Category: Podcast

This is where we talk about making money, getting your membership up and online as soon as possible using WordPress and WishList member. Getting not only your first sale, your first buyer, but a steady influx of sales and buyers whether you’re charging a monthly forever site, a single payment site, a fixed term site or anywhere in between. I have five quick questions for you as were getting started here.

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We’re going to talk about magic tricks in your marketing. The whole point of magic tricks as you might’ve heard different clichés and things like that that will as time goes on, especially on the Internet as we have things like Twitter and Facebook and text messaging, that messages get shorter and that people’s attention spans are become less and less. I mean I guess that’s true. Why would we fight it and why if that all is true, if attention spans are a lot less than they were even a couple years ago, then why are you having big long sales pitches and things like that?

Why are you listing all the different bullet points and all the different things that are in your site especially on say like a live webinar or things like that. Why are you going on for 3, 4, 5 hours when maybe there is some kind of a version of a 5-minute or 30-minute presentation where you just give me the good stuff. Or you can even explain to me the hot thing that will get me to join your site.

For example my name is Robert Plank. Me and Lance Tamashiro have a course called membershipcube.com. This is a course where you can get your membership site online tonight. I could go on and on talk all the different plug-ins you get and all the different trainings and how the hours of stuff and how much we labored to create that. Why would I? What’s so important about me? What’s way more important is you and what you’ll do with that training.

Out of all the possible things I could talk about with membership sites and why you should join our membership cube course, the number one reason why you should join our membership cube course is that we give you everything to set up your membership site and get it online tonight in literally in just a few clicks. We’ll give you a membership site clone that includes a plug-in called WishList member, that includes our plug-ins like WP Drip, WP Notepad, WP Kunaki, which I’ll explain as his podcast moves forward. The point is, you get it set up tonight.

Now why am I telling you this? Why am I giving you basically are a commercial break? Because I want you to think about your own offers whether they exist or whether you’re going to set something up. What thing could you tell me in five minutes or less that will get me to jump on it right now? If it’s something that people want like you can set up the membership site tonight. If it’s that you can set up drip content, whatever it is, give me the quick demo, give me the hot item that pushed me over the edge and gets me to buy.

I’ve had all kinds of arguments with people who think that they need to have a three and a half hour long sales pitch or five hour long sales pitch. Maybe worked really hard on that. If you’re talking for five hours straight, I don’t care if it’s in person, on a webinar no one’s going to stay around for all that. No one’s going to listen for all that. The point is that we need to conform a little bit to this shortened attention span and have a quick demo. If you have software, if you have a system, if you have a checklist that he can show me, a huge result that I’ve never gotten and dude in just a few minutes or seconds even, that is huge and that should be about the goal and the focus of any kind of selling that you do.

My five quick questions are these; number one, what can you demonstrate for me? Not just list all the different features and benefits and all that kind of tired stuff in your offer, what can you demo for me? There was another different person who was creating what’s called an email autoresponder or I can email broadcast service where you can get people to join a newsletter and then when it comes time to talk to those say 20,000 or 50,000 people who joined the newsletter, type in one message, send it out.

This person was so fixated because they had “worked super hard” on their email or autoresponder and broadcast system that they seem to need to explain that, well you can create all these kinds of cool forms, you can send all these kinds of cool messages, you can send messages on a delay. I’m thinking you’ve lost me, you’ve list so many things. If I get to item number seven I’ve forgot what items one through five were. What can you demo? What can you show me on a screen, click a few buttons, boom. Now these emails get sent out.

Or boom now these emails gets out to one part of the list. Or boom it creates this whole email sequence so that maybe somebody joins my newsletter and if they don’t confirm their registration, I’ll send them another email. Or I can send an email to them if they don’t open the link in that email within 24 hours, maybe you can send another email to them saying, “Why didn’t you open the link?” Cool stuff like that. Or if they click the link but didn’t buy, maybe your system send an email to me saying, “You clicked the link but didn’t buy.” Little cool things like that where there’s no way you’re going to list all the nooks and crannies of your offer, but you can have this quick demo.

Question number two, what to do you have that’s proprietary? This is all about being unique and standing out from the crowd and all that good stuff and what we have that’s proprietary usually is the speed. Maybe it’s the speed, simplicity, ease-of-use, maybe you include some kind of a software or there is a result that people can’t get any other way. I’ll give you another example, I use a service called eclincher.com. I’m just a sponsor, I don’t get a commission from that. What I’m just saying, I use a service called eclincher.com.

This is a service where I can load up a queue or a list of items that I would like to post to my Twitter account. I mean these kind of things exist where you can saw time delay tweets and things like that. What’s unique about eClincher is I can then recycle my post. For example, I can load up my list or my queue with about 200 of my old blog posts with about 87 of my podcast episodes with different links I found useful. Then it minute will maybe once every six hours post one of those links to my Twitter feed. Just that alone saves time. Then once that list is used up, its exhausted maybe 30 days later it’s gone through all the items in that list, then it starts all over again and begins posting to Twitter a new. That’s not only a cool demo, but that’s also a quick feature that maybe a lot of people are asking for but no one else really provides other than this service called eClincher.

