Not All Membership Sites Are The Same - 2
We continue our series on membership sites …
The Free Membership Site
There are a number of membership sites that are free. Most are free at an entry level, however. If you want to receive more extensive or exclusive product then you can upgrade your membership for a small fee. In fact, you may be able to upgrade to several higher levels, each one slightly more expensive than the other.
SureFireWealth is an excellent example. Free members can log in and receive ebooks, reports, software downloads and other products with reviews related to online business, Internet marketing and various niche topics. Some downloads and resources include giveaway rights.
A level above the free membership is the Silver Membership, which gives you more downloads and often includes resell and master reseller rights to the downloads. The Gold Membership gives you ready to sell digital download packages. Many packages include multiple products such as ebooks, software, videos, audio and templates. Most products include resell or master reseller rights.
Another example is PLR Wholesaler. In this case, they have a free membership, and an Elite Membership, which is a one-time, life-time fee that gives you access to a whole slew of upgraded PLR products, generally including resell and/or master resell rights.
At its foundation, the objective of a free membership website is to acquire names and email addresses of people who are interested in a specific topic in order to build an opt-in list. Nevertheless, this is a membership website and unless a visitor joins, they’ll lose out on access to some good information that will not otherwise be available to them.
The Community-Driven Membership
Yet another kind of membership website is what is known as a “community site.” Sometimes membership in a community site is free and sometimes it’s paid. The idea here is simple: people with a common interest come together to explore their various approaches to their interest. They exchange information and ideas, support one another, and even team up if they so desire. Sometimes a community web site will also offer one-on-one training above and beyond the cost of membership in the community website.
Next time, we’ll take a look at choosing your membership site niche.
Tag: Marketing Tools
Not All Membership Sites Are The Same
There are a number of different membership site models. So we begin by taking a look at some of these, a brief overlook of how they differ from one another, and some points to take into consideration before you jump in with both feet.
Web 2.0 Websites
You’re already familiar with Web 2.0 membership sites, even if you aren’t aware of it. In fact, you likely belong to several of them. These are sites such as YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Social networking sites that provide tools for an interactive network of friends and include such user-submitted things as personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos are included here.
Membership in these sites is generally free. The revenue generated is generally on the backs of the content that the members create. In other words, as members add pages of content, ads that generate money for the web site are added. In addition, a huge database of members is developed.
A Web 2.0 membership site can be in a very narrow niche, where people gather to share information, knowledge, experience, etc. It doesn’t have to be the biggest site on the web. So don’t dismiss this model out of hand. It’s quite easy to develop a niche Web 2.0 site using free content management systems such as Drupal or Joomla.
The Exclusive Paid Membership Site
This is probably the most common form of membership site you’ll come across. It thrives on the concept of exclusivity. Become a member and you’ll gain access to exclusive … information, products, software, templates, graphics, behind the scene tricks of the trade, etc.
The exclusive paid membership site is designed for specific group of people. Its members are a group of like-minded individuals who are seeking instruction or information that can only be discovered in exclusive membership websites.
While they can range from something as simple as a place to get master resell rights to a variety of products, to how to use video marketing to grow your business … the exclusive membership site tends to be higher end.
We’ll continue next post.
Tag: Marketing Tools
Introduction To Membership Sites
Membership sites are a growing phenomenon on the Internet. If you’re wondering why, the reason is simple: they serve both the marketer and the client.
On the client side, members receive quality information while participating in an exclusive membership. Not only is there an element of prestige, there’s a sense of bargain. For a small monthly fee, they can receive top-notch information about their favorite hobby, how to set up a successful Internet business model, how to flip foreclosed houses, or thousands of other niches of interest to a small, hungry group of people.
On the flip side, marketers can achieve some income stability. They know exactly what to expect in monthly income by the number of members. They have the opportunity to develop a closer relationship with their members. And they can introduce members to other membership clubs, their own new products, and affiliate products.
Everyone wins.
And that’s why we’ll be exploring membership sites over the next week or so.
Tags: Marketing Tools, membership web sites
Rule of Scarcity
I’m sure you’re aware of the Rule of Scarcity. It’s one of the most common sale tactics you’ll come across, both online and offline.
