Robert Plank

The biggest benefit you can give to yourself as a business owner is to remove yourself from the equation. That means automate as much of yourself as possible ahead of time so your daily tasks do not become chores.

You might be surprised at all the ways you can pre-schedule your content and your marketing ahead of time and I'm going to explain six ways to do that right now.

1. Blog Drip

When someone says the phrase "drip content" to me, the first thing that comes to mind and the first thing that should come to mind to you is dripping out content on your WordPress blog.

WordPress is the #1 blogging platform and my favorite feature about it has always been that you can schedule content ahead of time with no additional plugins needed. When you're writing a blog post, you can choose to submit it right now or you can change the date on it so it appears as if it was written a long time ago, but you can also change the date to a date in the future – for example, date it to be next week or next month.

That post will remain in a scheduled state until the next week or next month and it will automatically be published for you on a timer. You can set not just the date but the time of day so you know exactly when that next post is coming out.

I highly recommend that instead of sitting and writing out your blog's next week's worth of content, write 4 or 5 short posts and schedule them one month apart. That way, you have the next several months of blog posts already scheduled. And guess what else, if you're using WordPress to run your membership site, you're dripping out content inside your paid membership site as well.

2. Autoresponder Drip

The next easy way to drip content is with your email autoresponder.

You might not have notice it yet but your autoresponder gives you the ability to pre-schedule posts in the same way as your blog. You can write an email that will be sent to your list and set it to tomorrow's date or next week's date, which means that you can write your next month or your next week's worth of autoresponder emails and not have to do anything for that amount of time. You could go on vacation for the next week, schedule your next week's worth of emails and now your business will run even though you are not present.

When you are launching a product, one email simply won't cut it. You need to give people multiple reasons to go check out your offer. You need to give people multiple email reminders getting them to look at your webpage. When you're running a webinar, you should send several emails leading up to the webinar to make sure everyone is on the call.

When you make a blog post, you should send traffic to that blog post and even send reminder emails, which means you can schedule your blog post and schedule your autoresponder emails for that blog post.

3. Sales Letter Drip

If you know a programmer for about $5, you can get content on your sales letter dripped out. There's a little thing called "if else" statements.

That means if you want to slowly increase the price of your product – say increase it by $10 once a week for 5 weeks, you can at a special bit of PHP code that will replace your order button with a new one at a higher price every few days. You can run seasonal specials. For example, every month you could rotate in a different bonus for your offer to give different people a reason to get in.

4. Squeeze Page Drip

You can apply the same "if else" technology that you use on your sales letter to your squeeze page as well and you can use it to do the same things – rotate a monthly or weekly offer, and this can be a different headline, a different bonus or even an entire page swapped out for another.

You can switch out one of your opt-in forms after 2 months for a different one and have the first opt-in form send people to a page where they are supposed to re-tweet one of your free audios, but after 2 months, now direct them to a page where it sends them to your blog, which is now filled up with content.

More often than not, if I have a hard deadline for something, if I know I'm going to increase the price, change the headline, change a redirect, I will set it on this timer instead of doing it manually because otherwise I know I might forget.

5. Social Media

Now that you've dripped out your blog post, install a WordPress plugin such as Twitter Tools to leave a Twitter post or a tweet everytime you make a new blog post.

Also, if I know I'm going to be tweeting about something for the next week or two, I will use a scheduling service such as SocialOomph (formerly TweetLater) to write tweets but set a publication date on them, which means I can write 10 or 20 tweets a time which will be posted once a day or once a week.

If you don't know what kind of scheduled tweets you should put out there, just use 30-day reminders. If you're posting about a blog post today, schedule another tweet in 30 days, reminding people about that old blog post.

6. Traffic Drip

Even third-party services allow you to drip out your content, even if your content appears on other people's sites.

The Traffic Geyser service allows you to upload up to 90 videos at once and determine when they will be scheduled. (I wish Tube Mogul did too.)  When I was using this service for videos, I would record 90 videos at once, upload 90 videos and set the publication date for each and everyone - meaning that I could leave it alone for 3 months and it would send out a new video to the video sites once per day.