Question number three, what can you give away that most people charge for? When we’re talking about giving things away, what we’re talking is for example may be you’re selling a course on how to publish a book on Amazon. That’s always a really good example I like to go to. If everyone has a book about how to get published on Amazon, maybe you could demonstrate that. Once you have the book done, how to fill in the form on Amazon and get it done. Or one thing that we do many times is we will brainstorm or organize the table of contents in the book we’re going to create.

This is like we can attack from a couple different angles when we can say, “What are people having problems with? Where do they short link? If the struggle that they have a book and they don’t know how to get it out there or maybe even more people have the issue of they don’t even have a book to begin with. Then we can make fun of all the clichés and all the things people assume. Like maybe we say that well people think that writing a book takes six months, takes 12 months. Maybe we can look up the statistics on how many books get published every day.

I don’t know if it’s like 10,000 a day but it some huge huge number and how were you even going to get lost in the noise and that number is only going to enlarge. Or we say what is the average amount of money that people make from their books? Especially if they’re self-published maybe it’s $5, maybe it’s zero dollars. Then we can demonstrate how to get over this little stumbling block. What I like to do is give away a little more than I’m comfortable with.

The reason for that is that it’s already being given away. If you go on YouTube right now and you search for how to publish a book to kindle, how to publish a book to create space, you might even find some of my videos on that. Give away something that most people charge for. You give away this thing that you see your competitors charging for. In a lot of ways it discounts your competitors, it makes your competitors maybe not worthless but diminishes the thing that they’re selling. Because well they can go and buy from someone else for 500 bucks or get it from you for free.

How do you win in that situation? How do you teach what others sell and give it away for free and still make money? Because you still have remember question number two, something that’s proprietary. Maybe we have some kind of a Kindle software, Kindle cover creator, a way to monitor and increase your Amazon ranking or we don’t actually show how to dictate and edit the books. Those are pieces of the step-by-step course that we show. There’s definitely something to having a membership site, a members area where you have video training and you have a very clear step by step system.

You say, here are the steps to getting a book created. I’m going list you the steps, I’m going to go and perform the steps, I’m going to perform an actual case study. Then once I’m done, I will list the steps over again and that’s one module of my membership site. We create the membership first and then when it comes time to promote it, then we find little pieces of things that we can give away for free that many other inferior marketers and teachers and trainers will charge money for.

Question number four, what must-have tool will your buyers login to access once a day for 30 days? This could be anything from if you’re selling an email marketing course, you could include a list of your best swipe files. If you are teaching a course about blogging or writing a book, you could include a list of daily writing prompts. We have a plug in for this which you can get for free as part of membershipcube.com and is called WP Notepad. This is a plug-in that installs with WordPress and runs with any WordPress based membership plug-in.

We recommend WishList member and we include WishList number. We actually buy licensed a copy for you out of our own pocket when you join the membershipcube.com. The point is we use this plug-in that we’ve created called WP Notepad and allows you to do a number of things. It allows you to create a checklist list on your membership content where somebody can view a video and then go and check off boxes as they have completed these tasks. It allows you to add a special note taking area underneath videos and things in your membership site that way people can type in their quick notes, they can they can write down like if they watched half of the video, where did they you left off, they can write down the important things that they thought were important and then come back to that.

Your member’s area saved those notes for them. The best part about the WP Notepad is that it also includes fill in the blank forms. When we provide things like templates or we say things like copy and paste this into this website, then we can have the written template in front of them with little pieces, little phrases and sentences where they can click and then edit and change those phrases right there in front of them, so that they have their own personalized template there. Let’s say that let’s keep going with that book publishing membership site, right? We say here’s how to publish a book and maybe one of the final modules is and then how to promote the book.

Then maybe part of that involves interviewing other similar authors for you. Maybe we say, what we want you to do is go and find the other book authors in your niche and go look them up and contact them. Then we can’t just say, send him an email ask them for an interview because I’m not sure what you mean by that, I’m not sure what the exact wording is, so we exactly word in the email to send to people but then we leave little blank spaces for people to fill in their name, their niche, their book. Then that way it is a customized template.

Then the final question for you today is what can you do for your customers within the first 48 hours after they join? In Membership Cube, we get your membership site online tonight. In our webinar crusher course, you run your first webinar and the very first module. In our podcast crusher course, your podcast is online the very first module. In our makeup product book creation course, your book is dictated and ready to go in that very first module within 48 hours. I’m asking what can you provide, what tangible results can your buyers have, not within the first 30, 60, 90 days that sucks.

I’m talking about the first 48 hours if not the first one hour if you can handle it. Very important though is I’m not saying that you’ll learn stuff. By the way you should remove the word learn from all of your marketing. No one likes to learn. Learning is from school, learning means you get a bunch of useless facts and figures, you don’t actually get something out of it. Instead of learning, what will we actually have created by the time they’re finished with that first module. Notice how I didn’t say you join or make a product course and you will learn how to publish a book, you won’t have the history of Amazon or the overview of getting a book out there, you’ll have a book. Just like in Membership Cube, you’ll have a membership site.

