Membership Site Podcast

If you are the kind of person who has a membership site or wants a membership site, you probably like to have fancy stuff, like to have the bells and whistles. And if a certain feature exists, if a certain marketing tactic is possible, you’re definitely going to want to try to pursue it. Right? Wrong. You need to keep your site simple – because most people who will avoid keeping their site simple never get the site launched in the first place. So, the answer to most of the fancy stuff such as split testing emails is you do not want to do it and there are many reasons why.

First of all, instead of split testing your emails, you should be focusing on split testing your sales letter. You could spend all day testing and tracking and figuring things out, but at the end of the day, you have the same 24 hours that everyone else in the world does. So, why would you waste it testing out silly things?

If somebody is on your email list and you’re going to be sending out emails to them regularly and you’re going to be launching a product properly, meaning sending out 5 to 10 emails whenever you launch something, then they’re going to open up your email and click on your link sooner or later. And if not, then they are simply not a responsive subscriber. So, it doesn’t really matter if you split test emails just so you send out a lot of emails.

What about open rates? Let me tell you something from a technical standpoint. When you test email open rates, what your autoresponder service does is embed an image in your email messages. Unfortunately, spammers also use this technique to figure out if the junk mail messages they send are actually opened. For this very reason, many email clients block these types of trackers, so your open rate tracking is not going to be very accurate at all. If you get a 50% open rate, that doesn’t necessarily mean that only half of your subscribers have opened up your email, the number could be much higher but the tracking image is simply blocked in their email client.

So, things like subject line split testing, things like open rates are not very accurate anyway. So, just stay away from the fancy stuff. As far as integrating autoresponders with your membership site, you should integrate an autoresponder with your membership site. This is one of the things that is very important.

So, have an opt-in box inside your membership site and have some kind of auto-subscribe functionality to automatically get somebody who buys into your membership site to get on your list and this is included with most membership software such as Wishlist member.

Now, why would you want to have both? Why would you want to have the auto-subscribe feature plus the manual subscribe feature inside the membership site? There are many reasons. Somebody might join your membership site and then accidentally unsubscribe from your autoresponder sequence and they want to get joined back in. So, make it easy so they can log in, enter their name and email address one more time and get back on the list. Another reason is that some people have one email address dedicated only to processing their payments and another towards receiving emails. So, if they happen to use their payment email when they sign up for your membership site or they just type in the wrong email and for whatever reason, they’re not getting your messages, they can opt in using that form on the inside to the email address they are used to for receiving messages. Pretty simple.

So, most fancy things like split testing emails and tracking open rates are not important but some fancy things, the basics, like integrating your membership site and your autoresponder is very important. It’s one thing to be told how to do some of these things, but wouldn’t it be nice to see a real how-to step-by-step video, taking you by the hand, and walking you through every step of the way? I think so.

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If you’re on more than a few people’s email mailing lists, you’ve seen people do a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong. I want to shortcut your success by just telling you exactly what you should be doing with your autoresponder opt-in list and what you should be avoiding like the plaque, especially when it comes to promoting membership sites.

Do create free and paid lists, separate free and paid lists. It’s really going to help if you only market within one specific niche and your different offer and your list are in sub-niches related to that, but the idea is that if somebody is on one list, you could try to upsell them to some other offer. So, for every product you have, for every membership that you have, create a paid list for updates and a prospect list for free promotions. This way, you can mail to just one or a small group of sublists or you could mail to the entire bunch of sublists. It’s up to you. But this should go without saying what I see all kinds of marketers trying to get by on just one list for everything and it simply does not work.

Do update regularly and be consistent. Again, a big tragedy is marketers build up a giant mailing list and then they let it go for two, three, or even six months. If your mailing list is neglected for even a couple of weeks, it will very clearly wither away and die. People forget. They forget that they know you, that they signed up for your list, even if they bought from you. So, it’s up to you to be interfaced and in their mailbox as often as possible.

