Category: Tips

Every so often people ask me how they can ensure their servers can handle traffic and that their members would be able to gain access to their online membership sites without trouble. It is amazing that these people do not own a membership site in their whole lives, some have never made a sale in their lifetime and yet, they are already worried about traffic. From this one can decipher that these are some sort of roadblocks one may be putting in front of oneself to procrastinate. I host a number of sites, with each having 20-50 people at any given moment, and my server does not act up, as it handles the traffic.

Before you worry about your server handling the traffic, ensure that the site is up and running. A membership site can also be run on a shared account. One can choose to move the membership site to its individual server, if it is able to make some money at the end of the month, say a couple of a hundred dollars. For as low as a hundred dollars, you can an excellent server. This server will handle the traffic from thousands and thousands of subscribers, even without fancy software, all one is required to do is to avoid clustering. On top of this, WordPress blogs enjoy caching add-ons like a built-in Cache add-on, and a Super Cache add-on. This generates a page on order and saves it for future use, so that it doesn’t recreate the same WordPress page recurring.

WordPress comes with built-in components, which keep the load down for your computer, even though computers are normally fast and in most instances do not need a dedicated server, but it doesn’t hurt if you are making the money and have a lot of online traffic, to acquire a dedicated server.

It is advisable to manage your membership site traffic by dripping the information they are after. By dripping the data, you will keep people coming back for more as opposed to if you did not, they would access your site, download all the content they need, even if it runs in to gigabytes and go for good. This might overwhelm your site, and cause inconvenience to other subscribers.

Dripping enables the administrator control the member site traffic and manage it. Have your site up and running and worry about traffic and shared account change, later, when the site is earning you $ 500 monthly or more. If it poses a threat, you can use cache add-ons as an alternative to store pages and posts made by WordPress, until later and drip the data still. Restrict the downloadable data to avoid congestion as people might start accessing data that runs in to gigabytes at the same time.

Join us http://www.membershipcube.com for a great and enjoyable course on how to construct a membership site so that it can be out of your way.

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When I ask people, “Why haven’t you launched your membership site yet?” the most common response is, “I haven’t made any content because I’m afraid everyone’s going to hate me and refund from me.” Luckily, that’s not the case especially when you apply all of these techniques to reducing refunds. You’re always going to have some but these will keep them to a minimum.

1. Announce bonuses ahead of time.

A big chunk of my refunds come from people who simply drive by. They purchase and a few minutes later, apply for a refund. A way to prevent this is to announce upcoming bonuses in your membership site ahead of time. If you have a new video coming in a few days, tell them right now. That way, they can be ready for it and will stick around and give you more of a chance before cancelling or refunding immediately.

2. Use PayPal instead of ClickBank.

If you can help it, use a payment processor such as PayPal instead of ClickBank. ClickBank is great as an affiliate payment processor but they let many refunds simply go through whereas with PayPal there’s a little bit more to it and the buyer has to deal with you directly to get the refund instead of going over your head and to ClickBank.

I have offered the same exact product on both PayPal and ClickBank and had sometimes a 10% refund rate while on PayPal, the same exact product had under a 1% refund rate. The reason is simply because it’s far too easy to cancel or refund on ClickBank even accidentally.

3. Make customer support very easy.

Even with PayPal, your buyers can go over your head and go to your payment processor to try to get a refund. And usually people try to get refunds for silly reasons that you can avoid. For example, they didn’t get a download link or they lost their link or they couldn’t get your e-book or software to run on their computer. Make your customer support very easy so people will go to you first instead of simply going over your head for a refund. This is a very simple step and reduces your refunds dramatically.

4. Add contests or challenges so your customers have a tangible result from what they paid.

What do you think is more impressive, somebody paying $20 to get information about how to set up a WordPress blog or pay $20 and get the butt kicking to actually set up that WordPress blog? It’s the second, right? For that reason, you should add contest or challenges into your membership site forcing your members to apply what they have learned. That way, if the time comes for them to decide whether to either cancel or refund your membership site, there is solid proof that they got more out from your site than what they’d put in because they actually took some action.

5. Avoid trials and simply price upfront.

If you offer time limited discounts or time limited trials, you are attracting the bottom of the barrel buyers. You are attracting the cheapskates. I know it sounds mean but I would rather turn away the cheapskates and bring in the best buyers possible because it means less customer support for me.

