Building Membership Site

Introduction to Building Membership Site

Over the last few weeks, maybe even months, I have been working through in my head how to put together strategy for building membership site.

There have been a few threads to the thinking

1.  A unique way to offer bonuses on affiliate offers. I have been pushing a few offers and have added in bonuses – nothing is really zinging just yet.
2. I know that membership sites can be really profitable. This was confirmed to me in emails I have received from Promote Labs who have a few membership sites. In fact they have 15 years of experience building, running and marketing dozens of different membership sites (their words)
3.  A membership site is a good platform to deploy private label rights products I have purchased. I have bought a few recently that would complement each other well in a membership. I discussed this in a post on Using PLR a few weeks ago
4. The best profits come from selling your own products – a membership site becomes an own product (even if it is delivering PLR content)

Over the years I have bought a number of membership tools and also rights to resell memberships. I have never done anything with them – like all good things the idea looks good at the time – make the purchase – and then lose momentum some time into the implementation.

I developed a strategic framework some years ago now which has helped my get to grips with shiny object syndrome. What I have learned is there is a right time to deploy new tools – the time when you are ready. Until the time is right and you are ready, do not buy anything.

Designing a Membership Site

A few weeks ago, I felt the time was right for building membership site . I also got an email that laid out all the things that need to be in place to launch an effective membership. I will repeat the guts of what it said here

• Pick a Niche: Find something the market wants and that they will value. That takes research
• Choose a Membership Model: This seems simple enough but it has layers of complication (free, monthly, annual, drip feed, all available, time limited)
• Develop a Winning Sales Proposition: The offer must stand out as offering value worth paying for (and choosing over competing offers)
• Pick Price Points: A factoid here = up to 75% of your income will come on the back-end. This makes a freemium offer or a bonus offer quite compelling.
• Select A Platform: Key criteria to consider are property protection, scalability, customer service, ease of implementation and cost.
• Create Content that Fits the Market Need. Delivery method becomes a key point too – video vs audio vs text. I am a text type person. The current leaning is toward video. Audio works really well for people who consume stuff on the move.
• Pick a Selling Platform: The biggest buck comes from back-end sales – this needs to be built into the delivery platform. While your members are using what they have signed up for they will look at related products and services.

Now that is a lot to take in before we even think about stuff like design, branding, logos, hosting, support tools, and and and.

To quote

But as a busy entrepreneur, the idea of building an entirely new membership site then sweating over video/training content (for multiple levels of membership), getting the sales funnels tested and tweaked, managing the ticking technical time bombs and the prospect of supporting hundreds/even thousands of members on a daily basis is just out of reach.

Designing A Membership Site Course

These are the steps the team at Promote Labs laid out in a series of emails

Your Online Course Checklist in a Nutshell:

• Step 1: Pick a topic: Is there demand for the subject matter and will people value it?
• Step 2: Create Course Outline: Building a course from scratch can take time. You will make better progress if you use a consistent course outline
• Step 3: Create Course Content: This needs to be a mix of formats with at least one video module.
• Step 4: Think about branding = Start with a sexy title: This becomes more important when one is selling a membership (as opposed to giving one away for free)
• Step 5: Launch.

Now that all sounds easy enough.

Building  My First Membership Site

I did feel the time was right to buy a ready made Reseller Membership – I bought one a few weeks ago. This has 5 core modules already built all in the arena of passive income building and affiliate marketing. This helped with a lot of the technical design choices – the membership already comes with the platform choice made for product and course delivery. The platform is built on Product Dyno and a 12 month membership. Product Dyno includes the hooks for upsells and cross sells.  I am in a few memberships that use the tool – it comes highly recommended. AND I was able to get a sweet lifetime deal not long after – and a big bonus was getting a lifetime bonus on a suite of tutorial videos on Internet Marketing basics. .

Of course this is where I have been in dither mode for a while. Two things have got me there

1. Branding and logos. There are a lot of images and tag lines loaded all the way across the membership. I really wanted to align those with my own ideas – Stratocharge Your Income.
2. Putting together a sales front end. Now this should be straight forward. Choose a landing page builder – build the sales pages and thank you page and integrate with product delivery platform. The problem: I have more than one page builder I use. One already (Convertri) has integration hooks with the membership platform (ProductDyno). I do not know how well they work and I have not been able to find someone using it that way. I would love to find one and clone it as Convertri has strong cloning tools. The other (FusionHQ) has the added attraction of including both member management and affiliate management. I kind of would like to keep open the avenue of adding in affiliate management in the future.

