Category: Case Studies

Any membership site, people are going to be able to either stay in for longer or simply drop out, and I have people asking me if people drop out, what kind of access should remain?

And here’s my philosophy: If somebody cancels, they’re kicked out; if they make all payments, they’re in for life and they continue to get updates for life as long as they’re in good standing.

I know you might be tempted to be the nice guy and set up your membership site so that when somebody leaves your site, they still would access to the items they paid for. But the real world does not work like this.

If you’re taking a university course and only paid for half and then dropped the class, you can no longer go back to the class. All you have is the notes that you took from being in that class. If you buy a car and pay for half the car but then stop making payments, you don’t get the key that half of the car you already paid for; you lose the car. So it makes it very easy for you to manage your membership site if somebody is completely kicked out when they cancel. After all, if you provided any kind of downloads which I don’t recommend you do on every single post, but every now and then if you provide downloads, people already have something to take away from that class even after they have canceled.

Having this kind of cancellation policy at first seems harsh, but you can transform this into a selling point by explaining the following. If somebody makes all the payments for your membership site, they’re in for life. So if you have a six-month membership site, and somebody pays only five months then cancels, they have nothing—they’re out.

But if they make all six months’ worth of payments, now they’re in forever and they can come back to the site years from now and still get access to everything.

Why is this so important? Because when somebody’s approaching the end of your membership course, they feel like they’ve gotten most of the stuff, right? If they are in month 5 of 6, how much more impressive and (2:40) changing items are available in that last month. Hard to say. But if you make it a feature where at the end of six months they’re in forever then that added to changes, “Well, I’ve been here for five months.” I may answer, “Why out to that final month?” to get lifetime access. And the good thing about this is that lifetime access can mean quite a bit especially if you provide updates. If somebody for five months they cancel and you update a video or a port even a piece of software, they don’t get it, because they only paid for five months.

But if they pay for six months and a year from now, if something breaks and you fix it, you release a new version then it was very worth while for somebody to stay in for all six months.

Your cancellation policy should be the following: If they cancel, they’re kicked out; if they make all payments, they’re in for life; and if they are in for life, they get lifetime updates to that particular membership site.

Now that you understand the strategy of membership sites, let’s get to how to at www.membershipcube.com.

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When you create a monthly membership site, people are always going to be able to cancel it. That’s just a simple fact. They are not your prisoner when they join your site.  That’s part of the appeal of a membership site that people who join don’t necessarily have to stay in for a year or even to the completion of your course. They’re always going to be able to drop out of that membership site and not have access any longer but also not have to pay you any longer.

So how easy or hard should it be for your members to cancel? My philosophy is to make it easy for them to cancel, encourage them to stay but be upfront and be honest with what happens if they cancel.

So why should you make it easy for somebody to cancel your membership site?

The simple answer is you don’t want chargebacks over complaints. Even if somebody asks you to cancel or asks for a refund, they can always go over your head to your payment processor such as PayPal and leave a complaint with you. If that doesn’t work, they can even go over PayPal’s head and go over their bank or credit card company and do what’s called a chargeback and forcefully cancel this subscription and get their money back. So make it easy for somebody to get out of your membership site because it’s better for you in a long run; it’s not worth hanging on to that $20 just to get one bad mention.

So what do you do instead? Be a normal person. Encourage people to stay. Give them a reason to stay and show why it’s more valuable for them to stay. Have a list of stuff that’s coming up in the next week and the next month so that they don’t have to think about years or months in the future; they only have to think about a few days or weeks ahead of time.

Finally, be upfront about what people are going to lose if they cancel or even better, what they gain when they stay and finish. My favorite for this is if they cancel their membership, they no longer have access to any of the content—that’s fair. But if they stay until the completion of the course, if they graduate, they get access to all the videos for lifetime with no further payments.

I even have some courses where if they finish the whole course, they get a bonus call just for staying in. And it seems like not a lot of extra stuff on your ends but many people who are in your membership site want to get the complete experience—the complete package. They want to graduate so why not make it appealing to them.