That’s why I have eliminated trial offers on almost all of my membership sites. So if I have a $100 a month membership site, I’m selling that immediately. You do not have to have a trial offer to get people in your membership site. You simply have to be a better marketer.

Those are my five ways to reduce membership site refunds. Announce bonuses ahead of time, use PayPal instead of ClickBank, make customer support easy, use challenges and avoid trials.

Get your membership site set up, add content and add members so that you can build yourself a recurring income. Set up your membership site at www.MembershipCube.com

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The absolute best way to encourage and get extra user participation is with a contest. Here are five ways to run a membership site contest.

1. The fastest person to finish.

It’s one thing to explain a theory or even show or tell somebody how you accomplish a task but what good that does do someone unless they actually attempt that task? What you do with a fastest person to finish contest is tell your visitors the first person to show proof they have completed the task wins some kind of price. Usually for me, the task involves setting up something on the website so the first person to post a URL to their completed video, website, blog or even sales letter wins the prize.

2. The best person to finish or the best and closest answer.

Rewarding the first person to subscribe is one thing but what about the best answer? The problem with having the first person to post win is that after one person post, what’s the reason for others to respond?

For example, you might only allow 20 comments on your blog post and the winner, meaning the person who gives the best answer gets the prize. For example, my buddy Lance ran a contest giving away an LCD monitor and he simply asked, “How do you plan on using the monitor if you win?” and he gave the best answer, “To monitor.”

3. The 100th person to reply or give this answer.

Here’s a contest type that you should probably only run via email, not on an actual blog post and that is the 100th person to reply with an answer wins. This might be something as simple as the 100th person to say, “I want this free monitor,” wins it or even the 100th to give a reason why they would use the monitor that wins it.

But the idea is that it doesn’t matter if the person responding gives a good or bad answer even the fastest answer, they are just number 100. So when somebody emails you giving the answer, they have no idea if 10 people have responded or 200 people have responded. This is the same way many radio stations run contest where they say the 9th caller or the 100th caller wins the prize.

4. Random person.

You can even supply the prize to a random person on your blog or in your email but the important thing is that you have your users take some kind of action. It’s no fun if you simply run a random drawing with your user base. It’s a lot better if you will have to work to win it even if working only consists of leaving a comment.

It’s actually very easy to pick a random person when you use a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel. Simply post a list of every single person in the contest onto a spreadsheet then in the next column over, type-in the following, =RAND(). Hit enter and then copy that cell down the entire column then sort by that random column and now the person on top is the clear winner. If you want to have five random winners then the top five users are your winners.

5. The best way they promise to use this.

This is very similar to the best answer method but instead of somebody giving you the best answer such as, “What’s the best iPhone application?” or “What’s the best use of 60 minutes?” you’re asking for the best way they are going to use the prize. So when you are offering a free LCD monitor, you might not ask what’s the best program to use with the LCD monitor but instead what’s the best way you’re going to improve your productivity with the monitor?

And those are my five favorite ways to run a member driven contest. Give the price to the fastest person to finish, the best person to finish, the 100th person to reply or give and answer, give it to a random person or reward the best way they promise to use that monitor.

Now that you know how to run a member driven contest, let’s give you some members. Go to www.MembershipCube.com to get your first training videos right now.

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Whether you realize it or not, the problem you’re having with your membership site is usually not the content. It’s just that you don’t have enough new subscribers joining that membership site month after month. How do you get new subscribers? Use all five of these methods.

1. Create a simple follow-up sequence.

I can’t tell you how many marketers I know who have squeeze pages, opt-in bribes, blogs and so on. They have a list of subscribers who have not yet bought and yet they don’t send any messages to them. People need to be told an average of seven times before they will accept your offer.

So why don’t you send them more emails? Give them a new reason everyday for 10 days about why they should join your membership site. Overcome common objections, answer commonly asked questions, remind them about specific features of your membership site that they might have missed glancing at your sales letter. They want you to sell to them. They have opted in, it’s up to you to finish the job.

2. Ask, “Why didn’t you buy?”

This is the best way I have of getting people to respond to me. Simply ask people, “Why the heck haven’t you joined my membership site yet?” Tell them they can respond directly to the email and you’ll get their answer. Don’t send them to a survey page or a contact form. Make it possible for them to hit the reply button and email you directly. This is good because it lets you know what’s the common reason people aren’t buying.

