Reading time: 6 - 10 minutes

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!)

Excuse #1: It Becomes a Huge Chore You Have to Maintain. That membership site might be fun and exciting when you first get the idea, but what about a week from now?  A month or even a year from now?

That site is going to become a massive time-suck, and you're stuck with it even though you could be working on new projects instead.

Excuse #2: It's Tough to Retain Members. How many magazine subscriptions have you canceled in your lifetime?  Most of them, right?

The same thing happens to subscribers of your membership site.  Maybe you don't provide enough content, or it's not exciting enough for people, or they just quit and it has nothing to do with you.

You can try to fight it by scheduling daily e-mails in your membership and overloading new subscribers with content, so there's no way they can get through all the information and they forget to cancel... but that's kind of mean.

Excuse #3: The Conversion Rates Suck Because It's Monthly. You get a lot of extra objections when trying to sell monthly access.  How easy or hard will it be to cancel?

Will I forget I'm subscribed to your monthly membership?  Is the content going to be just as good 9 months from now as it is today?

Excuse #4: You Have to Create a Lot of Content. Let's face it, you take a big risk when creating a monthly membership site.

It's a big project, it's fun to start but tough to finish.  You might spend 6 months creating the content and another 6 months promoting it, only for it to flop... and guess what, there's a year of your life, gone forever.

Now that I've ruined your day let me drop a bomb that's super-obvious to half of you and super-surprising to the other half...

Membership Sites Don't Have to Be Recurring!

Think about it.  If someone pays you money one time, and your system gives them a username and password to login and get their download, that COUNTS as a membership site!

Between the two of us, Lance and I have been a part of 20 membership sites.  One of those (NicheSeeker), I created in 2006.  The other 19 were made in the past year.

Only 8 of the 20 are actually recurring membership sites.  The rest are things like e-classes, where they pay once and get access to a private blog.

So now that you know a membership site doesn't have to be recurring, what the heck can you do with it?

Solution #1: Bonus Drip. You can offer your regular e-book but then write some extra reports, or create a bonus webinar, even buy up resale rights to related products... drip it out over the course of a week, a month, or a year to keep people coming back.

Help them through the step-by-step parts of your book, or give them reminders... or just keep delivering value a little bit at a time to cut down on refunds.

Solution #2: Collect Testimonials. Because your membership site is setup on a blog, people have the ability to leave comments.

You could ask people for their feedback which you can use to create your next product, or your next bonus, or even work it into an actual testimonial.

Solution #3: Offer a Trial Period. What if you offered the bonuses to your product first... whether those are checklists or extra videos?

People can join your membership for $1 or $4.95 for 7 days to get a little bit of content, then once they rebill for the full amount, they get the downloads including the main product.

If They Cancel, They Are Kicked Out of the Membership...

Lance and I are using a trial period for our "List Copywriting" membership and I'm going to be applying this to some of my one-time payment products.  What's cool about the trial period is you can present a special offer to a specific person's list or a forum, without discounting the price or bonuses at all.

Solution #4: Offer a Payment Plan. This is similar to the trial period, but you let people pay in two or three parts... again, every time they pay, they get access to a little bit more content.

We used to do this all the time with our high-ticket, single payment membership sites for group coaching.  The final price might be $197, so they pay $127 now and $127 later.  Gotta add a little bit of interest so they're more motivated to pay in full right now.

Solution #5: Easy Upsell. Most membership software like Wishlist makes it super easy to add multiple membership levels.

So you could easily package a bunch of your bonuses in one membership level, or make people pay a little bit more per month to be able to download the content (as opposed to streaming it right off the blog).

Just Check a Couple Extra Boxes...

Solution #6: Cut Off Access If They Refund. If you're a product creator then you like doing this.  A couple of our membership sites run for a 6-month period.

If people get through all six months, they have access for life and can come back anytime.  But a minority of people cancel after 3 or 4 months thinking they've got "just about everything" ... but when they cancel, they're cut off.  So lifetime access after they've paid all their payments is a big reason to stick around till the end.