So, send messages to your email list. If you’re good at writing follow-up sequences, do that. If you have a lot of say and you want to simply broadcast everyday, do that. Here is a secret. If you broadcast on a regular basis – let’s say a few times a week or even once per day, you can later on save those sent messages and schedule them as follow-up sequences in a specific list. So, you think of the message now, send it out now, but then see save that for later. So, anyone new coming onto your list gets those emails as well.

And it’s also important that when you do update, you update on a very regular basis. If you’re the kind of person who updates every week, then always update every week – because if you change it to once a day or once a month, you’re going to have people either overwhelmed or forgetting about you. I personally prefer everyday. So if you can manage it, email your list every single day, at least until they purchase.

Don’t try to announce to all the different lists separately – because if you’re a good marketer, if you have upsells and follow-ups in place, then people should be on multiple lists of yours. So, when you send out a broadcast, your autoresponder should have a D duplication feature. This means that if someone is on the list for products 1, 2, and 3 and you send an email to all the lists at once, they only get one email and not three copies of the same email. So, when you go and try to send a different message to each list, not only is it time consuming, but somebody might get the same email multiple times just because they are on this different list.

Don’t chicken out and limit yourself in the terms and conditions when somebody signs up. I see all the time in opt-in forms, “Oh don’t worry. I will only use this list to notify you of updates for this product. I will never try to upsell you.” Why not? You worked hard to get that sale, to get that opt-in, they’re on your list, let them know upfront that you will be giving them other offers in that same niche that they will be interested in. There’s nothing wrong with being a good marketer.

So, when building a list, when marketing to that list, make sure you create separate free and paid list, make sure you update regularly, but avoid announcing to small lists. If you want to announce something big, send it to all the lists and don’t chicken out, be a real marketer. Tell them upfront that you may be sending them future offers.

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You need to have an email list, that’s given. You also need to have a separate even list for every product and every membership site you have as well. But it doesn’t even stop there. You should have a prospect list and a buyer’s list. That way, you can give people who are slightly interested in your offer but have not yet bought more reasons to get in and you can give messages to people who have bought and send them reminders to consume your content on a regular basis. Fortunately, with most modern autoresponders, you can even set up several rules so that if somebody is on your prospect list and joins your buyer’s list as well, it removes them from the prospect list. What this does is it keeps on bugging them to join until they do join and then it stops.

So, always have at least one pre-sell and post-sell list for your membership site. When creating the follow-ups for your pre-sell lists, and these are more reasons to deliver it every few days to purchase, just look at your sales letter. Look at the reasons you give for somebody to join your membership site. Look at the problems you lay out and how you solve those problems. Look at the common objections people usually have for membership sites and how your sales letter resolves them. Your email sequence is just your sales letter cut up into little tiny pieces. You should have at least 10 follow-ups sent out every single day to your prospects. If you need more than that, then add more at the end, send out every few weeks, and then every few months, just to make sure that people are reminded even weeks or months later, why it’s so important that they join. Then, add your post-sell lists and all you need to do is simply tell them upfront what to look forward to, what’s coming, and then send one message per week telling them what they missed or participated in that week and then a link back to the blog where they can log in and consume more of the content.

I’ve said in the past that if you have different membership levels that are drastically different, have those be sublists. But most of the time, for one single membership site, you can get away with just having one single email sublist and just one single set of follow-up messages. But when you have free offers, don’t get carried away creating lots and lots of sublists.

Let’s say you have one single membership site and it’s about real estate, you have a membership site about how to get started in real estate. And you create a simple audio interview that you use as an opt-in bribe as a gift to get people to get on the list. So, that’s one of your sublists. That’s just your pre-sell sublist. So, the bribe gets them on your pre-sell sequence. But then you make a report, a 5-page report, also about something getting started in real estate. Do you need to create a separate sublist for that? The answer is no. You send them on the same sublist because the message is the same, and you still want them to have more reasons to get into your paid membership site. So, why make it complicated? Why event all these extra sublists when you can put your effort into more marketing? When you can put your effort into more opt-in bribes?

So, have the same pre-sell sublists for these different bribes. Just create more bribes and create more sales letters, send more emails, focus your energy on that. But bare minimum, for your membership site, you should have at least one post-sell list to keep them updated and one pre-sell list to give them reasons to buy.