Ignore anyone who responds with the word “price” but if somebody says they’re not sure about the money back guarantee, that’s another email you can send to your list reminding of the money back guarantee. If somebody is not sure how much content they get upfront, respond to your list, tell them how much content they get upfront and so on.

3. Add an upsell to the end of your reports.

Just because somebody’s bought a product from you doesn’t mean it has to stop there. You can add an additional page at the end of your product telling them about your membership site. If you can make it a logical progression from the end of your report to the beginning of your membership site, even better but remind them that there is more stuff out there from you that they want.

4. Blitz the market with authority articles.

Your membership site teaches people things, right? So take a couple of those quick tips, write them as articles and submit them to article directories, post them on blogs, submit them to magazines or other online newsletters. But get the message out that you are the expert on this topic and at the end of those articles, send them to your membership site.

5. Add a pop-up to your blog.

When you wrote all those authority articles you posted, all if not most of them to your own blog, right? What’s the point of having a blog if people are not directed to some other offer especially a free opted newsletter? Add a pop-up on your blog offering some kind of free gift in exchange for an opt-in. That way, you’re not just getting traffic but you’re capturing that traffic into a mailing list that then reminds them why they should join your membership site.

Those are the five methods you should be using today to get new subscribers. Have a simple follow-up sequence, ask why they didn’t buy, add an upsell inside your other information products and membership sites, blitz the market with authority articles, and add a pop-up onto your blog.

Now that you know how to get new subscribers, let’s set up your membership site properly at www.MembershipCube.com

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I’ve realized that coming up with the subject for your membership site is difficult. After all, it’s the first step and if you get it wrong, the rest of your steps are ruined. How do you decide on what kind of membership site you’re going to present? How is the content going to be delivered? What price will it be? What niche will it be? And so on. Here are five ways to overcome this roadblock and finally decide for sure what membership site you’re going to have.

1. What is your competition doing?

What do you see other membership sites in your niche presenting? How are the membership sites

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Traffic is a very difficult thing for any marketer in any niche to get. It’s simply the one thing that we can never have enough of. How do you get people to promote your membership site? Use one of these methods.

1. Direct broadcast.

Do you have mailing list of your very own? Even if it’s small, as long as it’s in the correct targeted niche, you can email that list and tell them about your membership site. Do you know other people with similar targeted list? Contact them and ask for a simple favor for them to mail.

2. Download page offer or exit offer.

Let’s say you buy one of your competitor’s offers or even someone who’s on a similar niche as you. They all have a download page or membership area after payment. When you go to that download page, is the only thing you can do is download the thing you just bought? If so, contact that person and ask if you can pay them to place a link on their download page.

If you have an affiliate program and they could place an affiliate link you don’t even have to pay them. If they say no, you’re still not stuck because you can ask them to place your offer as an exit pop-up. This means that they go to the download page after purchasing, they can download the product but after they try to leave it shows your offer.

3. Autoresponder follow-up offer.

Even if someone has said they won’t mail for you and they won’t place your link on a download page, ask them if they will place an ad for your membership site in their autoresponder follow-up sequence. A follow-up sequence is where someone gets on their list and gets a certain message on day one, day two, day three and so on and the average marketer simply does not know what messages to send on different days. They’re herding for content. If you were to offer a pre-written follow-up or even a pre-written follow-up sequence for them to simply place into their autoresponder and get an affiliate commission, it’s a no brainer for most people.

4. Ride along bonus.

As a membership owner, what would you do if someone came to you and said, “Here is my report, here’s my video. I want you to put it on your membership site for free, no questions asked. I just want the exposure.” Seems like a good deal, right? You can do the same thing.

Take your product and offer it to membership site owners for free, meaning that your product will be included as part of their membership site. This way, you can ride on their credibility and be associated with that person, they get extra content and you get extra exposure and traffic.

5. Embedded report upsell.

Ask other membership site owners and info product creators if they will sell you a one page or half page ad inside of their latest book. You’d be surprised at how many people will say yes and now you have a built-in advertisement in someone else’s product which is even more effective if you write the ad as a non-obvious ad as an instructional chapter because you are not limited to the usual rules placed on newspapers or magazines to make an advertisement look different than the rest of the publication. You can make your ad blend in and make it look like the other marketer is literally endorsing your membership site.