Solution #7: Easy Download and Password Retrieval. I deal with about one request per day from someone saying, "I lost my download link" or "It says my download has expired, can you give me a new link?"

What's cool about having a membership site in WordPress is that WordPress has a built in "lost password" feature.  If one of your customers needs their download, they'll go to your sales letter, see the link to the member's area, and use the lost password to get their login sent to them... they login and grab their download.

Solution #8: Easy to Notify of Changes. Did you improve your book or change that script?  Just upload the file, edit the post... and guess what, most membership software like Wishlist allows you to e-mail the entire user base right from within WordPress.

The thing is...

Even If Your Membership Takes Only One Payment,
It's a Membership!

So when I asked you guys on my e-mail list if you have a membership with at least one paying member... were you telling the truth or were you a liar?

If you're a liar, don't bother commenting below.

If you aren't a liar, tell me the URL to your membership site so I can check it out.

Leave me a comment below please... I'm only letting 100 of you reply.

Reading time: 3 - 4 minutes

Traffic Bad Boys is a site Jason Fladlien and I launched during the first week of our PLR Copywriting class -- DURING the end of the first class.  It was pretty crazy, we showed our students how fast and easy it is to build a site consisting of private label rights material.

I don't usually read what other people say about me.  But I just read a bad review about Traffic Bad Boys, actually a bunch of bad reviews written by just one guy.  And I'm smiling and laughing about it.  You know why?  Because the only bad things he had to say about it were:

1. I was banned from YouTube, so I "must" be bad.  (Not a good assumption.)

2. Someone blogged about me a couple years ago calling me the next Mike Filsaime in a good way, that reviewer found it and tried to spin that as a bad thing.

3. The Traffic Bad Boys site contains master resale rights material, so it must be bad. (False... in the AM2.0 Platinum Google group full of $100K+ earners we recommend master resale rights products all the time.)

For that class, we took 7 products we had rights to, cut them up into pieces and dripped them out onto a membership site for 7 dollars a month.

The reviewer joined for one day, couldn't wait for the rest of the month or even the rest of the week, cancelled immediately and wrote a bad review about us... even though all he had to base it on was the first 20 pages of the material.

So What Does This All REALLY Mean?

It means you need a $7 product for two reasons: to get people on your list, and to get people OFF your list.

You can't always land a $97 or $497 or $997 sale immediately, you have to build trust.  Get them to say yes to something small and then build them up with upsells.

But when you price so low you're also attracting bad buyers... it's a fact of life.  When those people cancel, you can't take it personally, it's just part of the weeding out process.

You need to weed out those people complaining about having to pay an entire dollar for each product, complaining about having to wait for the rest of the material when they haven't even read what they already have.

(It would be stupid to put your best stuff into your free products and $7 products... save that for your high-end stuff.)

You can't pack the member's area with more stuff because then people will join and complain about being overwhelmed... been there, bought the t-shirt with the Daily Seminar membership.

The Solution!

If you're offering a $7 per month membership site, put $7 of content into it every month... no more, no less.  (That's exactly what we did.)  That sounds like common sense, but far too many people take bad customers personally and overcompensate.

If you were selling everything in that first month for a one time $7 payment, you would value-stack so that the information was already worth at least $50 or $100.  There's no need to further bloat that up to $200 or $300 of value every month just because it's recurring.

Your information and your advice needs to be expensive so people will take it seriously.  That's the real lesson you should take away from what happened with Traffic Bad Boys.

Do you find when you price higher you deal with better customers, yes or yes?  Leave me a comment below to share your thoughts with me.

Reading time: 5 - 8 minutes

It looks like a lot of the people who comment here have their own WordPress blogs. I was recently asked by Lou Dalo:

What Do You Do to Make Your Blog Search-Engine Friendly?

If you are a marketer and you don't have even a simple blog, you are committing marketing suicide.

