Archive for August, 2012

Pain of Disconnect: How to Get More, Make More, and Keep More (As Soon As You Understand This Very Simple Idea)

Can I let you in on a couple of quick, little secrets?

Secret #1: We are using "drip content" less and less in our business -- it's almost obsolete for us!

Secret #2: The marketplace goes through "cycles." Notice how one month articles are really hot, then next month it's all about making short reports. The month after, webinars are the "next big thing" -- then it's social media. Then it's membership sites... more on that in a minute.

Secret #3: We all have a $2,000 membership site inside of us -- as long as we can get over price reluctance...

Here's something I even have to remind myself sometimes... a membership site is just a download page on steroids. Someone pays you money (even a one time fee), or joins for free, fills in a quick signup form containing: first name, last name, email address, account username, and password...

And now they get the digital product (PDF, video, software, service) they just paid for -- plus you're building a mailing list. Plus they can get back to that page anytime they want -- recover the password if they forgot it. You can easily update or add bonuses, throw in a forum.

What You Probably Didn't Know About Drip Content...

Drip your content even if it's a single payment site.

Example: I charge $97 for my "Time Management on Crack" course. It contains a PDF report and a series of videos, people can post comments. But what's really cool is that new short videos are dripped out once per week 26 times. That means we stay in contact for six months even after they've paid me money.

I have links to other products in the sidebar of that site. Login offers when they come back to view more content. And, of course, if they refund (within the first 30 days), they no longer have access to the site.

Pain of disconnect. This makes it interesting because I could split up the payments and make it a 2-pay, 3-pay, 5-pay, 10-pay. Maybe something ridiculous like $9.95 for 10 months and then it's paid off.

Throw in a live monthly Q&A session where I setup a "recurring webinar" in GoToWebinar, schedule 12 of them, put it on my Google Calendar, schedule some email reminders so my members show up, hop on a call and talk about whatever's on my mind, and answer any questions people submit -- no big deal if there are only a couple questions or even no questions.

"The Last Thing You'd Ever Shut Off"

Quick question: What do you pay for on a recurring basis? What do you pay for on a recurring basis that's FUN? What do you pay for on a recurring basis, that would be one of the last things you'd turn off? How about...

• Web hosting (HostGator)
• Webinar service (GoToWebinar)
• Email autoresponder service (Aweber or SendGrid)
• Online storage (Amazon S3)
• Mastermind group (Double Agent Marketing)
• Paid advertising

If you had to shut off any one of these items, you'd be in serious trouble, wouldn't you? So if you want to make "real" money online, create a paid site that people simply can't live without.

Add a forum or community in your site where people can interact -- but keep it alive (that's the secret)...

Bundle your site with software that shuts off remotely upon cancellation. Adobe is going this right now with their "Creative Cloud Suite." For $49/month you get the latest Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, their audio editor, all of that -- and you'd probably pay that same price just to buy the software outright and keep it updated every year. But, you stop paying, and now you can't use Photoshop.

"Pain of Disconnect" Explained

Were you on the internet when "audio buttons" on sales letters were popular? Armand Morin had a service called Audio Generator. You place an audio button on your website, and can call a phone number, leave a message in their voicemail, and that's your audio message...

BUT!!! If you forget to pay your monthly bill, the audio messages changes to something like -- "This customer's service has been discontinued for non-payment. Add audio buttons to your site right now at AudioGenerator.com."

Now... with that pain of disconnect, you have an easy time getting people to stay in, and they'll reactivate if they have even more than a couple of audio buttons around the internet -- no one wants to hear that message!

And that's why we have this "remote activation" built into our WP Drip, Video Player, Webinar Optin, Backup Creator, Plugin Dashboard, WP Import, WP Notepad, and WP Kunaki plugins. We can put these plugins on a payment plan (probably not a monthly charge forever). We can offer a trial period -- as we've done with 99 cent trials in the past.

I don't mind if someone joins for 99 cents, or makes 4 out of 5 payments and then cancels, because they'll be shut off if they do! The plugin will no longer function.

Eugene Schwartz: Marketplace Cycles

Getting back on track. Marketplace cycles. A really smart copywriter named Eugene Schwartz had a couple of ideas about finding a demand and filling it. First of all... unless you're Coca-Cola and spend millions and millions on "branding" ... you can't "create" demand. It's much cheaper to find out what people are buying right now and sell that.

But... the marketplace has its ups and downs. (Articles are popular, then not, then webinars, etc.) It goes in four stages...

•  "Novelty" stage: brand new course teaches a "simple" technique to lose 10 pounds (i.e. diet & exercise)
• "Enlargement" stage: competitors flood the market showing how to lose 50 pounds
• "Sophistication" stage: even more competitors show how to lose 100 pounds, from just 5 minutes a day, in your sleep, without changing your diet or any exercise whatsoever
• "Abandonment" stage: the marketplace is so fed up with complex solutions, and not knowing what to buy, that they lose interest

That is why you see these trends coming in style, getting too crowded, going out of style, then becoming popular again. That's why we sell multiple software products and have webinar training on different topics.

