Category: Members

Attrition is one of those things that most membership site creators don’t think about until they’ve already gone through with the headache. The simple fact is that you are going to have people dropping out out of your membership site every single month. It’s just going to happen. There is no such thing as having 100% retention – in other words, 100% of the people staying in your site just does not happen. So, how you keep this membership site attrition as low as possible? I have three tips for you. The upfront about the re-billing, send them email reminders, and announce upcoming posts ahead of time.

So first of, be straight up about how you’re going to be billing your members. This seems like it would do the opposite of what you want but being upfront, being honest is going to be what it keeps your members in. So, on your sales letter, be upfront about the payments, tell them what the initial payment, what they get as soon as they make that payment, and then what the future payments will be and how often. For example, if you want a $50 a month membership site for six months, then say on the sales letter, “Your initial payment will be $47 tonight and then $47 every month for the next six months.” That way, when that billing comes in, when they see their credit card bill, then they know exactly what’s that for. And to help that, also state what the name on the credit card bill will look like. And then I’ll just prevent people from forgetting or wondering about what a certain bill is and charge them back without even investigating because a lot of people simply won’t.

On top of that, the next thing you can do is to send out email reminders. So, if your membership site updates once per week, then get them on an autoresponder after they join that sends them an email once per week, telling them what is new in the membership site, what they missed if they have not logged in for a week. The reason why this helps is because people forget to log back in. If somebody joins your membership site and they never get an email from you ever again, then they might go for two or three months without realizing they’re in that site, joined, and then be overwhelmed, confused, and behind. So, send email reminders and you might think that this will remind people each month to cancel. But remember, they chose to join your site. So, it’s in everyone’s best interest that you remind them of what they paid for this week or this month and tell them where to go and click and log in to go get it.

And then finally this brings you to my next point, announce upcoming posts. It’s one thing to say, “Here’s what you missed so far,” but if there’s a really important post coming up, like a long video or a big webinar or even a live webinar, send an email reminder a few days ahead of time so they can take a few minutes or hours out of their schedule on a particular day. This once again helps people to consume your content and to just make time in their schedule to make it a habit, make it a regular thing to check in on what you have just added to your membership site.

Those are my top three methods of reducing membership site attrition and increasing membership site retention – the upfront about the re-bills, send email reminders, and announce upcoming posts.

Go ahead find out how to not just make a membership site but to keep your members in it for as long as possible.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I don’t know what your reason is for considering a membership site. It might be the prospect of getting a recurring income, it might be the idea of being able to cut off refunders after they have bought and refunded, but on a more basic level, just from a simple download delivery standpoint from just selling a one off single payment product, a membership site works very well as a simple download area that you can add to and make more fancy later. So, for a membership site download area, the three best things about it are the membership levels, the content drip, and the lost password.

So, what is a membership level? You might have a membership site where you have a silver level and a gold level. And maybe for the silver level, people who join get some kind of instructional videos, but for the gold level, they also get live training and Q&A calls. So, in the past, you have set up two separate sites to accomplish this. But with most modern membership software, you can use the same membership site but depending on a particular user’s level, they see what you want them to see.

When you create a membership content in a WordPress blog, the way most membership software does it is they add tiny check boxes underneath your blog post. So, when you make a post, you can check the box and say “this should be only shown to the silver level, this should be only shown to the gold level, or this appears to both the silver and gold level.” So, by having these levels, you can show different contents to different kinds of people and even host different products entirely in the same membership site. So, you could have one membership level that’s called the intro product and another membership level called the advanced product and that is just a centralized download area depending on which product the person bought, they’re in a different level and see a different download link. So, the levels are very important for download delivery. It saves you a lot of time and a lot of headaches because you can host a lot of your downloads in the same location.

Next, to give your users ongoing training, extra content, you can use this thing called the drip. Drip content means that people join your site and get another small lesson or another small article or video every few days or every few weeks. So, whether you’re doing a recurring product or not, even if somebody pays one single payment, it’s really cool to be able to drip out loyalty bonuses to keep them interested to keep them from refunding over time.

So, those are both advantages for your users, but the biggest one for you in particular is it reduces customer support. Now, you might be thinking how does it do that. Because most modern membership software uses the WordPress blog platform, they can use what’s called a lost password feature. WordPress has this built in. So, if somebody tries to log in to their membership site and they forgot their username or password, they can click one simple link that says, “Have you lost your password?” They click on it, they fill out their email address, and it will mail them a brand new password. So, this cuts down on you having to reset their download or go and find their link. They can reset it themselves, they get a new password, and then they can log in.

So, the three big advantages for a membership site download delivery are the membership levels, drip content, and the lost password functionality.

Robert Plank wants to show you how to go from zero to having a fully functional profitable membership site in no time flat.   Find out how you can use your membership site for download delivery and much more.

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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.

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