Let me recap for you those five quick questions that you should ask yourself whether you are going back and updating a membership site or creating a new offer for people, what can you demo? What do you have that’s proprietary? What can you give away that most people charge for? What must-have tool will they log in to access once a day for 30 days? Finally what can you do for them within 48 hours that is not learning but is instead a tangible thing that they have created? As I’m winding down this call, I want to remind you that you need to have some kind of a system or an end goal in your training.

You should be building towards something. A certain amount of traffic in social media, a book is published online, a membership site is online. They actively trading stocks and maybe they’ve grown their portfolio by 10%. They bought a rental property and they are now renting it out. Whatever that niche is, be building towards something and whatever your you’re teaching, have it systematized. Which means that even an idiot could do it, even a 10-year-old could do it, just by going through the steps. Let’s say that you’re teaching traffic, let’s say you’re teaching how to set up Facebook and Google ads as part of your course.

Well you might think that there’s a certain amount of judgment eyeballing but anything you do, you can always look at and say, “Well if I’m creating a Facebook ad, let me just show you how I do it. Here are the eight steps to creating a Facebook ad.” For me doing my research, choosing keywords, choosing a title, choosing a URL now I’ve created the ad. Then I can go back and look at the ad and I can know if it’s performing or not, if I’m paying too much. Then here are the steps I take to tweak that ad. We want you to have a four part process, four milestones from getting someone from point A to point B.

Each of those milestones will probably take about 60 to 90 minutes to explain and show and it usually involves about six steps. We have some PowerPoint slides, we say I want to show you how I set up a Facebook ad. Here’s PowerPoint slide, here’s the bullet point and how I do it. Then leave the PowerPoint slides and open up your browser and actually set up some Facebook ads so they understand the case study. It’s not just theory it’s not just test ad one, test ad two, you’re setting up some real actual Facebook ads.

Then at the end of that milestone, you give them a challenge, you give them action items, make it exactly four that way you don’t have to overload them. List four quick action items that they should now take after they view your module about Facebook ads. We’re talking about having some kind of a system. I want you to avoid the copout of saying, just go to this site and get it done, right? I’ve seen a lot of people do this. They have a course on Facebook ad, they say, “Well you want to go to Facebook.com you want to go to click, create new ad. See here’s what the screen looks like, buy now.

That sucks. Or if you’re publishing a book about Amazon or having a course on how to get a book published, then a lot of crappy membership site training says, “Well here’s Amazon’s page, you’re welcome.” I want to know what site do I go to to get the cover made. I want to know what tool I used to record me dictating out a book. I want to know what site I go to to hire someone to get the words I’ve spoken out transcribed into written words. Then now we are combining how I record a book. Then how I go and get someone to transcribe it for me.

Then how I get someone to edit it for me. Then how I go and get someone to create a book cover for me. Then I can take all that and then go to Amazon and publish it. Even then, now this is where the templates and checklists come in. Because you can say when I create the title for my book, here are the steps I take. When I list the keywords and description, here are the steps I take. Here’s what you should price your book at. That way it removes the guesswork. Remove the guesswork when people are not only in your training and going through it, but also when people are about to buy from you. What this magic trick avoids are a couple different things. It avoids you having the tab by tab explanation.

Let me explain. Membership Cube shows you how to install software tool called WordPress on your website, how to install a plug-in called WishList member, how to add in your first content and how to create a button to charge money for access to that site. That’s all in the first module. Notice how we say the end goal is this, the end goal is the site’s up, you can charge some money, now only focused on exact screens and clicks to get to that goal. There are probably 100 different screens and clicks that we avoid looking at because we’re only concerned with, go here, click this, click that, you’re done the step-by-step process. Conversely, is that a word?

I think so, a lot of other membership site training says, “Well here’s WordPress. Here’s one where you could install WordPress. Here’s a second where you could install WordPress. Here’s a third where you could install WordPress.” Now I’m already overloaded because now I already have to choose one out of these three options. Then you say, “Well here’s WordPress and now it’s installed and see there’s this one tab, you probably won’t need this, but let me just show you this tab.

Here’s the media, here’s the links tab, here’s the settings tab, here’s the plug-ins tab.” You’re showing me tons and tons of things and you think it’s useful because your brain is playing tricks on you. Your brain thinks that because you’re putting in the time and all that energy, that’s useful but it’s not. You’re opening up. Like I had a list of maybe five questions and you could have answered them but now you’ve opened up 50 more questions for me. Don’t do the tab by tab, only show me the things I need to click on.

Also avoid the overload. I’ve bought courses where there were some useful video training and stuff like that. Let’s keep with the example of book publishing on Amazon. As a bonus it also included something like 20 interviews, now 11 hours of interviewing some other authors. I could get what they were going for, they were going for where you want to have a book on Amazon, cool, buy my course, watch some videos. Then once you’re done, every now and then you can just tune in and listen to some cool interviews with people. Then I look at that 11 hours and I’m thinking I’m never going to complete this. I’m never going to listen to 11 hours of audios.