The Rule of Scarcity states that the perceived value of an item is greater if the item is considered to be more difficult to obtain than comparable items. Building scarcity can be done in a number of ways, but if you do it incorrectly, you can actually do your credibility more harm than good.
I came across a free report on building scarcity that I thought might interest you. You can pick it up here:
Enjoy!
Tags: Marketing Tools, Rule of Scarcity
Cheat Sheet For “Now So Newbie” and “Wannabes”
Subtitle: How to go from where you are to the next level
where the going gets good
By Guest Blogger Marlon Sanders
If you haven’t snagged it yet, I have a freebie guide for newbies at:
Newbie’s Guide To Internet Marketing
I refer you to that because today’s article is NOT for you. It’s for people who have gone beyond the newbie stage and want to go the next level and the next level beyond that.
Yesterday on Twitter, Karen asked if I could produce a guide for “not so newbies” and “wannabes.” I’m going to assume you know the basics of building websites, blogs, market research, optins & aweber, SEO and Social Media.
But you’re struggling to get by and working 10-12 hours a day. Your biggest problem is building a stable, consistent income.
Let’s dive right in:
1. Get really comfortable with producing products and getting them out the door.
You need to get this down to a checklist. About everything you need to know is in ProductDashboard.com. But you still have to DO that process over and over.
When I was a kid, I loved to go to the skate rink. Now, before you could learn to backwards skate (which was the really cool thing to do), you had to learn to forward skate.
And until you’re comfortable going around the rink forward, you’re not advised to start working on backwards skating.
Same way in marketing. Getting products created is something you should do like breathing. Get comfortable with it.
2. There are several ways to get products out the door. Find one or two that work for you.
You can interview people over the phone, transcribe the interviews and create audio and pdf compilations.
You can do webinars and record them.
You can create Power Point presentations and record audio with them.
You can write ebooks (don’t attempt this unless you’re a fast writer).
3. Master Camtasia, Camstudio or Screen Flow.
These are what you use to record your screen in concert with audio. Screen Flow works on Macs. Camstudio and Camtasia are for use on PC’s. Camstudio is a freebie download.
That’s right, if you’re too broke to spit, you can STILL create products with Camstudio. Or just do audio interviews.
4. Get confident
Dan Kennedy is fond of repeating the saying that “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
If you need a dose of good ol’ fashioned self confidence, try listening to Anthony Robbins.
5. You gotta write or talk
There are only two choices here — either you write or you talk. If you write, you can always hire someone to turn your written words into audio and video. If you do audio or video, you can have it transcribed.
6. Now, once you get comfortable producing products, learn to SELL them.
If the word “sell,” is a potty mouth word for you, the reframe it as learning to create messages that make people WANT to buy. Or “helping people make sound buying decisions.”
This is a different learning curve. You’ve got to get comfortable learning to sell stuff. You can sell via sales letters, webinars, teleseminars or podcasts. But sell you must.
Let me point out something here. These are the things most newbies focus on: Building websites, blogs, market research, optins & aweber, SEO and Social Media.
These are all ways to get TRAFFIC to your web site. And most newbies START as affiliate marketers. And that’s a good thing. You need to know how to get traffic.
But notice there’s nothing in that list about learning to SELL. See, building web sites and blogs and researching the market, those things all involve NOT selling. They are just fun little things you piddle around doing on your computer.
And they’re good things to do no doubt.
But do you get paid for building web sites or setting up Aweber? Do you get paid for building blogs?
As a matter of fact, you don’t.
No one gets paid unless and until someone buys something. In the end, that goes for Adsense clicks also. Because no one pays for clicks in the long run unless someone buys at the end of the day.
I do NOT recommend you build your business around adsense. I recommend you build your business around learning to SELL STUFF online. That’s where the bux are.
Stated differently, the money is in learning to help people buy now and not later. And learning how to craft messages that give people really good decisions to want to do that now.
7. Realize that your time as an affiliate, before you create your own products, is best spent learning to sell.
Learn to get people on your list then invite them to a teleseminar or webinar where you pitch a product. Learn to write great “pre-sell” pages. Have someone interview you about an idea and then subtly pitch one of your affiliate products as you talk.