And that’s how easy it should be for members to cancel. Make it a simple process if you don’t want complaints, chargebacks or bad publicity but give them a reason to stay; tell them what’s coming up and tell them what they stand to lose if they drop out. I think if you combine those three things, you’ll be able to keep many more people in your membership site than you have right now.

Create a membership site, fill it with content, and market it. Find out everything you need to know right now at www.membershipcube.com.

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I’m sure you’ve heard the craze about membership sites. You create a site with a bunch of content and people pay you month after month to get access on this content whether it’s written materials, downloadable items, software, or video. But many other people have already created the membership sites you have thought of. And they have an affiliate program, meaning you can promote this; you can send paid members into these programs and get a commission back.

So the real question is should you create your own membership site or promote as an affiliate. There are pro’s and con’s to both.

Being an affiliate sounds great at first because you don’t have to create the products. You don’t have to maintain subscribers; you don’t have to e-mail the subscribers so they’ll know about new updates; you don’t have to really do any work to keep people in the membership site. All you have to do is recommend that these people join the site, and it’s up to the membership site owner to keep people in that site.

But what are the bad things about being an affiliate?

You don’t get all the money. You are working hard just to get some kind of a commission and many of these membership sites, you get a low percentage, like 20% or less for recurring commissions; and for some other affiliate programs, you get paid for the initial sale but not for the recurring commissions. So it’s very important that you check the terms of service carefully.

Then the one thing that most affiliates don’t realize, and that’s when you recommend somebody to a membership site, when you send them into that site, you give up that hard to earn and leave. You work hard to get traffic; you work hard to get somebody onto your mailing list and now, you just sent them off onto somebody else’s list.

So think about that. If you had one person on your list, and you got lucky and happened to get that person into five other membership sites, guess what, now they have six people e-mailing them instead of you.

So should you really promote someone else’s membership site as an affiliate or should you make your own? It just depends on how quickly and how easily you can create content.

If you can put together a membership site that last for six months, and you can put that together in two weeks or less, then you definitely should look into creating a membership site. On the other hand, if you struggle to even create one single video or get one single subscriber, then you should start off slow, promote a membership site as an affiliate now and then in the future, get into your own membership site.

Let’s shortcut the process and the hardships it takes you to create content for your membership site. I want to show you how you can create an entire membership site in one single day, stop promoting other people’s stuff as an affiliate and finally, make your very own membership site at www.membershipcube.com.

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If you’re the kind of person who creates any kind of content, whether that’s written articles, information products, reports, videos, audios, interviews, or webinars, there are a lot more uses for you than you might think.

First of all, you could take all of the information you have and roll it into one giant membership site. You can submit your content to other membership site owners to get some link backs and traffic within a membership site and you can re-write your paid content into free articles quickly and easily.

How many reports do you have floating around out on the internet? How many half-finished books do you have? Why don’t you just take everything you have and if it all relates together, put it into one site so somebody can enjoy it and get access to all your stuff at once? And now, plenty of information marketers and they used to be the same way where if somebody wants to get all my stuff, it had to pay $10 here, $20 here, $5 there; why not put it into one site for 100 bucks where they can get all your stuff in one place.

Next, many membership site owners are always herding for content. They would love to have someone come and write even an article or two or make a video or two for their membership site because that would buy them an extra week or two worth of paid members.

So it can’t hurt to contact these membership site owners and ask them if they need a guest columnist; ask them if they need an extra article written for free to add to the membership site. The only catch is that your name stays on it and your resource box stays on it. So this is just like submitting your article to article directories except that it’s inside; somebody else has paid membership area so you are talking to a much more savvy crowd and a much more targeted crowd.

Finally, you have taught certain kinds of information inside your membership site. It can’t hurt to take a couple of those ideas and turn them into articles. So what do I mean? It means that if you explain a 10-step process, take one of those steps, make them into articles. Or if you’re left out with just one extra thing that people might want to know, make that an article. Or if there’s one little question always gets brought up when explaining this step-by-step procedure, make that an article.

The key about writing articles is to deliver similar information but leave out the step-by-step process. They get the basic information for free but join your page site to get the step-by-step process. That’s how. If you’re an article writer or a product creator, you can successfully use membership sites. Make your all in one site, submit to membership site owners and finally re-write your membership content into articles.