Reasons Why:
Product Launches, Name Recognition, Sales Momentum

Reason #1: Thanks to pinging, new blog posts get indexed in a matter of hours, not days. This means if you link from a blog post to a new product, that sales letter gets indexed quickly as well.

If you own a blog... try it! Make a post, then later in the day go to Google and type in the post title as a search phrase. I guarantee you, within 8 hours your blog post will be listed.

Reason #2: Many people will do research on a product and Google your name before they buy something. In 2004 I added Simple PHP Volume 1 into the eBookWholesaler membership site and got a flood of sales and newsletter opt-ins... even though there was no link to my site!

People Googled my name and found my site. If you have a blog and mention your products, they'll find your blog when looking for your products.

Reason #3: On your blog you have a list of all your products so people who have bought product #1 can find product #2 and product #3 and product #4. This means you get repeat sales.

Register YourName.com This Instant...
Before Someone Else Grabs It and Makes It Into A Porn Site!

I could go on and on with the reasons. If YourName.com is available, register it now and stick a simple WordPress blog on it today. I don't care if you don't have anything to put on it yet. Through all of 2007, RobertPlank.com contained nothing but my personal resume. When I was ready to write a blog, I finally did.

Who cares if your blog is brand new and only has one post on it? If you are building a list like you should be doing, it doesn't matter if you take 6 months to write another blog post because you can send a quick mailing to your list and they'll come right back.

Great, you know how important a blog is, you have a blog setup, now let's make a couple of tweaks to give you a huge advantage other the 99% of bloggers who post garbage...

There is a lot of free info about WordPress search engine optimization floating around, but some of the information is crap.

I took some of the best advice and several of my blog posts have jumped from page 2 in Google to page 1. One went from spot #5 to spot #1.

Here is EXACTLY what I did to my blog to make it search engine friendly:

SEO Tip #1: Permalinks

If you only make ONE change to your blog today, make this change.

By default, WordPress tries to link to your posts using a numeric ID which I just hate.

What you need to do is go to Options, Permalinks... then specify a Custom permalink structure with this value:

/%postname%/

They will give you special HTACCESS code to upload to your site if you haven't messed around with permalinks already.

Making that change in WordPress will make your posts look like:

http://www.example.com/your-post-title

Instead of:

http://www.example.com/?p=38

SEO Tip #2: Edit the TITLE Tag

My most effective SEO change by far was changing the code for the TITLE tag.

By default, WordPress sets your TITLE tag as: Blog Name » Post Title. You don't want that. That's what's going to appear in the search engine results! If you write a post called "SEO" you want the title to be just "SEO" ... not "Site Name » SEO."

Edit your header.php template and replace your TITLE tag with this:

<title>
<?php if (is_home()): ?>
<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>: <?php bloginfo('description') ?>
<?php elseif (is_category()): ?>
<?php wp_title(''); ?>: <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
<?php elseif (is_date()): ?>
<?php wp_title(''); ?>: <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
<?php else: ?>
<?php wp_title(''); ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</title>

SEO Tip #3: Edit the META Tags

I added a meta tag inside the HEAD tag of the HTML code... again, in header.php... to prevent duplicate content penalties. This code:

<?php if ((is_home() || is_single() || is_page()) && (!is_paged())) {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />';
} else {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />';
}?>

... Will tell search engine robots to spider the front page, individual posts, categories, and so on... but STAY AWAY from pages where you can leave a comment... as well as categories. The contents of those pages are going to look almost exactly the same.

SEO Tip #4: Edit robots.txt

One last change I made to my blog was the robots.txt file. I told robots to stay out of the WordPress control panel and the template folders. This will make sure that the only search results for your site are REAL content pages, no junk pages.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content
Disallow: /tag
Disallow: /author
Disallow: /i/
Disallow: /f/
Disallow: /t/
Disallow: /wget/
Disallow: /httpd/
Disallow: /c/
Disallow: /j/
Disallow: /*/de/
Disallow: /*/ru/
Disallow: /*/nl/
Disallow: /*/zh/
Disallow: /*/ko/
Disallow: /*/ja/
Disallow: /*/pt/
Disallow: /*/it/
Disallow: /*/fr/
Disallow: /*/es/

# Google Image
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:
Allow: /*

# Google AdSense
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
Allow: /*

You might want to take that last bit out if you use AdSense on your blog.

