to talk to you live as you create the content. Because you’re giving them a lot of stuff in a shorter amount of time, you might not have the extra time to go and monitor the membership site 24 hours a day. So, you would want to leave comments unmoderated, and if somebody becomes a hassle, simply kick them out of the membership site. So, you’re just talking about a small pilot group who pays one single payment for you to run a class. That’s good for starting the class, but what if you turn that later on into a monthly membership site.

So, all those recordings you made, all the webinar recordings, and the videos, you can now put them into a site where people get the videos maybe at a slower rate – so they get maybe one video a month instead of one a week or maybe a few a month, but they pay on a monthly basis and it’s probably much lower, say 50 bucks or $100 a month instead of several hundred dollars one time. So, now you have a lower quality of subscribers. They didn’t jump on the class early. They might have a smaller budget because they’re only paying per month, so you don’t necessarily want them to be able to comment on every single thing. So, I would still allow comments but turn on comment in moderation. So, if somebody leaves a comment, it gets put in the moderation area, then you have to log in and approve the comment, say the comment is okay, and then it will be appear to everyone else.

Finally, if you are just running a very low-ticket membership site, I’m talking $20 or cheaper, I would not allow comments because you don’t want to have just one membership site, you’re not going to get reached off just one membership site, and you also don’t want to train your subscribers that 20 bucks a month gives them unlimited access to you. So, for a $20 or less membership site, turn off the comments. And then if you ever create a $50 or a $100 membership site in the future, then you can turn on comments and use that as a selling point to justify the higher price because they can leave comments, they can ask questions, and you will respond.

Did you know it’s possible to create an entire membership site in one single day? Well, now you do. Find out how you can do this and build a thriving community of loyal customers.

Claim Your Access to Membership Cube Now