Robert Plank

Do you have a membership site setup yet? (it's okay if you don't)

When you sell products and services online, you can't avoid the steps that people need to take in order to buy from you:

1. View your offer on your sales letter
2. Pay you money using your payment processor
3. Collect that offer on your download page

And you can literally take any payments without software of any kind. I did that for the better part of the 2000's. It was simple:

1. Add HTML page called index.html to your website (presenting your offer)
2. Add HTML page called download123xyz.html to your website (presenting your download)
3. Login to PayPal, create a Buy Now button that charges $17.00 (and sends people to download123xyz.html after checkout)
4. Right click and copy button from PayPal (and paste on the bottom of index.html)

Sounds like a great way to get started but why wouldn't you want to set things up this way?

• Your buyers aren't added to an email list for updates (unless they signup themselves on your download page)
• You can't easily provide lots of bonuses or drip content (refund reducers)
• There's no community (customers can't talk to each other)
• The download page can easily get passed around (you have to rename the page every week)
• It's almost impossible to charge a monthly fee and keep track of who still gets access
• You have to manually setup a new download page for EACH product you want to sell

Instead, you should use a membership site to handle your product downloads, here's all you have to do:

1. Add HTML page at www.example.com/index.html (presenting your offer)
2. Install WordPress and Wishlist Member at www.example.com/members (presenting your download)
3. Create a membership level called "Full" so when someone buys, they get access to everything for now (you can add more levels later)
4. Add your blog posts or pages (click "Add Post", type a title and type out the content or paste in the video)
5. Login to PayPal, create a Buy Now button that charges $17.00 (and sends people to a special link provided by your membership software)

That's a "slightly" more involved, but you basically go through the same steps, and now:

• Your buyers specify their own unique username and password that they can't share and can always recover (using "lost password" tool)
• Your buyers can get added to your email list for updates (when you specify it in the membership settings)
• You can add more levels and sell an unlimited number of products or packages from the same website
• Any WordPress plugin (including popup software, drip plugins, forum add-ons, and tracking software) can run inside your membership site
• You can easily drip or manually add bonuses for your buyers to reduce refunds
• You can easily switch the payment button to charge in installments, or a monthly fee, for access
• If someone refunds (takes the money back) or cancels (stops paying a recurring payment) they lose access

Do you have a membership site? If so, what's so special about it? If you don't have a membership site, what's stopping you and what are you planning?

Notice: Only 29 More Comments Will Be Allowed in This Blog Post...

1. Setup a backup of your ENTIRE account or your ENTIRE server in cPanel/WHM. Do this long before anything goes wrong... preferably one that automatically runs once per week and backs up via FTP to an offsite server... email your web host if you need help setting this up.

Seriously, don't even bother with any automatic WordPress backup plugins, just backup your ENTIRE account... this makes sure all your files, databases, email accounts, and everything is kept safe... not just your WordPress blog.

2. Backup your desktop files on a G-Safe redundant external drive and using offsite backup service Carbonite. Don't store everything on a memory stick or your computer's hard drive... it WILL fail eventually.

3. Install Roboform Everywhere on your computer. This software stores all your passwords in the cloud so it can sync with all your computers including your laptop and smartphone. You also don't have to spend 30 seconds logging into every website. If you only logged into 10 websites per day (think Facebook, email, your membership site, forum, someone else's membership site, YouTube, Twitter, a news site, another forum, and your hosting account) that's 5 minutes per day, which is 30 hours per year you're saving.

An added bonus is that it will auto-generate every password for every site for you... so you use a "master password" to let Roboform do its thing, but it fills out an extremely hard to guess password... and it uses a different password for every single site.

4. Bookmark each of your login pages and membership sites in your browser, organize them in folders, and use Firefox Sync to back it all up. I save my most visited sites in my "bookmarks toolbar" that appears at the top of my browser window. On this toolbar, I have:

• one bookmarks folder for News Headlines
• one bookmarks folder for Forums
• one bookmarks folder for Classes (recurring membership sites)
• one bookmarks folder for Products (standalone membership sites)
• one bookmarks folder for Dashboard sites (for travel, Google Website Optimizer, EzineArticles, and other training I'm taking
• one bookmarks folder for cPanel (site backends I login to)

5. Install the Maintenance Mode plugin on your blogs and WordPress membership sites in case you need to take them offline quickly. This is a free plugin you can install from your WordPress dashboard where you can take your entire site offline to outside visitors in one click... useful if you are tweaking your theme or if a plugin fails.