How do I break out of dither mode?

Some time ago Kane Minkus used the words “functional is good enough” when it comes to Internet Marketing. Get something going and then come back to improve it. Dean Holland says much the same in a lot of his sessions. The art is to keep it moving. Now when I was going through the training on how to implement the Reseller Membership, the trainer said “get stuff out there” and then come back to make the changes. So that is what I am going to do. I will pick one module and implement that. I will offer it as a bonus for affiliate products I am promoting so that I do not have to worry about the sales page side just yet. That can come along as phase 2 or even 3.

Action Plan for Building Membership Site

So here goes with an action plan for a membership launch

1. Get base site up for one product (Passive Income Building)
2. Choose what products to promote from within the site. Each course page includes banner ad space to cross promote. Ideally this is used to do upsells into the rest of the membership. To start off I can promote Internet Profits products like the Iceberg Effect and The Perfect Offer
3. Work through logos and branding and create templates for the other modules.
4. Roll out to other products in the collection (there are 5 products).
5. Decide on pricing strategies – e.g., free vs paid vs bundles and monthly vs annual or 56 monthly
6.  Integrate new products from existing PLR (Digital Course; Time Management; Copywriting)
7. Roll out to other collections (more technical product specific topics like Youtube Marketing and Podcasting)
8. Supplement individual products with new modules as market and technology evolves

I did a little more digging to find a link for Fusion HQ for the resources section. Software is working but I cannot find a working promotion link. Decision made – stick to stuff that I can use and promote.

Postscript

I wrote the guts of this blog post about 10 days ago. I have to say it all sounds perfectly clear – pick one module that already exists and run with it and then reverse the changes in. Well I got distracted. A long time ago I bought reseller rights (from the same person as the membership stuff) covering a range of video tutorials ranging from basic WordPress stuff to crunchy programs on traffic and a conversions. It is the longer term plan to implement those probably as a bonus product or as an addendum to the membership site. I started the process of putting together a module following the approach outlined above – picked a topic (WordPress Basics); created course outline (3 topics and 14 videos); created content (created intro video for each course and created the merged videos); started creating the course on ProductDyno. And that is where I got stuck – the default themes look really ugly and are dramatically different to the first module I wanted to clone.

That should never be a problem – stop working on stuff before getting too far(I did just that) and step back to the original idea – clone the working model and then make the changes. That is when life got in the way. We have kitchen renovations just beginning. I am not the project designer but I am at home when the work is happening. AND a 7% correction in stock markets over 3 days on corona virus fears has got me busy doing other things – that I do know make money.

What’s Coming

I did write higher up that there is a right time to do stuff. I do have a bigger picture of products to offer. One of those is in the whole area of copywriting – I now have the platform on which to launch my copywriting courses – at the moment I have two with a new one popping up for PLR rights this last week – it is all coming soon.

A few years ago I invented a new word – stratocharge – a bit like turbocharge but going to the stratosphere. The time is right now to start working that into a concrete idea – Stratocharge Your Income. The membership will be the vehicle and will have 4 main modules – and maybe more.

• Statocharge Your Income
• Statocharge Your Income Marketing Toolbox
• Statocharge Your Income through Copywriting
• Startocharge Your Income Technical Toolboxes.

An Aside – The Iceberg Effect.

In Chapter 7 of The Iceberg Effect written by my mentor and partner, Dean Holland writes about the perfect path to 7 figures. He describes 3 roles one can play.

• Phase 1 Start as a Connector – connect prospects to other product owners and earn affiliate commissions.
• Phase 2 is the Creator – start to sell your own products. Easy way to start is to use rebranding and private label products. A membership site is a strong way to start as a creator.
• Phase 3 is all about how to scale this up – more automation; 24/7 coverage; an army of JV partners and affiliates, and more. He calls this Commander.

The book is free – just pay shipping.  Order here

Resources

Convertri is the page builder I use. It has a solid page import function under the Pro membership for cloning pages.  Its strongest selling points are the load time for pages and the easy to use editor for desktop and mobile pages. It works for me and the price point is lower than the main competitors. There is a free trial period – you will not be disappointed. Try it here

ProductDyno is a product delivery and membership platform. Their words

All the marketing features and functionality you need combined with dozens of time saving integrations are what make ProductDyno the #1 solution for secure digital product delivery and hassle-free membership management!

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