8. The money is learning how to sell
I’m famous for creating the saying, “The Money Is In The List.” I said that in Amazing Formula back in 1998 or whenever it was. But you’ve got to learn to SELL to your list.
That means learning to write emails that sell. Learning to write words on a page that gets people to buy.
9. Realize that selling is NOT a dirty word.
Some people associate negative things to the word “sell.” If that’s you, then realize now that what you’re really doing is helping people make a sound buying decision.
When we use the word “sell,” what we’re really talking about is explaining why the value in a product is greater than the money someone has in their pocket. An why it’s in their best interest to trade that stack of money for the product today and not next week, month or year.
10. If you learn how to create products and how to sell but you don’t have anyone on your list to email, you still aren’t there yet.
So one of the things you’ll want to do is create small reports, videos, newsletters, pdf’s or webinars that you can offer people as a freebie in exchange for joining your email list.
If you don’t know how to do this, I refer you to promodashboard.com as a resource.
11. Learn to split test
The way you increase the number of people who join your email list when they visit your web page and then the number of people who buy from your presell, sales letter, audio interview, teleseminar or webinar is by learning to split test.
You test one sales approach or sales message vs. another one. And you see which works best.
12. Get really comfortable with writing and sending out emails
At this point you know how to create products and sell them. You need to get in the habit of writing emails to your list at least several times a week, if not daily.
Learn to write subject lines that get your emails opened. Learn to write and format emails. Learn to create your tracking links, so you can see what people click on and how many people buy.
13. Create your automated follow up sales machine
Now you have products to promote, you know how to sell them, and you know how to send out emails.
Now take the webinars, teleseminars, emails, blog posts, podcasts, interviews, and pdf’s that have worked BEST and load ‘em up in a sequence in your autoresponder, so that every new subscriber gets a pre-planned sequence of offers.
Be sure you use your tracking links.
14. Calculate the value of a new list member
Once you have this follow up sequence, you can figure out how much a new subscriber to your list is worth after 30 days. Now you know how much you can spend to buy traffic.
15. Ramp up your traffic
You can pay people to write articles for you. You can pay ppc ads. You can buy banners. Once you know the value of a new subscriber after 90 days, you know how much you can afford to get that subscriber.
16. Ramp up your affiliate promotions
Once you’ve mastered your sales machine and have a healthy worth for every new list member, ramp up your affiliate recruiting. Now you can go to affiliates and say that every click they send you should be worth $X.
If you need help setting up your affiliate systems, I’ve laid out my whole system at affiliatedashboard.com. If you have a really lucrative sales process, the affiliates will come because you’re paying their bills for them every time they send you a click.
17. Learn to sell by speaking
If you haven’t already started doing teleseminars and webinars to pitch larger ticket products, now is the time to learn.
You’re going to need larger ticket back end sales and this is how you get them. Once you learn to pitch on teleseminars and webinars, you’ll be ready to hit the speaking circuit.
Bundle up your products into a bigger ticket you can sell. Or create a series of teleseminars or webinars with high value. Learn to sell big tickets.
18. Hit the speaking circuit
Now that you have a bigger ticket product that you know you can sell because you’ve done it over and over on many teleseminars and webinars, you’re ready to hit the speaking circuit. It’s easy to get speaking slots once people know you can sell from the stage and aren’t boring.
If you’ve been practicing your webinars and teleseminars, you’ve learned how NOT to be boring. If this is a challenge, join a Toastmasters group.
19. Handling bumps along the way
You’re going to run into problems, glitches and obstacles along the way. Get used to it. That’s part of business.
Learn to hire talent and outsource on elance, rentacoder and the other sites. Find a “go to” technical person to assist you. Find a “go to” graphics person who can do the graphics for your web sites.
Struggling with technical things shouldn’t be your focus. Learning to create and sell products should be.
For the record, the money is NOT in the details. The money is in the list an in learning how to sell. Or, if you prefer, learning how to get people to buy stuff that’s in their own best interest to buy.
Selling stuff is what pays your bills.
People think they’re getting into the web site building business. It sounds sexy and exciting. It is. But make no mistake.