When does all of this come in handy? Last night I needed to take about 20 sites down in a hurry while a problem was fixed overnight... so you know what I did?

• I went to the "Classes" folder on my Firefox bookmarks toolbar, right clicked, and chose "Open in All Tabs" ... this opened each of my membership sites in a different tab
• I logged into each of these sites with 1-click using Roboform
• Enabled the Maintenance Mode plugin on each of these sites

And there you go, in a couple minutes, temporarily took my sites down so I could fix them.

What's your best tip to keep your business running smoothly?

Any time somebody teaches membership sites, you always see the question come up, "Should I offer a payment plan or should I offer some kind of a trial?"

And while it seems like a lot of fun, and while it seems like you might get a lot more subscribers and customers into your funnel by offering a payment plan or a trial period, I recommend you stay away from them, for these three reasons:

You are always training your subscribers (whether you realize it or not); you are training your buyers as well; and trials just plain suck and attract the wrong kind of customer that you do NOT want to be a part of your business.

How Do You Train Your Subscribers?

Even if somebody doesn't see everything that happens behind closed doors within your membership site; even if they have not bought a lot of things from you, they still see the way you market your stuff.

If you are always offering a payment plan, or if the reason for you offering a payment plan is because no-one is buying, you look desperate!  If you are not emailing to your subscribers enough, then they get the feeling like you are not much of a marketer.

If you keep dropping the price or keep piling in more bonuses without actually marketing your product, you look like somebody who will simply pile on more "stuff" in order to get a sale; and not really marketing and not convincing people and giving real good REASONS for them to join.

And let's say somebody does join.  You are training those buyers as well. If someone is used to only paying you $1 or $5, and they have been doing it for years, it might be a little bit of a struggle to get them to the $100 or higher mark.

It might take a little bit of time - but if you can get your buyers to pay you more money to get more stuff, instead of paying you less money to get less stuff, they will be used to dedicating a larger portion of their monthly budget to getting your solutions.  And that includes payment plans and membership sites.

I am totally for having a membership site where with every payment they get some new kind of concern.  But too many times I see launches happen where someone is offering a product for $100, and people split it up over five payments: they pay five times but they only get one thing at the very beginning!  How much sense does THAT make?

And the reason why many marketers offer payment plans like this is to claim a high number of sales. They get a lot of people to pay them $20 and then they claim that every sale was a $100 sale, when really it was only a $20 sale, and many people canceled along the way - because after all, why should somebody continue making payments if they already got the product they paid for?

Payment Plans Are Good If There Is Ongoing Content...

But they are not good if there is just a single-time delivery and you are doing it to inflate your sales numbers.

And finally, payment plans, and trials, and low barriers of entry just suck!  I have tried membership sites with and without a trial - and with the trial there were lots more dropouts.  There were a lot more people not logging in and not using the material because they didn't really have any motivation to; the price was low enough that it didn't really hurt their pocketbook, and they didn't have a good reason to make their money back - because there was so little to make back.

Trials really do suck. The new credit card laws are moving everyone slowly away from trials.  And I would definitely recommend you TRY marketing your site without a trial.  If you are having difficulty, it might be because you haven't trained your subscribers or your buyers enough.  Tell them why you are not offering a trial, and turn it into a good selling point.

For example, there is no trial because you want to reduce the number of people who get access to this information; there is no trial because you want them to take action on what you show right away; maybe certain bonuses are worth a certain amount of money and a trial would cheapen that.

And that is why you should only offer a payment plan for ongoing content, not for a single-time product:  because it trains your subscribers, it trains your buyers - and trials draw in the worst kinds of customers.

Do you offer a payment plan or not on your website? And what is the reason?  Please comment below telling me.

If you've seen any of the comments on this blog, you know that my posts get a lot of response.

If you've been inside any of my paid webinar classes, you know that I have a lot of successful case studies and success stories from people who did exactly what I told them to.

How do you clone exactly what I did? You use one of these 4 methods to get your followers to take action.

"Know" Phase #1: The Blog Comments

Something you can do right now without launching a new product, even without making a new blog post, is look at the most recent post you've made on your blog and cap the number of comments at 10.

