Category: Case Studies

A good chunk of membership sales letters I look at don’t have just one payment button; they have two. They give people a choice between paying the entire membership all at once or paying in installments; or even worst, they might offer a high level, a platinum-level membership or let somebody choose between that or lesser gold-level membership.  And I’m telling you right now, don’t do that. You should only offer one single payment option on your sales letter. If you ever feel like you need to offer a different payment option, that should be a completely different sales letter.

So here’s my thinking. First of all, most people who run very long payment plans—for example, if someone’s paying 50 bucks a month in chunks for a $1,000-program, they’re going to be a little hassled to do it because they can barely afford the payments; and they’re going to be the ones who participate the least in the membership site. I wish this wasn’t the case but it’s simply the way thing is. And it’s true also with trial members.

If someone is in a trial period from my membership site, they’re going to be also a pain to do it because they barely wanted to buy anyway and they had to kind of force that by having the trial offer. So most people in long payment plans or trials are really hassled to do it, which is your first reason for not offering multiple payment options and just to sell the membership site upfront.

The next reason is, an old saying that goes, “The confused mind never buys.” If someone goes to the button of your sales letter and they see a button for platinum subscribers and a button for gold subscribers; now suddenly they’re going to be scrolling back up, looking around, and trying to figure out the difference between the platinum and the gold levels. It may not seem like a big deal, but just adding those extra few seconds of thinking, makes it all the more likely that your visitor is going to leave your site, just out of their confusion or distraction.

So what do you do instead? Get them in the membership site now, and upsell them later. So if you want to get someone on some kind of extra coaching or some additional products, there’s nothing wrong with putting extra payment buttons inside the membership site; but I will definitely focus on getting them in some kind of membership site instead of getting them in the perfect membership site. Get the sell now, worry about upselling later. Don’t deal with long payment plans, trials, or with multiple payment buttons on their page because it’s just going to be confusing.

I’m telling you right now, “Keep it simple.” Don’t offer multiple payment options; just give them the one single button on your sales letter whether it’s a membership site or not.

Robert Plank wants to help you get your own membership site starting from scratch today before 5 o’clock enter your name and email address below right now and we’ll get started together.

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Depending on whether you choose a newsletter open-ended or fixed term membership site, it’s going to drastically affect what kind of membership site you create. How many hours per week you put into it and how much money you make? So let’s go through the difference between these two very important types of membership site.

The first type is a newsletter. This is just simply an e-mail autoresponder. This is where somebody pays you money; they get put on and e-mail subscriber list and your autoresponder sends them lessons automatically every few days. This is the cheapest and easiest way to create a so-called “membership site,” and I like to do this for simple one-time payment products.

This is kind of cheap. You probably already have an e-mail autoresponder. You just go and add extra messages, but the problem with this is that you have almost no control over where the content goes. You’re always going to have people e-mailing you back, ask you for yesterday’s e-mail, last week’s e-mail; it’s not stored anywhere and it’s a real headache to take people off of the list if they cancel, refunds, or accidentally even unsubscribe. It’s a hassle to maintain. But if you’re just selling a simple single-payment product, it’s always a good idea to having some extra followups.

The next type of membership site is probably what you normally think of when you hear the word “membership site.” This is a download area. This is an open-ended membership site where you charge people month after month forever. They pay a monthly fee and can log in with their own unique username and password, and get access to your old articles, your old videos, and your old audios.
But the problem with the open-ended membership site is it continues on forever. So in a year from now, if you still have subscribers in this membership site and your heart just isn’t in it, you just don’t want to update the site, too bad; you still have too. So it becomes a chore and over time, less and less people are going to be in the membership site, so you’re now stuck.

The solution to this is to create a fixed-term membership site. This is just like the open-ended membership site where somebody can log in to your webpage, but the difference is you have an ending date. So your membership site might only last for six months; after six months there ain’t forever.
So instead of an ongoing training area, you instead have a course—a class people take—and after six months, they have graduated.

So I definitely recommend you to create a fixed-term membership site instead of a newsletter or an open-ended site because you get the best of both worlds. It’s easy to set up; it’s simple to maintain; and you can always go and change it later whereas with ongoing membership site, you’re always trying to catch up to this month’s worth of content and there’s no time left to market your site the way you should market it.

So those are the differences between a newsletter open ended and fixed-term membership site.
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For some reason when people think about what content is, they immediately grab and take towards written materials. Written materials are great. Most of what’s on the internet is written materials but there’s one problem; it takes a lot of time to write stuff down.

Also, most people are simply not writers so even if they can speak out a paragraph or a page or two, they simply run out of gas. What do you do instead? You should create audios instead. Not because they’re cool; not because they’re the future of the internet; because they’re easier to make than writing things down.

Audio is easier to create than video. Video is pretty easy too but the problem with the video is you have to worry about what’s on your screen; you have to worry about changing the picture on the screen every now and then. And this means, if you are filming a live action video, you have to change your expression on the picture, on the video. And the problem with that is sometimes you have to look down at your notes.

The similar problem with screen-captured video because it’s showing a PowerPoint, you have to change slides, change the bullets; but the advantage with an audio is you simply have three things to talk about—three points—and then you just talk and people get the same idea.

Anyone knows how to talk; anyone can talk on the phone and there for you can too, and you too can make audios. And it’s easy to talk for just ten minutes. I’m not talking about being at keynote speaker or anything. Just talk about a subject for 10 minutes, time yourself, and at the end of 10 minutes, wrap it up and tell people where they should go next.

Even if you’re speaking slightly slower the normal, you still talk at about 150 words per minute. So if you talk for 10 minutes, that’s 1,500 words you didn’t have to write. That’s over five pages. It’s very easy to make 10-minute audios and avoid the hassle of all that extra writing.

When you put audio on your site, it’s important to remember that you don’t necessarily have to provide the download of the audio. There are plenty of audio players for WordPress that allow you to take an audio file and simply play it on the page. There’s no way to “Right Click” and “Download.”

It’s up to you how generous or uptight you want to be on the subject, but it’s much easier to get comments on a blog post if you don’t provide a download. This is because people have to sit at the computer and listen to your audio for those few minutes, and they’re already back on that page when it’s time to leave a comment.

Asking somebody to sit for three to 10 minutes to listen to your audio is not that much to ask.

Should you add audio to your website? Yes, you should! Because it’s easier to create audio than video; you just talk; you just have a few things to say, a loose out one, and you let yourself go. It’s easier to talk for 10 minutes and have a complete explanation of some subject and that saves you writing five to 10 pages or more; and if you embed this audio on a webpage or a blog, it’s easy to get people to click on a link, leave a blog comment, or do whatever it is you want them to do at the end of that audio.

I hope you saw today that creating content for a membership site is easy. Now that we’ve got that issue out of the way, let’s get your membership site set up.

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