What puts large chunks of dollars in your bank account is selling stuff, whether it’s your own products or someone else’s. But eventually, you need to learn to create and sell your OWN products, webinars, podcasts, seminars and teleseminars.
20. How to overcome mistakes
Let’s say you screw up or make mistakes. So? You thought you were God? Only God is God. Everyone else makes mistakes and screws up.
How do you overcome mistakes?
You sell enough stuff and big enough ticket stuff that it doesn’t matter. You create a sales machine, so you have the room to make mistakes and not suffer.
21. How to find the time
You may say, “But how do I find the time for all of this?”
If you use webinars or teleseminars as the basis for your product creation, it doesn’t take that long.
If you learn to interview people in your products, so that part or all of the content is theirs, it doesn’t take that long.
You’ve got to focus on what pays your bills — learning to create sales messages that get people to buy then getting those sales messages in front of the right people.
22. How to get traffic
One of the perennial questions is, “How do I get traffic to my web site?”
This usually means you’re still in the “web site creation” model. The idea is that your job is to “build web sites.” And somehow by building or assembling lots of web sites, your bills will get paid. That’s OK for newbies just getting started. You can pay a few bills that way.
But you’ve been there and done that or you wouldn’t be reading this. So let’s get real. You get paid when someone buys something. Plain and simple.
Getting thousands of people to your web site makes you zilch.
Would you rather have 1,000 visitors who do NOT buy or ONE who buys? I’ll take the one who buys.
The BEST traffic bar none comes from your affiliates. Chances are, you’ve been sucked into the idea of being someone else’s affiliate. And I love affiliates. Affiliate marketing is a GREAT way to get started in this business.
But the best traffic comes from affiliates. And affiliates send traffic to the offers that get the most bux per click. And the secret to getting most bux per click is split testing and learning to craft super powerful sales messages.
Nothing happens until someone buys.
And no one buys until someone sells.
Here are your best traffic sources:
a. Getting affiliates to promote your products
b. Article traffic
c. Ezine traffic (from buying ads in ezines)
d. organic seo
e. ppc
f. banners
g. cpa traffic
We could debate the order of some of the above. But you can write or get written and submit dozens of articles a week and get traffic that way. You can buy ads.
Here’s the thing: It ALL works and pays your bills as long as you have a SALES MACHINE that follows up and gets people to buy over and over and over again.
Without a sales machine, not much above will work. As long as you write the articles yourself, article marketing will. If you have a sales machine, it ALL works.
23. The bottom line
The thing that separates the newbie from the next level up is the willingness to create and the willingness to sell.
“But Marlon, what about all these stories of people who just have these automated systems for building web sites that magically make bank?”
Here is what I think:
a. It sounds good in theory
A lot of these people give you 2 or 3 examples of sites they created in a few hours that bring in $30-$100 a day. But they don’t tell you they had to create 10 or 20 to find those.
The same thing for those super big Adwords campaigns that make your eyes bug out. They don’t tell you they created 100 to find that 1 to give you as an example.
b. The person has a very high skill level
I’ve seen people who actually DO this. And they have a very high skill level that few people could match. If you’re a genius, a lot of doors open up to you.
I prefer teaching methods that are within the realm of realism for someone who is less than genius.
c. The person skews the truth
The pitch doesn’t necessarily lie but it omits key facts.
d. The System isn’t evergreen and will be “broken” in 6 months or a year.
If you want to build a solid business that will be around 5-10 years later like I’ve done, learn how to get people on a list and get ‘em to buy stuff.
I’m thinking about doing a new 6-week course that elaborates on all the above. It would be teleseminars, videos and a webinar or two for $300 to $500. I need 12 serious people to do it.
Post to my blog if you’re 100% sure you’d be 1 of the 12: Marlon Sanders
About The Author
Marlon Sanders is the author of The Amazing Formula That Sells Products Like Crazy.
To get on his killer ezine list, to get cheat sheets and all kinds of other goodies every Saturday and during the week, to get simple, to-the-point Internet marketing know that works real world without all the hype, go to: http://www.marlonsnews.com and subscribe
Check out all my products here:
Tags: Marketing Tools, Marlon Sanders, Newbies Guide To Internet Marketing
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