Even if I do, I’m going to get so off on different tangents and some of the advice with these different people you’re interviewing is conflicting and I’m just overloaded. Instead of the tab by tab and certainly overload, give people everything they need in one place. That is the advantage to having a membership site. Whether it’s single payment or multi-payment that you’re charging for, high ticket low ticket, the advantage is that someone buys from you, pays you money and they create an account, they can always go back to log into.

They log in and you can dump in whatever stuff you want and organize it inside your WordPress membership site. In whenever your teaching, whether it’s real estate, stock trading, knitting, raising a horse, becoming a veterinarian, souping up your car whatever, include whatever necessary software, templates or copy and paste elements. The best way to do that, well first of all is have the right mind-set of not overloading people and instead selling them on the idea of joining your membership site with the cool magic trick. Preferably log into your site and click around and show them some cool stuff.

We have another, it is a membership site but it’s a service called website remote which allows you to remotely manage all of your WordPress sites all in one place. When I promote that, I log into the website when I say check this out, I can see all my WordPress sites, blogs and membership sites by the way, all the sites in one place. I can click one button and I can update all my sites. That’s really all people need to see. They need to know what’s the hard way that takes a long time, it’s not fun where I’ve been struggling versus the easy shortcut way where I can click a button and all that stuff I hated now it’s fun again.

You have that mind-set and also use our tool called WP Notepad to include whatever kind of checklist, fill in the blank forms, or step-by-step system you have and join us inside of membership Q to claim your axis to not just WordPress but WishList member and our various plug-ins including WP Notepad to make your training fun, to make it quick, simple and easy so people can get to that end goal because that’s what the heck they were paying you for, right? They had a problem, so it could have been they have trouble setting up a website, they see your solution, they buy it and they get that result from you.

I think that’s pretty simple. Let me know by emailing me at robert.plank@gmail.com. Go to membershipsitepodcast.com/iTunes please and rate and review our podcast. It helps us rise in the rankings and it motivates me to talk to you more and help you out with your own membership site. This has been episode three of the membership site podcast. Robert Plank explains magic trick marketing with your WordPress membership sites. Be sure to subscribe rate and review and I’ll talk to you very soon.

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Membership Site Podcast, episode 2. Start Your WordPress and WishList Member Membership Sites With a Bang. I’m Robert Plank, and welcome back to the Membership Site Podcast. My website is membershipcube.com. We’re going to talk today about how to make your membership sites interesting. When we’re talking about membership sites, we’re talking about you creating an online course, that e-learning kind of platform where somebody has a real marketplace need.

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Somebody needs to find out how to code webpages. They need to know how to use Microsoft Word, and Excel, and QuickBooks. Whatever the reason, they want self-help. They want real estate, and for whatever path that brought them to you, they join your membership site. They go do what’s called a “sales page” or a “sales letter.” You can see one of those at membershipcube.com. They click a payment button, and after they check out or pay you money, then they have access to fill out a form where they can choose a username and a password, and also in that process, enter an email address for them to log back in, but this is huge.

Membership sites don’t have to be recurring, and they shouldn’t be recurring at first. If you have something to sell, if you can package it into something that’s $10 or $100, that’s something that you will actually be able to complete as opposed to having this pie in the sky dream of a $5 a month or a $10 a month membership site, and you say, “I’m going to update it every single day. I’m going to fill it with interviews. I’m going to get 10,000 members.”

I would rather see you charge something that’s a single payment site and maybe a little bit out of your comfort zone, maybe a little bit where there’s marketplace price resistance, or maybe you charge 100 bucks, 200 bucks, 500 bucks where you aren’t normally used to selling at that price range, and it’s a lot less work to make the amount of money that you need to live a comfortable lifestyle, and because you are providing these videos, or these written materials, or whatever you have in mind inside a membership site, you don’t necessarily have to pile on a ton of stuff.

Now, I want you to write down 4 quick things. I want you to write down the words: want, need, long-term, and Q&A. Why did I have you write down these 4 things? Because this is the structure we’re going to talk about today. In our course Membership Cube, we give you all the tools you need to set up a site, and that is mainly WordPress and WishList Member, which is a plug-in that installs on top of WordPress that protects your content. By doing that, you can take payments using PayPal, or Stripe, or ClickBank, and then control access to some or all of your content.

Instead of trying to pile in tons and tons of stuff, we want you to follow this format, which I’m going to unpack for you today, which is want, need, long-term, Q&A. What we want you to do is to create what we call a “4-module membership site.” Now, the reason someone is going to buy from you is because they are stuck. They have a real legitimate problem, and your training, checklists, materials, coaching, and all that stuff, that solves their problem, and we want you to solve that problem in 4 easy, manageable milestones, in 4 modules.

Now, a module is about a 60 to 90-minute video training session. We’re not talking about lots of goofy little 5-minute videos, but we’re also not talking about having a huge 8, 10, 20-hour training course. We’re talking about 4 hours total, 6 hours at the most where you give someone some real actionable stuff, and this is key, actionable. We’re not teaching the dictionary. We’re not un-turning every rock. We’re not giving people the history of real estate or every possible facet of hypnosis. We’re giving them this solution broken down into 4 modules to their very common problem, want, need, long-term, Q&A. Keep that in mind as we’re moving forward today.