I hope I’ve opened your eyes to the real focus you should have on your membership sites. It’s on the marketing, not on the content. Give me permission to help you out and get you making a membership site much faster.

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Most membership software wants to give you all the features you need to successfully run a membership site. For almost everyone, this includes an email autoresponder, the ability to send an email to your entire membership with one click. But just like with any feature, there’s good and bad things for that. The biggest problem is that you’re not sure if you’re going to ever use a different membership software. You’re not sure if the membership site is going to exist forever and you still want to have those opt-in leads.
So, what do you do? Do you use the autoresponder built into your membership software or do you use your own? How do you decide and how do you even accomplish such a thing?

I want you to have a separate membership software and email autoresponder. They are two separate things – because you’ll never know if you have to use a different autoresponder service, you’ll never know if you want to be able to log into one place and send one message to everybody who’s bought from you, everybody who’s opted in for a free gift, and everybody who has been in the membership site with you.

So, I definitely recommend you use the AWeber autoresponder, that is not my autoresponder, but I want you to have it separate from the membership site. This way, your subscriber list is not stuck inside your membership site. So for now, go to AWeber and you’ll never know if you have to move – if you have to move autoresponders, if you have to change membership software – but at least you have the list and at least it is in one location, so you can log in and blast to all the lists.

One other thing I like is that you can take advantage of the advanced features in autoresponders such as AWeber including the name personalization, including the ability to schedule messages in the future, including the ability to schedule follow-up messages. A follow-up message is somebody gets on the list and you have autoresponder emails that are going to be sent on day 2, day 3, day 5, day 10. So that way, you can line up your autoresponder content with the actual content on your blog. So, you know that if somebody joins your site and they get a certain post 7 days in, then guess what – you can schedule an email to be sent out on day 7 after joining that list, so they will automatically get an email notification telling them to log in the blog and check out your newest edition to the membership site. So, have your autoresponder list separate from your membership site. Luckily, most modern autoresponder software accomplishes this including Wishlist member.

Robert Plank is the creator of several profitable Wishlist membership sites, and he wants to show you how to duplicate his success.

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I’m going to assume that you already have some kind of traffic coming to the sales letter for your membership site? I am going to assume that you’re already building some kind of a list but how do you make that even bigger? Well, even if you think you have your site pretty well monetized, you might be missing out on a few very important steps. Those include an email opt-in process after they register, a squeeze page before they see your sales letter, and even a two-step order form between the sales letter and the payment checkout page.

The no-brainer improvement you can make to your membership site is to have an opt-in process after registration. Most membership solutions such as Wishlist member will integrate your membership software with an autoresponder such as AWeber. So, if somebody signs up to your membership site, they also get on a mailing list.

If your membership software does not have this functionality, also put your opt-in code on the sidebar for your blog. In WordPress, this is very easy. Simply go to the appearance area and add what’s called a widget. A widget is a block of something on your sidebar. So, you can add a widget called the Text widget, but the secret about the Text widget in WordPress is that you can also add any HTML code you want including links, images, and most importantly, your cut and paste autoresponder code. So, add a Text widget to our sidebar, drag it over to your sidebar and paste in your autoresponder opt-in code. And now, magically, you will have a place for people who have already bought your membership access to get on to a mailing list.

Another very popular way of getting people on a list is a squeeze page or a forced opt-in page before seeing your sales letter. So, if someone wants to go and they want to read your offer, well you stop them. You have a page that they see first with the forced opt-in. They have no way of getting to the sales letter unless they put in their name and email address, they get on your list and then they are redirected to your sales letter. You don’t necessarily have to bribe them with anything. You could bribe them with the information contained on the sales letter. You can bribe them with the 100% free details they are going to get just as soon as they fill out their name and email address.