Put a note that says "as soon as that blog post gets 10 comments, you're going to disable comments." You would not believe how many people have told me at live events that they had no interest in leaving a comment on my blog until they heard that they might miss out on it. That's how most of your viewers are as well. They are just barely on the fence about whether or not to comment.

It's up to you to give them that one extra reason. If having 10 blog comments seems like a lot, here's a secret. You should be replying to your blog comments. This means that if 5 people leave comments on your blog and you reply to each individual comment with a comment of your own, that equals 10 responses total. When I say you should cap your blog post at 10 comments, you really only need 5 people to leave comments and then for you to respond to each one.

At first, you might have to pay people $1 per comment or have some of your friends leave comments, but after a few posts, when the social proof is there, people will leave comments as long as you are sending traffic there from your forum and from your list.

"Like" Phase #2: The Retweet Campaign

When I launch a blog post, after it has filled up the 100 or so comments I like to have, I will close out comments and then mail my list a second time, telling them to re-tweet that blog post.

In the past, I tried to tell people to comment and re-tweet but this works a lot better if you devote one day and one email just to commenting, and after you've gotten what you wanted, devote one day just to re-tweeting one of your posts. On my blog, I use the TweetMeme plugin and just by having that button there, I do get 10 to 20 re-tweets or one click mentions on Twitter.

But when I specifically ask people to re-tweet, it jumps to 50 to 200 re-tweets. That means that 200 different people have mentioned that specific blog post on Twitter which gives me more traffic and more social proof, and I like that at this point, the comments are turned off because that means anyone who comes to my site now has to sign up to my mailing list to be notified when they can comment again.

You can also have fun with this re-tweet campaign by re-tweeting your blog post once per day to drive the count-up and add some kind of prize. For example, if you can get 20 re-tweets of your latest blog post, you will make another blog post this week.

"Trust" Phase #3: Free Live Webinar

Most people have no strategy when they're leaving a blog post. I always do.

When I make a blog post, it's usually to pre-launch my next class or my next email offer. You should be doing the same.

Use the responses you got from that last blog post to create your presentation or to improve the next class you will be offering.

Even if you only have 10 comments, you can pick out about four things that people are having trouble with.

For example, I once made a post on my blog called Forfeit the Race to Free, telling people not to gravitate towards trials but instead be moving their price higher, and although a lot of people agreed with me, some people told me things like they were at first afraid to launch their product and now this advice got them to do it. Some other people argued that more people bought at a low price, which in my experience was false. More people bought at a higher price.

My favorite response to that post was that some – one of my commenters told me that somebody didn't buy from them because the price was too low and the average person thought that because it was so cheap, something must be wrong with it.

All those responses can make a great presentation or augment a presentation that's already ready because it speaks directly to people's fears and frustrations and the best part is you can use the same language, the same phrases people say to you and use that to make a killer headline based on your pressing issue.

"Close" Phase #4: Pitch And Close

You've already taught people something from your emails leading up to your blog post, from your blog post itself, and during your free live webinar. At the end of that free live webinar, all of that info should be coming in together - the emails, the blog posts, the comments, and this live training into a relevant and special offer.

You gave people a lot of tips on overcoming roadblocks but now it's time for them to pay you to get access to the step-by-step how-to system to get them from point A to point B.

Make it a special offer just for people on the call that will be increasing in price soon, have a real deadline so that there is real scarcity, and send them to at least a short sales letter explaining your offer exactly in black and white terms. That way, when people join your class or purchase your report or get your video series, they know exactly what they are getting.

Is your business model anything close to this, the KNOW, LIKE, TRUST, and CLOSE step-by-step system? If not, why not and how soon are you going to implement this? Comment!

But Here's the Big Question:
Should You Upgrade?

Three First impressions About WordPress 3.0

I don't care what niche your membership site is in, what software is running the membership site or even how big the membership is, you should be following all of these 12 rules of membership sites.

Rule #1: Autoresponder Reminders

Whether your membership site is filled with audio clips, videos, articles, or even PDFs or software, you simply cannot expect your members to always remember to log into your site everyday or every week. Set up some kind of autoresponder reminder system so that if someone has been in your membership site for 7 days, then on the 7th day of your autoresponder, it reminds them and tells them to come back to the membership site.

Rule #2: Drip Content

Don't give everything in your membership site away at once. You should be giving your members something new every week if they are charged on a recurring basis, but even if they are charged one single time, it can't hurt to record a couple of extra bonus videos that are dripped out throughout the refund period.