Why don’t you have your membership site yet? It’s not your fault; I want to help you, www.membershipcube.com.

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It’s one thing to talk a bunch of theory about membership sites, but it’s way more helpful to actually talk about profitable membership sites that have worked for and worked for you in the past. So let’s talk about some of those.

I’m going to cover three types of membership sites. First of, a shrewd up type of membership site, a live training class that was turned into a membership site and finally, a membership site in a day split up into a membership site.

So the first membership site that really took off for me was a site that I created as a membership site upfront, which I really don’t recommend you do because it’s a lot of work upfront. What I did was worked with a business partner to generate one year’s worth of content before ever launching. What we did is we planned out that 52 weeks; and for every single week, recorded a video, run an audio interview, bought and posted a private labor right product and then at the end of the week, asked for questions. So there was a new post everyday for four days out of every single week.

It was kind of a relief to finish and relief to launch especially because we knew after we launched it that we had enough content for an entire year. It was also a good place to store videos on subjects that didn’t really fit into any of our other products. But the problem was we had to spend weeks, if not months, generating all this content and there were just too much pressure on it. If we launch the membership site and no one bought, then we would be out all of the time we put in to generate this content. So it was a good idea to create all this content upfront for a membership site but I definitely would not recommend it.

So what would I recommend instead? What I would recommend is sell a single-payment membership site and then cut it up later to make it a recurring membership site. When I say single payment, most people think $20, $50; but what I did instead was to charge 200 bucks, 500 bucks, even $1,000 one-time payment for a four- or eight-week training course.

I really enjoyed the live training because it gave me a chance to interact with small group of people, let’s say 20 to 30 students, and that it let me of course correct and really talked about the things that people learning the subject and using the subject wanted to know about.

For example, I’ve run a few a classes on information product creation: how to create an e-book, video course, report—things like that and I thought people want to know the advanced subjects but after doing the live class, I realized people were carried more about choosing the right niche. So I focused more of the course into niche selection.

Now if you get comfortable with creating a membership site, that is a live training course and turning it into a monthly membership site, you’re going to love this last strategy which is to create your membership site in entire day. And what you do is you run eight webinars all in one day with the same audience covering a different topic, starting with the easy stuff, getting into the advanced stuff.

It might be kind of tough; it might be a pretty long day for you; but at the end, you’re entire year’s worth of membership site content is complete. Now, wouldn’t that be a nice feeling—to finish all your content in a single day instead of in a few months?

So those are my three favorite methods of creating membership site. First is creating it as a membership site just by generating lots of content which I did for an internet marketing membership site; turning the live training into a weekly membership which deals with a product creation membership site; and teaching eight subjects in a single day as putting it up into a membership site which deals with a list-building course.

So whichever one sounds great to you, if you’d rather work slowly or quickly, either one will work. The point is to finish what you start; turn it into a membership site; launch it and get a (4.36 dough) there.

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I don’t care how proud you are or how much you worked on your membership site; there’s always room for improvement. With that said, I’m going to share you today three easy improvements you can make to your membership site right now; and that’s having a welcome video, that’s having some question-based post, and having a step-by-step system.

How do you make a welcome video and what should it say?

I definitely recommend that you get a video camera such as a flip camera and stand in front of any blank wall and welcome people personally to your membership site. It doesn’t seem like much but when on most sites, somebody joins and they just see a regular, boring, bunch of texts on the page when they can see you personally talking to them, looking them in the eye—it makes a difference.

So record a video, welcoming them into your site and tell them what to do next. Tell them which post they should read first; tell them if you want them to leave a comment explaining themselves. And this is all going to depend on what type of membership site you have.

For example, if you are having a self-help membership site then you might want to ask somebody, “What’s the one thing in your life you want to improve on?” And you’d be surprised at the number of comments you can get just simply by telling people what to do next and they can get a logical next step for what people should do as soon as they join your membership site.

Next, half-post that asked questions and encourage commenting. Having comments is the best thing ever because you don’t have to do extra much work. You users can generate a big chunk of your content simply by asking follow-up questions or adding in there to send on a video or even telling you what they would like you to create content about next.