Now, here’s the big reason why this is important because most people only think about generating the content that they’re going to have inside of their members area, right? If I’m telling you that you should have a 4-part hypnosis course … and by the way, you should, of course, have a membership site about knowledge that you already have. If you don’t have any knowledge, then partner up with someone who does, but I would rather that you take some skills that you can already prove, and show, and talk about fluently for lack of a better term as opposed to trying to learn, and make it up, and reach as you go along.

The good news with that is that if you don’t have the knowledge quite yet, you can either partner up with someone or do a thing called “resell rights” or buy private label rights where you can for, sometimes, $10 or $20. Buy the rights to a video course that you can then put into a membership site, and so the whole reason behind this is while you might get hung up on creating the content for your site, and I’ve known a few people. It’s not just one person, but I’ve known people where the person comes to me and says, “Okay. Well, I’ve got some content made, but I need to make 6 months of content. I need to make a year of content. I need 2 years of content before I can start selling it.”

I’m thinking, first of all, that you’re putting up obstacles in front of yourself making money. If you already have any amount of months of content for a membership site, then you should put it online and at least slap a payment button on a sales page to see if it gets some sales, and so here’s the thing is that … So, you make a sales letter. I don’t want to unpack all these stuff about making a sales letter today, but what you can do is make a simple webpage that explains to someone first why they’re here.

Have an attention-grabbing headline and tell them, “Well, are you stuck when it comes to flipping real estate houses?” I don’t know if that’s … Should I call them real estate houses? “Are you stuck when you’ve installed the dream that you could just buy a house and turn it around or rent it out and just have all this free money?” or, “You’ve been told that you can go and find a house for $50,000, and fix it up, and then sell it for $120,000. Isn’t that the dream, but it wasn’t so easy, was it? Well, I tried that too. I tried this. I tried that. I tried all these different things that didn’t work, but finally, I stumbled on the formula, and I had to do these specific steps.”

“By doing that, I was able to, for example, flip this property, rent out that property, and I’ve taken the skills I’ve developed, and I’ve taken the system I’ve refined over the years to flip X number of houses for Y amount of dollars, and I call my package the ‘Super Real Estate System Course,'” whatever you want to call it. You say, “It’s the best course for anyone who wants to make money from rental properties, make money from flipping, stuff like that,” and then we can list the 4 modules and list why they’re important to our buyers.

Now, what are these 4 modules? How are we going to break down this huge problem of buying and selling homes in real estate? I’m sure you can think off the top of your head of some easy ways to break it down, right? You can have one module where you show someone how to use … I don’t know, use some website or use some software to narrow down the neighborhood, and maybe a list of 10 possible homes that they could scoop open by if it meets a certain criteria. Maybe, at the same time, get approved for some kind of online financing to buy that house.

Then, the second module could be how to actually buy the house and go through the paperwork, and how to own it in the proper way. Then, the third module could be how to then rent the house out, and then the fourth module could be how to then sell the house once it meets some other kind of criteria like if the value of the home rises to a certain amount you were expecting or if the house is too much work or something along with whatever you think of along the way.

Now, what did I just explain to you there … By the way, after you list your 4 modules, you say, “Now, here’s all the really exciting and emotional reasons to buy my real estate course, and here’s some bonuses,” so maybe you add a one-on-one coaching call. Maybe you add some extra videos you make or you have your checklists and templates. You say, “There’s a 30-day money-back guarantee. If for any reason you don’t like this course, you can get your money back. Now, here’s the button to buy it.” That is a formula for what we call a “sales letter.”

Now, I want you to pay attention that when I listed … At first, explains the problem, then the solution, and the actual solution was the course as a whole, this super realistic course, imaginary thing that we’ve just dreamt up. Then, I unpack the individual modules of this course where we start off from the beginnings, the basics.

The first module is tricky because … We don’t want to overload them, but we also at the same time want to give them bigger and better results than they’ve ever experienced in their entire lives at this point when it comes to real estate because here is the thing is if you are thinking about making a membership site, or you’re in the process of making one, or you’re stuck with the chore of having to update a monthly membership site, here’s the problem is if you say, “Well, you can join my site called ‘realestatemonthly.com,’ and in this Real Estate Monthly site, we’re going to share some tips. I’m going to interview some successful realtors. What’s in the course? Well, don’t you worry about it because we haven’t made any of the interviews yet, but just believe me, it’s going to be fantastic.”

Also, a lot of high-profile internet marketers and people like that have had a lot of success with this model, and the reason is because they have name recognition, right? If some big name marketer sells anything, people are going to buy just because they like that person, want to be around them, want to hear what it is they have to say, so like if … I don’t know. If like Carlton Sheets who’s a huge real estate person … By the way, I don’t know anything about real estate, but if Carlton Sheets made a real estate course, a lot of people would buy from him.