EzineArticles even has a premium option which means you can schedule all your articles and determine what date they will be published. Meaning, you can use the same strategy, write or outsource 90 articles, upload and schedule them all and the next 3 months' worth of traffic building are now automatic.

I hope that one of those 6 ways to drip content automatically opened your eyes and made you realized that doing things on a consistent basis doesn't always involve you and doesn't always have to be a chore.

So, which one do you like the best? The blog drip, autoresponder, sales letter, squeeze page, social media, or traffic drip? Post below, letting me know. Thank you.

Writing anything is pretty tough, whether it is writing articles, putting together a report, writing a blog post - but especially creating sales copy.  Let's figure out what your options are...

Hiring A Copywriter

Finding someone to write your sales letter for you sounds good, right? You just pay somebody some money, and out pops a brand-spanking-new sales letter.

But it's not great, because the copywriter doesn't necessarily know you. He doesn't know your voice. He hasn't seen your product. He doesn't understand what your customers' problems are.

And the worst part is you paid money to get something that is worse than if you had made it yourself!

Writing It Yourself

There is a free option: that is that you try to write the sales letter yourself. However, unless you have been trained in writing sales copy, it is not going to be that great. It is also going to take you for ever, and you might not even finish it. If you are not a writer, let alone a copywriter, your skills might be better put to use creating videos or marketing your solution.

Also, many people who have not written on a regular basis don't write the way they sound - which means your sales letter is going to seem completely different than the way you come off in person or in audios.

What is the solution then?

Put together a list of problems your customers have, and a list of benefits that you have that will solve the problem, and...

Dictate Your Sales Copy!

You are going to use the same exact elements as a sales letter: like a headline, sub-headline, body copy, your story, a problem, and so on. So you might need to consult for one hour with a copywriter, especially to help you flesh out the headline and organize the copy.

But if you know your niche and you know your product, and you are passionate about it, you can dictate out an audio file, get someone else to type it up for you. And now you have a complete sales letter that sounds exactly like it came from you - because it did!

Also keep in mind that once you have the sales letter dictated, transcribed and properly formatted, you can send it to the same copywriter again to get it critiqued.

This will probably take only about an hour, and critiques where the copywriter gets on a phone call with you - or preferably a webinar - work the best because you are not waiting around for him to finish.

The next time you need a sales letter done, dictate it! Meet with the copywriter for one hour to flesh out the plan of the copy. Dictate it, transcribe it, format it. Then meet back with the copywriter again, to make it shine.

Have you dictated sales copy yourself? What kinds of things are you dictating? Are they articles / reports / sales letters? Or something I hadn't even thought of?

Leave me a blog comment below with your response.

Why is it that people pay you money for your services, products and memberships?

It really helps to figure out not just how people found you, but what is their reason for joining your community? That way, when you send emails and write sales letters, you can appeal to all the groups.

I can't speak for anyone else, but here are the reasons I buy your stuff...

The Entire Step-By-Step Training

Four years ago, I joined a Membership site from Jim Edwards that taught everything I needed to know. It taught how to create videos, how to make reports, gave me tips on sales letters... And a lot of the things I learned were not taught directly to me. They were things I observed from his marketing and his videos.

I joined that site as a relative newbie because I wanted to learn and apply one hundred percent of what he showed me.

That training helped me get over a lot of obstacles. For example, I had not ever created video. I had some idea in my head that I needed to have green screen, that I needed to have different camera angles and different screens. But most of his videos were simple PowerPoints. At the time, PowerPoint videos were not very common. And that was the biggest benefit I got from learning and taking all his training, was making PowerPoint videos.

Eventually I outgrew that training and quit. But I short-cut a lot of things that I might have taken a long time to figure out, or maybe would not have figured out at all.

The Quick Fix

I have joined other membership sites, just to get one piece of the training. It is very important that when you join some kind of site, you know what your goal is.

Jeanette Cates delivered a three-month training program about product creation. And although most of the things she taught I already knew, I joined because I wanted to get motivated enough to record more audios. That was my one goal from joining: to record more audios.