So at the end of every video you have and every blog post, ask a question or ask for a comment, but either way ends by asking something.

Remember, turn your training into a system. It’s hard enough to navigate a blog without getting distracted or follow some kind of training course, but when you make it a step-by-step system, people can figure out exactly what steps to take next. They even figure out how close they are to finishing and how long they have left to finish. Also, it makes it easy and catchier to remember; for example, if someone’s on Step 3 or 5, then people can refer to themselves as Step 3 people or Step 4 people; or even better, if you make your system spell out of something in certain letters, it’s even easier to remember.

If you haven’t applied these changes or improvements to your membership site yet, please do them now. Add a welcome video, ask questions and encourage commenting, and make your training into a step-by-step system.

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Just because you create a membership site of your very own or even buy it from someone else, it doesn’t mean you have to be stuck with it for the rest of your life. I have sold membership sites and the favorite one I sold is one that I created with the intention of selling it before I even started with the content. If you plan ahead in this way, you can sell a membership site of yours for many, many times where you earn every month.

So to make sure your membership site sells for the highest amount possible, I have a few tips for your. Mostly, I’m going to tell you how to handle moving over the domain and how to move over the software.

So how you position your site so that it almost flies off the shelves?

Well I have a few tips for you. First of all, leave some potential money on the table. When I sold off this membership site, I did market it as much as I should. I didn’t set up an affiliate program. I didn’t pull out individual project for leading so there were a lot of good ideas to give to the person who bought the membership site.

Another important thing in having a membership site is have some subscribers. It’s one thing to have the site set up. I don’t think they have the content but if you have paying subscribers who pay you month after month, it’s a lot easier to justify a high price.

I only had about 50 subscribers paying $50 a month at the site I sold, but it was still good enough to get a $40,000 payday; and that brings you to my next point—appraise the site.

A normal site with usual paying members is worth about a year or two worth of the monthly revenue it brings in. So because the site made around $2,000 per month, it was worth close to $40,000. Now, to make the site worth that much, we added in a few extra bonuses including some resell rights, a couple of mailings, a few extra sales letters; but in general it was about two years’ worth of membership fees.

And next, show some future potential. Show that these things can be improved. You left money on the table; show that the (2:28 affiliate) program is easy to add. A big selling point for this is 12 months’ worth of content was already scheduled into the site. So the person buying it didn’t just buy a membership site but how will these expenses. If you let it sit for an entire year, it would still make a bunch of money. So that is the future potential. A big thing about this is not just to ask for a price but showing a lot of ideas about what their buyer can do.

So now you sold the site. Maybe you’re thinking about selling the site and trying to figure out what to do next.

Well after the site has been sold, usually you work out some kind of agreement and use a service such as Escrow.com to hold the money until the transfer is complete.

Now what’s up with this “to be transferred?”

The two most important things are the domain name and the payment account. So obviously if you have this site posted on a .com name, it’s going to be moved over. So you only need to get the buyer to request a domain and be moved over to his registrar; and you’re going to have to unlock the domain and maybe you can change to their details.

Your Escrow is needed to move the payment account over. Now if you have your own merchant account or PayPal, you might be screwed and might have to sell off the entire account to them. Now if you’re using service like ClickBank, which I was using because I have planned to sell off the site, you can simply change the login information and the payment information, meaning the owner’s name and mailing address, and now the account belongs to him. So ClickBank is very friendly about selling off sites but PayPal not so much. When somebody is paying you through PayPal, they’re stuck in that account.

And finally, you need to move over the software that you used to power the site. This means your membership site’s life. If you have purchased an unlimited site license to run your site, you’re going to have to buy a brand new single-site license and then transfer it over into that person’s name.

Another issue is things like the autoresponder or the list. So the important thing that you would mind as far as moving a site in someone else’s name is to set up the whole thing as a separate business; set up its own payment account, its own domain name, its own license, and its own autoresponder.

To position your own membership site for sale, leave money on the table, have some subscribers and appraise it. Then when someone buys it, transfer over the domain name, payment account, membership site license, and the e-mail autoresponder.

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