Heck, I might buy from him just because I know that name, but you’re not Carlton Sheets. You’re your own person, and the problem with listing and unpacking the things in your membership site is … If it’s a monthly site where you keep on adding in new tips, and interviews, and things every month, what do you say when there are some really, really good stuff about 5 months down the road? If you say, “In month 1, you’re going to get all this stuff. Month 2, some even better stuff. Month 3, even better stuff.” But then, once I looked at what’s in month 5, I’m thinking, “Now, I’ve got to pay you money, and I’ve got to wait 5 months, and I’ve got to pay you money every single month just to get to that one thing I wanted to get to in module 5.”

Then, on the other hand, if you say, “Okay. Well, I’m just going to put all my best stuff and module in month 1 and 2,” then they’re going to buy and get a bunch of stuff, and then I look at month 5 on the sales letter and I say, “Well, I’m not going to want to be around the site in 5 months because all your good stuff is at the beginning,” so the answer is to not make your first site one of those monthly sites, to make your first site be something single payment, probably high-ticket, 4 modules, and it starts off where the first module gives them an immediate result.

You notice how I said that in this fictitious, realistic course that we could create. The first module, first of all, finds them a list of homes that they’re going to look into buying and gets them financing. Now, why didn’t I just say, “Well, the first module gives them an intro, an overview of real estate?” Why I didn’t say that the first module of your real estate course shows them how to gain an account to search MLA real estate listing? Because the reason is that sucks. The reason is that I believe that a certain percentage of your buyers are not going to get past that first module.

No matter what you do, they’re just going to get that first module, so why not pack in the biggest bang for your buck? Instead of building up and saving your best stuff for the end, put some really quick stuff you can do in 24 hours or the first 48 hours, let’s say. They join your site, and what’s like some of the craziest stuff that you could help them, and not just teach them, but help them to accomplish within the first 48 hours?

For example, we have another membership site, which is single payment or has a payment plan, but does not have a monthly forever option, and it’s called “incomemachine.com.” This is a course that shows you how to set up a lead capture page, a sales letter, get traffic, get a download page, set up a blog, have this whole functioning system, but if I said that, “Well, by the end of 6 months, you’ll have a blog,” that’s boring. Instead, I say, “You’ll have everything finished in the first … I think in that one, it’s 3 days.”

In our Membership Cube course, in the very first module, we show people how to set up their website, install a WordPress, install WishList Member, which is the plug-in that we use, and on top of all that, have a button where someone could click and buy from you right then and there. Now, do we say we’re going to add in drip content, add in a bunch of different pop-ups, and levels, and even the sales letter at all? No, but because we front-loaded a lot of cool stuff in that first module, when it comes time for me to sell it on a sales letter or on a webinar, then I can say, “You’ll have your membership site online tonight,” and that takes out a lot of the confusion, just, “You’ll have it online tonight.”

What we want to avoid is something called the “big box of crap,” so excuse my language there, but the “big box of crap” means that, first of all, you don’t need to log in and add a new download or video in your site every single day. I used to think I had to do that. I used to think that if somebody joined any kind of membership site, monthly forever or single payment, that if I didn’t go in and add something new every couple days, they’d get bored and refund or cancel. Not true.

The other problem too is this issue of drip content. Drip content means that … Let’s say that you had 20 different modules or videos potentially in your site, and someone joins, and they only have access to one. They went a couple of days, they get access to module number 2, video number 2. Video number 3 a few more days later, and this sucks especially because your buyers are going to be the most excited about not only learning, but also implementing from you in that first 48 hours and especially in the first 7 days after they buy your course, so why would you make them wait around?

The other thing too is I see a lot of people where they will … They’ll make it a point to drip something out every 2 days, 3 days, 4 days, and I’m thinking, “Give them a month’s worth of stuff,” and so if that means that you have a 4-module course, give it to them all at once, and then maybe if you have some other bonuses like a 30, a 60, and a 90-day bonus, those are all extra afterthoughts, but you don’t need to geek out on drip content. In the same way, you don’t need to geek out on creating the content itself.

Then, that also leads us to some evil internet marketers, let’s just call them, where the trend that I’m seeing go away, which is good, but still there. The trend is for people to just add in and load up the membership site with so much stuff every couple of days that there’s no possible way that any buyer could get through the whole course before the end of the refund period. I bought a course a few weeks ago off ClickBank, and it was a $67 course, but it was $7 now, and then I think I waited like 7 days, and then it was $67 more.

If it had just flat up been $67, I’m honestly not sure if I would’ve bought, but I said, “Okay. Well, this is just a little $7 product.” I got in, and there were lots of little videos I had to click through, little 5-minute, 10-minute, and then I had to go through a written part to the next video, and then I forgot about it for a week, and then I was dinged 60 bucks, and I said, “Oh, I got dinged 60 bucks. I guess I better go in and check out the rest of this course.”

The plan that a lot of its marketers put out is to pile in so much content inside a membership site that you’ll join it, and you won’t even get through half of it before the refund period comes up or the re-bill period comes up. I’ve heard of people saying, “Well, you need them to have half of your video on day 29, and then the other half of your video on day 31 after they’ve been re-billed.” It’s all just silly, so avoid the big box of crap. Instead, go for the 4-part membership course.