Those are five ways you can get people to promote you

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Charging a monthly fee for access is not the only way to make money from your membership site. Check out these additional ways below.

1. Sell resell rights to individual components.

You created the membership site content so that means you can do whatever you want with it. That includes selling off the rights not to the entire membership site but to individual products in pieces. You can charge 10 times what an individual component of your site cost to give others the ability to use it in their own products. This also has the extra advantage of getting your name out there and putting you on the map inside other people’s products and their membership sites.

2. Sell off the entire membership site to a new owner.

If you can show that your membership site has been making money for the last few months and has ways of making money in the future

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You might not realize it yet but there are many different kinds of membership sites. Which is right for you? Find out here.

1. Unique monthly resell rights.

Probably the easiest way to create a membership site is to take all the resell rights materials you have sitting around on your hard drive, pile them into one site and offer as a monthly access to the people who joined the site, get new resell rights given to them every month. This is especially valuable if you can find high ticket or a hard to find resell rights to pass along.

2. Software as a service.

If you can provide some kind of an automatic service that runs on your web servers, people will need to pay you every month to get access to it. Easy examples of these are web hosting or email autoresponder services. But a really unique kind of service is the video submission sites.

There are sites where you can upload one single video to the site and will broadcast the video on two sites like YouTube, Revver, Dailymotion. But the key to this is that the submission software runs inside a membership site. If you stop paying the monthly fee for that membership site, you’ll no longer be able to submit videos.

3. A coaching, freelancing or accountability blog.

Provide one on one training to people. Do you write articles or create graphics? Why not create a user account for each person you work for. That way, they can see all the drafts you work on for them. If you’re writing a sales letter, they can see the sales letter in progress. If you are designing a logo, they can see the five markups you’ve created. This way, they have a permanent record of all the things that you

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If you want people to see your membership site and most of all join it, you can’t just put it out there and show something boring. Make your launch exciting using one of these five product launch methods.

1. Only open a set number of slots for your pilot’s group.

A great way to get people who are on the fence about buying to make a decision right now is with scarcity. What if you launch your membership site and only allowed 20 members in at the introductory low price and then closed it down and opened it in a few months? Anyone who did not jump on your offer right now would be stuck out in the cold for a few months.

The great thing about having a pilot test group is that if there’s something seriously wrong with your information or your website, you’re fine. You can use these 20 people as guinea pigs before opening up the site to the entire world.

2. The Seven Dollar Bump Strategy.

Here’s a great way to overcome price scaredy catness, to avoid being afraid of pricing too high

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People love getting bonuses. It’s awesome to pay for one thing and get this extra thing thrown in on top for free. Here are five awesome bonuses you can add to your membership site with little to know work at all.

1. Website critiques or personal responses.

Depending on your niche, you could examine your customers’ websites and tell them what to change. If you were teaching a class about blogging, copywriting, article writing, forum posting, AdWords, AdSense, real estate and so on, if they create any kind of content that can be viewed online, simply create a video of you looking at their website and showing and telling them what to change.

If this type of video does not apply to your niche then record a personal response. Ask people to ask you questions and instead of typing up the answer, record a three to five minute video explaining your answer. You’ll find that you can give a much more thorough answer and not work as hard typing all that stuff up.

2. Updated information or URL recommendations and reviews.

Most information becomes out of date after a little while. What if you spent 30 minutes per month for a year going through the URLs you recommend and updating them for the current year? That would be a great selling point because you could make your membership site go from version 1.0 to 1.1 to 1.2 and you can tell your members or even your prospects that it’s been updated a set number of times in the past 12 months. For example, “It’s been updated 35 times this year to make sure all the URLs are up-to-date and the things I recommend are brand new.”

3. Templates, worksheets and checklists.

This is all about hand holding. It’s one thing to show somebody how to do something step by step. But why not create a written down step-by-step checklist they can use to easily repeat the process later even if they forgot most of what was in your video?

For example, you can show somebody how to set up a WordPress blog and then create 10 step checklist of things like install a database, download WordPress, upload WordPress, add administrator account, add first blog post. That way, people can tell that they

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