That's why if you're in the weight loss niche, you have one product based on Exercise. One product based on Diet. One weight loss product based on Mindset/Hypnosis/Goal Setting. One weight loss product based on Supplements. And now they can all sell year-round, although you'll cycle through what the marketplace is asking for right now.

Membership Sites!

Here's how I see marketplace cycles when it comes to recurring membership sites...

"Novelty" iteration: Drip content. Most marketers in your industry aren't using the "membership" aspect of their products so you create a site that drips out content over time, like 1 new video or interview per week with some assignments and tools in between.

Problem: you have to keep creating new "content" every month, and your customers have to wait to get it...

"Enlargement" iteration: Big box of crap. Now everyone is dripping out courses. You set things up so that when someone buys from you, they get that drip content, but are able to download a bunch of stuff when they first sign up. 10 hours of videos the first day. Keep putting out one new $97 product each month and say, you can either pay $97 for this one product, or get on this $97/month membership to get ALL my products at once.

Problem: when someone buys into your membership site, they're overwhelmed and have no way of consuming all that content before it's time to pay again... until they get frustrated and give up...

"Sophistication" iteration: Multi-tiered membership. Now you're saying, I want this site to be accessible to my low-ticket buyers, but I also want to make enough money to justify keeping the site open. I'll offer a "Silver" level for $17/month that contains all my products. The "Gold" level is $47/month and also contains a monthly live group Q&A webinar. Then the "Platinum" level might be $97/month and offer 1-on-1 coaching.

Problem: Can people easily tell the difference between each level? Is there an easy way to upgrade to a higher level? (Good news for you PayPal users: you can now edit the price your recurring members pay you every month... pretty cool!)

"Abandonment" iteration: Pain of disconnect model. We set our membership site at a fair price and bundle it with some software that'll shut off (WP Drip), or build a really useful tool right into the membership site (Make a Product or Newbie Crusher). Now it doesn't matter what we price the site at. How many payments we split this into. If we have a trial period or not. If they pay, they can use it, if not, they don't.

What's my point? Well, I see far too many people asking the wrong questions. What should I price my membership site at? Should I bill for a set number of payments or continue billing forever? Offer a trial period? How do I reduce refunds? How do I keep them paying?

This is backwards logic. Create a site, look at your competitors, and go with a price that "feels" right. There are some recurring sites like LinkedIn (job finder), eHarmony (dating service), or Angie's List (consumer reviews) where I don't "get" that monthly pricing model. I'm not going to pay a monthly fee just to find a local plumber in my area, I'll search Google. Someone might pay for LinkedIn for a month, then get a job, and cancel.

Lynda, GoToWebinar & Hulu

Can I tell you what I think is one of the coolest, most ridiculous recurring offers out there? Lynda.com. For $25/month, you get access to 1,427 different training courses on everything from Microsoft Word, to PHP programming, Apple software creation, video editing, audio editing, photo editing, any tutorial you'd need.

They don't worry about dripping content. It kind of is a "big box of crap" site, but even if you only took one course from them every month, you'd stay in.

GoToWebinar. You can run an unlimited number of webinar sessions in a given month, run free ones, charge for others, use them for meetings and coaching calls, run them for others -- if it costs you $99 per month, all you need to do is get $99.01 of value from it every month...

Hulu Plus. 7 dollars and 99 cents per month and I can watch many TV shows on demand, even several TV shows that were on-air yesterday.

I'll be honest with you. The first time I charged $200 for a product (I was 19 years old) I was terrified. The first time I charged $300 for a simple web page design (I was 17 years old) it was scary. But since then we've sold $297, $497 membership sites. $997 live webinar courses. $2,497 per person physical seminars -- and though it took a lot of marketing, follow-up, and course correction... even though it was "scary" to charge higher than $10, higher than $100, higher than $1000... we got over it...

How to Get People to Buy (Easily)...

Not because of "X number of videos" or "X number of hours" or "X number of pages" -- but because if they didn't pay the $2497, they'd lose $2497 in future profits by missing out on that training. Because if they refunded $2497 or didn't make all the payments, they'd lose $2497 in opportunity and lost profits.

Pleasure vs. pain. People buy access to your membership site because it's more painful not to have access and more pleasurable to get results from your training. The value has outweighed the cost of your course! Then, there's more pleasure (value) that comes from making those recurring payments than there is pain (cost) so they keep paying, and they stay out of the refund zone.

Create a tool and bundle it with training course that people will get much more than $2,000 of value from. Price it at $100 or higher. Cut it up into payments. Offer a trial period on it. Market the crap out of it (joint ventures, affiliates, pitch webinars) and create about 4 hot sellers so you'll be diversified enough to ride out the marketplace cycles in your niche.

Easy question: what "could" you add to your membership site (whether you have one or not) to give people the pain of disconnect if they refund or cancel? What are your favorite recurring membership sites and what pain of disconnect exists there to keep you in? Please let me know in a comment below, if comments are still open.