Now, the most important part of this is that you give them an immediate 48-hour result, so we show them how to get their payment button and membership site online within the first 48 hours. They run their first webinar within the first 48 hours. They have books spoken out within the first 48 hours, and then in future modules, we can have a module where we take that recording that they have, and they get it transcribed. Take the transcription, and then put it online on Amazon, or even better, if we can find a way to swing it where in the first module, they plan and speak out their book. In the second module, they get it transcribed. When that comes back, they publish it to Amazon as is.

Now, that’s really cool, right, because we can say that if you have 56 minutes free coming up this week, then you can speak out a book this week. Then, if you have another few more minutes in a couple days once the transcript comes back, then you can have a book with your name on it up and running on Amazon in the next 7 days or less. Now, that’s way cooler than some of these other sites you might see where they say, “Well, by the end of the second month, you’ll start to have a handle on making a book.” That’s really boring. Give me the 48-hour immediate results.

Circling back around to what I told you to write down at the beginning, can you remember? Did you write it down? It’s want, need, long-term, Q&A, so the first module delivers on that want, right? Delivers on something big, so maybe it’s to have their book done. I think that for authors, that’s the toughest part is to just have the book done, so we have a system at makeaproduct.com where you can speak out the book, have it done.

The second module is to then sneak in what they really need, which is to get the book published, which isn’t super glamorous, but that’s going to be awesome once they have it done, and then we can say, “Like we said, the book is done in a couple days. The book is done tomorrow at the latest, and the book is online by this time next week at the latest.” That’s the second module where we sneak in what they really need.

Now, the third module is a big, long-lasting result, so we can say that in this Make A Product course … I don’t have it open in front of me, but for a book publishing course, we could say that a third module is then to get a cover made, to get it proofread, to get some reviews, get some ads going, get some traffic, so now, that’s really important, but we can’t just sell a book just about Kindle traffic. We want the whole complete system.

Then, finally, the final module ends up almost creating itself, and it ends up being somewhat of a cleanup session where all the little things that were important are now in the final module, and so my thinking, like I said, is to cram in as much action-packed exciting stuff as possible, but we only have about 60 minutes, 90 minutes at the most to explain it, and even in a 60 to 90-minute session, we really only have time to show about 6 things because we need to explain why we’re all here, we need to explain what’s coming up, and we need to explain, “We’re going to go to this site. We’re going to click on this button. We’re going to go to this link.” I list that, then I show it, and then I explain what I already showed.

With all that fanfare, there’s really only enough room for about 6 different things, and so if we’re saying they’re recording a book, let’s think about this. We have to say, “Here’s the hardware you need. You need this headset, this microphone. Here’s the tools you need. You need this software. We need this other software to plan out the book,” and then number 4 could be, “Well, here’s how to use the initial software to plan out the book and figure out the structure.” Then, number 5 could be, “Now, here’s how to speak out the book,” and then number 6 could be, “Here’s how to hand it off to a transcriptionist.”

Already, that’s easily going to take 60 to 90 minutes to show all that, and even that’s cutting it close. Even with that will be flying and screaming, and so there’s lots of other things that we might want to talk about later on in the future like how to go back and improve your book, expand your book, make a multi-book series, how to get a physical book made in addition to a Kindle book, so we can put that on to the final module.

Now, we’re going to glamorize it. We’re not going to call the final and fourth module “The Cleanup Module,” but anything that was a nice-to-have and not a must-have in your previous sessions, you put that in the fourth and final session, and now, this becomes a really awesome, a really action-packed course. There is a light at the end of the tunnel for your prospects and for your buyers because now, they’re going to actually get the thing they wanted. They’re going to get a book published on Amazon.

You know what too? If your objection to me right now is, “Well, I can’t do a single payment site because … where I only have 4 modules because I want to have this passive income. I want money over and over again.” You’re going to make a lot more … Your sales are going to be a lot easier if you’re selling even something high-ticket as opposed to low-ticket continuity, and if something else comes to mind, then that’s your next course, so you could have a course about how to get published on Kindle, and then your final module explains how to also put it on CreateSpace.

But then, you could say, “If you want to put your book on iTunes and Audible, then this next course is for you,” so they almost voluntarily go and buy the next course, the next logical step, which in itself is complete, right? That course is all about getting an audio book online and selling, but someone could buy just that. You don’t have to reference things in the original Kindle publishing books and things like that.

When we’re talking about content creation as we’re wrapping up today’s podcast episode, we’re talking about content creation. A lot of people have the mistake of thinking that content creation is written PDF documents or it’s a lot of live action video where it’s professionally lighted and it’s all scripted. You know what? The best video you could create is something that is a screen capture video where I see your screen. We use a tool called “Camtasia” to do this, but think about that. Show me something. Show me what the end result is, and show me as much as possible of you clicking around doing things on the computer as opposed to just giving me facts and figures because that doesn’t help me.