If you don’t like the forced opt-in page or you’re advertising somewhere that does not allow forced opt-in pages, there is a loophole, and that loophole was called the two-step order form – because many shopping carts require people to type in their first name and email address before making a purchase. So, what you do is you have your sales letter, they click on what they think is the buy button, which is really a new page that has nothing but a forced opt-in on it. So, they read the sales letter first, they click over to the forced opt-in, and the forced opt-in says something like “step 1 of 2, enter your details here.” Then it has the forced opt-in page and after they fill out that forced opt-in, then they are sent to the checkout page, where they can pay. The idea behind this is that many marketers report a 50% or higher shopping cart abandonment rate. This is people who click over and/or about to buy but then for some reason, checking out and leave.

So, you can build a list based on people who are simply checking on the price or who almost buy it but don’t and then market to them afterwards. So, those are three techniques that you should be using for your membership site. Most importantly, an opt-in after registration and optionally, either a squeeze page which is a forced opt-in before your sales letter or a two-step order form, which is a forced opt-in after your sales letter but before the checkout process.

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You need to build a list. That’s all there is to it. It’s not enough that you’ve built a list, it needs to continue building bigger and bigger. So, aside from somebody buying something, how do you get somebody who doesn’t really know you to get on your list? Well, you’ve got to ask them. Right? You have to have that form that has a place that they can enter their name and email address. So, if you just ask, “Oh hey, can you get on my list just because?” That’s not really going to convert that well. What you need instead is a bribe. You need some kind of a gift that they will take after they sign up for your list. So, to get a bunch of people on a list quickly, have some kind of a bribe.

Now, what kind of a bribe should you have? I’m not much of a fan of reports just because they take a long time to write. So, a report is when we take a word document, you write maybe 5 to 10 pages, you save it as a pdf file, and it solves some kind of a problem. It gives them some kind of information. So, they enter their name and email address and get this report. That’s great except for they take a while to write. So, I prefer to create an audio bribe because you can make them quickly and then circulate them between different forums and communities.

So, have your bribe. Have a page where they come and it tells them what the bribe is, very simply has a headline, and maybe three bullet points, tells them to opt-in, has a form, that’s it. Nothing fancy. It’s a page where there’s nothing for them to do other than enter their name and email address. They enter those things In and then they can get to your gift, but that’s the only possible way they can get to your gift.

For years, when I had this so-called forced opt-in pages, I would chicken out and I would have a link directly to the gift, saying, “Oh well, if you don’t want to opt in, you can get it right here.” But you can’t do that. That is called chickening out. Have a forced opt-in page, a page where the only thing a person can do is enter their name and email address and get their bribe. Then a bribe should be an audio or an interview, but it’s the same thing. An audio recording is just you talking. An interview is where you talk with someone else.

So, how do you create an audio file? I prefer to use Camtasia. Camtasia Studio is a screen-capture program that records video, but you can record a video and then save just the audio. So, it is an all-in-one recording tool. If you want to have an interview, how do you record that? You get on Skype then use a program called Pamela to record your conversation on Skype, and that way, you can record the things that you and someone else say. Just plan to talk for 20 minutes, have four questions thought out in advance, and it will be almost impossible to talk for less than 20 minutes about those questions if you’re having a real conversation and if at least one person in that discussion is an expert. If you’re both experts, that’s great. If only one of you is an expert, then the dummy is the person asking the questions, the expert is the person answering the questions. And then you make these simple audio files, zip up the audio, and then you just have a forced opt-in page, they have to enter their name and email address to get access to this audio interview, and then after they enter that information, then they just get it. It’s as simple as that.

Once you have some of these forced opt-in pages, make them only available to certain forums. Don’t blast them out to everywhere on the internet. Take this one audio recording, which should do around a total of 20 minutes to make and offer it only to a particular forum. Now, does that mean that you will put it in your forum signature or in the forum special offer area? It depends on what everyone else in that forum is doing. But you should be able to do one of those two things, either promote it directly in the forum or put it in your signature file or maybe even buy ad space, but the idea is get the people off that forum to your exclusive bonus. And that is my favorite way of getting opt-in leads and then selling to them on a membership site – is have an audio bribe that is either an audio or an interview and then offer them to individual communities.

Now that you have that prospect list built up, how will you get these people into a membership site? Join www.membershipcube.com to get the answer.

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