This will reduce your refunds and complaints and also keep people from cancelling and rejoining your membership site at a later date.

Rule #3: Offer Extended or Bonus Trickle Training

One of the best ways to get your customer to love you is with surprised bonuses. That means if you are offering extra training, either in a recurring or one-time membership site, don't announce every single thing you're offering them. Make at least a couple of the extra items be a pleasant surprise.

Rule #4: Stick to One Niche

I can't tell you how many membership sites I have joined that either ran out of ideas, go off-topic or just don't have anything interesting to say in their membership. Have a clear point to your membership site. Is your membership site about weight loss, real estate, copywriting? Whatever it is, make it totally clear what your members are buying into.

Rule #5: Cut Off Access For Non-Payment

If you joined a gym membership and didn't pay, you would no longer be allowed to access that gym's facilities, right? If you stopped paying your cable bill, you would no longer be able to watch TV. The same is true with your membership site. People are paying for access to your training and your content and if they are no longer paying, they should no longer have access.

Rule #6: Deliver Your Training Step By Step

You really do need to not only keep your training simple but offer a clear outcome. The easiest way to do this while also appearing as the best authority on your subject is to set up your training in a step-by-step fashion.

For example, if you are teaching a course about blogging, the first set of training should be about how to set up that blog and then should gradually go into how to create the content. That way, if someone is already somewhat experienced with blogging, they will get caught up, but the new members will not be left in the cold.

Rule #7: Remove The Word "Or" From Your Training

When your members are learning something new from you, no matter what the subject is, it's tough enough to figure it out just by following your step-by-step progress. Don't make it any more complicated than it has to be by sticking the word "or" in there. If you're teaching blogging, teach WordPress blogging, not WordPress or movable-type or pMachine. Whatever the subject is, remove as many choices as possible and teach people to do things the way you do them.

Rule #8: Create Multiple Levels of Your Membership Site

The great thing about membership site software is that you don't have to have a lot of different memberships set up. If you want to offer multiple products in the same site, you offer different membership levels.

People buy the beginner's blogger WordPress level and then later on, buy the advanced blogger WordPress level and be in the same membership site but get access to a new set of content. If you come out with advanced bloggers version 2.0, you can add those posts in layer and use the same membership site to host it all.

In addition, if you want to run a special promotion or give a certain group of people a bonus that only they can get, all you have to do is make a new membership level. You don't have to make a brand new membership site.

Rule #9: Set It Up Quickly

Way too many people spend 6 months or longer working on their content to try to make their membership the best it can possibly be, but the problem with this is that you are not spending your time on things that might make you money and your membership itself might not even be something people want. You need to set up your membership site as quickly as possible and then course-correct once people join.

That leads me to...

Rule #10: Only Be Ahead Of Your Last Subscriber

Like I said, you might be creating a bunch of content for nothing. It's also more important to have a lot of paying members in your site than to have a lot of content. You might have 6 months of content that nobody wants, but if you have one month of content that a lot of people want, you can justify the extra time you're spending and create more of that same content.

Rule #11: Avoid Lifetime Buyouts

You created your membership site, especially if it's a recurring one to get yourself a lot of easy automatic monthly income, right? Then why would you throw it all away by offering a lifetime buyout option?

This is where members can, instead of paying a monthly fee, pay you one single fee and get the entire membership content at once, even if it's 6 months, a year or longer.

Not only does this kill your monthly income, it trains your subscribers not to pay you on a monthly basis, plus it is going to overwhelm them getting all the information at once.

And the final rule of setting up highly effective membership sites is..

Rule #12: Set An End Date

Unless you have tons of content, you won't necessarily be excited about your membership site in 6 months or a year from now. For that reason, why would you want to keep your membership site going forever and ever? Unless you are 100% sure you are still going to be excited about maintaining this membership site in 1, 2, or even 3 years, set at end-date for your membership sites.

I prefer 6 months (sometimes because that gives me long enough time to say everything I want to say even at the advanced level but it doesn't give me too much to handle.

And I know that if I have even more to say, I can see how this first six-month membership site works out and then create a second membership site.

And those were the 12 can't miss rules of highly effective membership sites.

Which one did you like the best and how soon are you going to apply it to your existing or current membership site? Leave a comment below explaining yourself.

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.