Thanks to Andy for pointing out that tips #3 and #4 can be very well managed using the meta robots plugin.

More WordPress Tips for Marketing Blogs

• Use a blog template that shows the title of the site inside the H1 tag, and the post title inside the H2 tag.
• Have your sidebar on the right side, not the left.
• Link to previous posts when possible to make sure all your pages get indexed.
• Put an opt-in form in place of where you would normally stick AdSense.
• Send an e-mail to your list when you make a blog post to get them to comment on it. See the 10-comment rule.

If you've made the above changes to your blog, go ahead and leave a comment with the URL to your blog that's now all SEO'd out.

Reading time: 4 - 6 minutes

This blog has what I call "The 10-Comment Rule."

I Post a Blog Entry, But I Don't Post Another One
Until the Original Post Gets 10 Comments.

I have the ten-comment rule because I'm just like you and have been to loser forums with tons of posts and zero replies to all of them.

On a blog, there's less focus on the replies and more on the original post, but that "empty restaurant" effect is still there.

1. Participation. If someone fills out a comment to a post of mine, they're no longer just surfing. They are now in interactive mode and are more likely to buy from me if I mention a product.
2. Search Engine Food. Search engines love lots and lots of content, and with comments, your pages can become much longer than the original post... that means more keyword matches for you and more search engine listings.
3. Intrigue. If you see lots of comments on posts you are more likely to read them, which means you spend more time on my site, which means you're more likely to see something you like.

Remember, your blogs are there to make you money. Update it and tell people about yourself, tell them what stuff you are working on and what products you have just put out. Try to work a call-to-action at the end of every blog post. Either you want to send them to a sales letter of yours, sign up to a mailing list or subscribe to an RSS feed.

If you are talking about someone else's blog or site, mention that in the BEGINNING of the post. Don't make that your final call to action (unless it's an affiliate link).

Don't forget to apply what you know about selling and direct response sales letters to content site and blogs:

• Try not to link out to too many sites. On the blogroll on the right side of the page, link only to your own products.
• Offsite linking includes "chicklets." Have one chicklet, i.e. "Digg this." But not: "Add to My Yahoo!" ... "Add to Reddit!" ... "Add to Bloglines" ... and so on. That's
  
• Build up a mailing list and send an e-mail to that list every time you make a new post.
• Stay away from AdSense. AdSense is for people too lazy to build a list and make a product. Believe me, that was me too at one point.

I researched how to make WordPress more optimized for search engines:

• I added meta tags to the header and made a robots.txt file to prevent duplicate content penalties.
• I changed the permalink configuration so the full URL of the post was actually revelant.
• I tweaked the template so there wouldn't be a bunch of extra text in the TITLE tag.

Got it? Your blog is just another part of your business, it's not "just for fun." It can be fun but it has a purpose:

• To present yourself as an authority figure in your niche. (BRAND YOURSELF.)
• To capture untamed search engine traffic and funnel it into a list or to your other products.
• To maintain a relationship with your list and past buyers. When you update them every once in a while, they remember who you are.

A minor side effect is that sometimes the conversation will meander off-topic and give you an idea for your next blog post.

Try your own 10-comment rule if you have a blog. My 10-comment rule works because I have a list of 10,000 subscribers (66% buyers) so you might have to make it a 5-comment rule if you have a smaller list.

Or, the ten comment rule might just mean that you can only post one blog per month. You can spend the rest of the month creating products, building up a list, and maybe advertising for your blog.

Seriously, what is the point of doing ANYTHING if no one is going to read it, or if they're going to just read it and lurk and not say anything about it?