Think about what kind of a checklist that you could base out of your training, so first, worry about the training. First, worry about how to show them how to buy a property and rent it out or flip it, or whatever, but then go back and say, “Out of the things I showed you, could I put that into some kind of a step-by-step checklist so that even if they’ve watched the video, if they come back 6 months later, they can just go through the checklist and still get those steps taken care of?”

Anyway, that’s a whole another subject. That’s a whole other can of worms, but I want you to use WordPress. I want you to use WishList Member. I want you to have a membership site, and the training for that is at membershipcube.com. Start your membership site with a bang. Have 4 modules leading to an end goal, and those modules encompass, first of all, a want, then a need, then something long-term, then the Q&A, then whatever questions people have or whatever cleanup items you left out of earlier modules. I’m Robert Plank, and that has been Membership Site Podcast, episode 2. Check us out at membershipcube.com to claim your free copy of WishList Member. Get your membership site online and ready to take orders tonight, and I’ll see you on the flip side. Bye for now.

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My name’s Robert Plank, and we’re going to talk about how to create a passive online income just by using the knowledge and just by clicking around and setting up some of those websites.

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My name’s Robert Plank, and my website is at membershipcube.com, and that’s the place to go to find out how to get your membership site up and running tonight, today without it taking six months or a year or longer of your life. I’ve set up a bunch of membership sites, and the number one problem I see people having is that they’re making it way too dang complicated, and I want you to have your membership site up and running as fast as possible. That way, you can make money as quickly as possible.

What I do, the majority of my income is to create what’s called a training course. You might have some kind of knowledge or some kind of skills that you can show other people how to do some of these different things. You can show somebody how to trade stocks. You can show somebody how to lose weight. Maybe you’ve seen people’s videos, blog posts, and books that kind of try to show people how to lose weight, but they don’t show it as good as you do. What you need to do is create a training course. We’d like to choose four milestones that we can break up this weight loss journey into, for example, fixing someone’s diet, getting someone’s exercise routine going, and maybe some other kind of lifestyle changes. It helps so much for you to deliver results and teach people stuff if you know ahead of time what goal they are striving towards, right? We don’t want to just have a site where we share some monthly interviews about weight loss or some monthly tips. You want to say that if your goal is to lose twenty pounds before your wedding or your goal is to lose twenty points before your high school graduation or you want to lose that baby weight, you need to join my membership course that shows you how to lose the weight in thirty days.

This is a great way to make money by just taking your knowledge and having this one to many relationship so that you don’t have to repeat yourself every time that you have something to say. You also don’t want to give away all of your information on YouTube or on blogging. You can give away some of that, but we want you to have your best stuff, your exact step-by-step checklist and system to be behind a pay wall, to be in an area where if someone wants to pay you a hundred dollars to get access to your meal plans, your step-by-step checklist, your extra videos, you can just pile them all in one place. I used to make videos and toss them on a web page, and charge money for them, but it got out of hand. It got really complicated and crazy really fast, so a way better solution is to make what’s called a membership site where you can charge somebody money, they pay you money, they get an account or they get a user name access to this area.

Maybe you only have one video, maybe you only have one PDF document, or maybe you have a collection of videos, but having a membership site is great for this recurring passive income because I can record it and put in the effort and do the work one time, and then get paid over and over again. In your case, you might be recording a training series on how someone can lose twenty pounds in the next couple of months. You put it behind closed doors in a members area, and then it opens up all this free time because you don’t have to teach people the same thing over and over again. You just email your email list if you have one of those, you just post to Facebook or your Facebook fan page if you have one of those, but this way you teach it once, and then you just get paid over and over again.

I want you to have a membership site, and the big takeaway that I want you to get from today is that membership sites don’t have to be recurring. It’s really tempting to say I’m going to make a membership site and I’m going to charge twenty dollars a month for some weight loss advice. I’m just going to get a thousand people to join and that’ll be an easy twenty thousand dollars a month for me. Well, the problem is no one is looking to join a site with a bunch of weight loss tips. They’ve already tried the weight loss tips, and if they want tips, they’ll go and buy a book at the bookstore for five dollars or they’ll go to Kindle Books for ninety-nine cents.

What you can get to people is get them to some kind of an end goal, and this can just mean that you charge one single dollar fee for that. You say for ninety-seven dollars, I’m going to show you, I’m going to give you a meal plan, exercise routine, everything to get to that goal of losing weight. This way, this makes it easier for you as well because this avoids the trap for you of making a membership site that just gets bigger and bigger, and you end up adding two years of content, and it’s still not online. Just get it set up. Create a membership site where you charge one single dollar amount one time for lifetime access, and get somebody to some kind of an end goal in a short amount of time as possible with as little work as possible.

The tools we use to do this are WordPress to host the blog and WishList Member to be the gatekeeper and to control access, and we want to include all of this for you in membershipcube.com. That’s membershipcube.com. You join that site and we’ll give you access included to WishList Member. We’ll show you how we structure our websites. We’ll show you how we generate the content. We’ll show you how we market it, and so much more. Go ahead, do it right now. I’m Robert Plank from the Membership Site podcast. Go to membershipcube.com and claim your access right now, take your membership site, set it up right now today.

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