I joined the site, picked up some extra tips about how to make my audios better, recorded them and then showed them to her for accountability. I also used those audios to build my list, and I reported back to her about how many opt-ins they gave me and how many sales those led to.

More often than not, I will join someone's site just for one particular thing. This is why, in addition to explaining the step-by-step of what they are getting in your sales letter, go into the details. Tell them EXACTLY what result they will get from your training - because you never know what outcome people are looking for.

Community

I have joined a number of monthly membership sites, just to get my name out there. It is one thing to leave blog comments, or post on a free forum. But the audience there has not been proven to buy anything.

On the other hand, if you join somebody's "$100 per month training" and are allowed to leave comments or make forum posts, you know that every single person reading your messages has at least $100 per month to spend on some form of training.

Also, because it costs money to get into this community, it is more exclusive, which means it is a smaller crowd, which means you have less competition as far as getting your information read.

Some of my best connections came from the inside of these communities.

Brownie Points

When a friend of mine, Stu McLaren, offered training about his WordPress Membership Software, I joined - even though I had previously taught similar membership training.

I joined this site basically to become the "Star Student." I listened to all the training calls, read all the blog posts, and when he had call-in days, I made sure to have some kind of question, to make sure I understood all of the content. And I contributed a couple of things just to make sure all the bases were covered with his training.

Although you should definitely position your sales letter and marketing materials to "Why newbies can best benefit form your course," keep in mind that some experts may join, to keep their own training up-to-date, or even show support for you.

And those are the four reasons why I buy eBooks, reports, services and memberships. Did I leave any reasons out? What is the top reason YOU join someone else's community or pay them money for something?

Let me know down below, in the form of a very brief comment.

A split test of mine recently finished and the conversion rate increased from 2.21% to 3.92% by changing JUST the headline -- but not even the words on the headline... the COLORS!

Imagine that, an additional 14 signups to a "$47 every 2 weeks" membership site -- an extra $1400 monthly passive income -- from such a small change.

Why does this happen?  Why does split testing even work?

I'll tell you why... it's because: Read More »

Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) who is worth over 5 billion dollars and is a fantastic speaker, has a unique close that if you try to emulate it, will kill every single webinar pitch and every single sales letter you have.

I'm not a huge Apple fan, but Steve runs an event once a year called MacWorld Expo... you've probably heard of it.  A bunch of geeks go to this event and he shows off all the latest stuff their company has put out.

At the end of the presentation, he stops and says, "Oh yeah, one more thing..." And then reveals something big, like iTunes or the iPod Touch. Read More »

A couple days ago I asked my list if they had a membership site yet... I got 300 responses to that question and I want to share the results with you right now:

• 165 people, or 54.8% own membership software
• Out of that half that owned membership software, 89 people or 53.9% have at least one paying member
  
• Total, those 89 people who had a profitable membership only accounted for 29.6% of the responders

So Strange!

Some of these people paid $197, $297, even 4000 bucks for a membership script but only half of them are doing anything with it.

So let me share with you a couple of reasons that stopped me from creating membership sites (I've created 19 of them in the past 12 months... and only ONE before that time period!)

Read More »

Let me tell you about the first product online that got me to pay higher than $100 for the very first time (this was years ago).

He called it a "Because I Can" sale.  Basically the guy put together a huge package with a bunch of his own products, including resale rights.

• This was long before that kind of thing was common!
• JV giveaways didn't exist yet...
• Pitch webinars didn't REALLY exist yet...

He set the start price at $37 and the end price at something like $297, and the sale only ran for about 3 days.  Every few seconds the price would jump up a fraction of a penny.  I waited until it was above $100 before I bought.

Back then I think my highest priced product was $197, and if I sold two copies of it in a week I would be jumping for joy. I might not have had a $1000 launch yet.  I was still full-time in college, rent was only $625 a month (a lot for me at the time).  I didn't have a full time job or any other source of income.

But... I Still Bought!

What got me to buy?  Scarcity!

Read More »