Robert Plank

Do you run a membership site?

What software, plugins, and payment processors do you use for it?

I just setup a real recurring membership site. No more of this password protected blog stuff.  I used aMember and WordPress, with Clickbank as the payment processor.

I was really surprised how many plugins are available for this stuff now.  Even a year or two ago, you had to modify code and do custom scripting... "duct taping" the scripts together.  Now you just install some plugins.

Pretty freaking cool!

I used a blog because I wanted to stockpile a bunch of content up.  aMember has the most support (I'm a member of Membership Academy so that helps.)

And Clickbank?  If you read my Membership Sites on Crack report, you'd know why I chose Clickbank.  Affiliates (60% commission on a recurring product) plus the escape plan.  If I can get enough content piled into that membership site so that I have a year's worth of content in advance, you better believe I'm selling it off.

Do you run a membership site?  What software do you use to run it?  Membergate, aMember, Visiongate?  What processor... PayPal, Authorize.net, Clickbank, PayDotCom, 1ShoppingCart?  How do you like it?

Please, show off the sales letter to your membership site as well since those can be tricky...

What are you working on this week?  I'm cranking out a bunch of content for a new membership site...

Lots of marketers the past couple of months are using the economic recession as a hook to sell their stuff.  "This system will help you profit in a recession..."  I'm sure you're tired of it.  You can't have a Unique Selling Proposition if it's not unique!

It's not just the internet marketing niche either.  I got this e-mail from Experts Exchange (a programming forum) a few weeks ago:

"If you had invested in the S&P 500 just before Thanksgiving 2007, and cashed out just before Thanksgiving 2008, you would have lost 41% of your money."

Boo-frickin-hoo. I lost $30k in cash to the stock market the first month of this year.  The value of my home has dropped $137,000 in the past 5 months on a city block where at least 30% of the homes were in foreclosure when I moved in.

One of my relatives was laid off this month, and you know what he immediately did?  He didn't feel sorry for himself -- he started looking for another job.  He has a savings account that will last him a little while and doesn't have a ton of debt that will eat him alive.

Another friend of mine just bought a brand new car and a house for his wife and kid, neither of them are college educated, they work "average" jobs and they can actually afford the payments.

For my business partner and I, 2008 was our most profitable year ever.  I just made close to $5000 selling a 7-pack of PHP scripts, and another $4000 before that selling a 23-page PDF report, using minimal outside advertising.  It was almost 100% in-house e-mail marketing.  He is close to $100k in income for the year.

We both bought homes this year, and we're both taking our girlfriends to Hawaii for New Years at the end of December.

I don't have to tell you about how there are more cars on the road, more people in lines at stores and in the movies now than ever...

The whole point of a "recession" is to weed out the weak businesses. You can either watch the news way too often, believe the world is going to end tomorrow, and let it depress and demotivate you.  OR you can realize that there are people out there giving up (just because they hear bad news) and you can get ahead of them.

You might have already read the story below.  It's "The Man Who Sold Hot Dogs!"

There was a man who lived by the side of the road and sold hot dogs.

He was hard of hearing so he had no radio.  He had trouble with his eyes so he read no newspapers.  But he sold good hot dogs.

He put up signs on the highway, stood on the side of the road and cried, "Buy a hot dog, mister?"  People bought.  He increased his meat and bun orders.  He bought a bigger stove to take care of his trade.

He finally got his son home from college to help him out.  But then something happened.  His son said, "Father, haven't you been listening to the radio?  Reading the newspapers?  "There's a big depression.  The European situation is terrible.  The domestic situation is worse."

The father thought, "My son's been to college, he reads the papers and he listens to the radio, and he ought to know."  He cut down on his meat and bun orders, took down his advertising signs, and no longer bothered to stand out on the highway to sell his hot dogs.

His hot dog sales fell almost overnight.  "You're right, son" the father said to the boy.  "We certainly are in the middle of a great depression."

D'oh!!

Do you belong to any clubs or memberships to network and get more ideas, do you know what you want in 2009 and do you know what you have to do to get it?  Heck, what can you do differently in the next three weeks that hasn't worked for you this year?

Please comment below, and let me know what you are working on for the remainder of this year.  And guys, PLEASE don't turn this into a political or economic discussion.  The whole point is that politics and economics won't affect your business unless you let it. Your bad attitude will KILL YOU if you let it.

I just launched Hypnotic PHP on Thursday, so how did it do?  $3,308 in 24 hours... and $4,574 in 48 hours, that's how it did!

Out of the 962 people who actually clicked through my e-mail, 211 bought.  That's a 21.9% conversion rate on my untested, half assed full of typos sales letter that I wrote in a few hours.

From those $17 purchasers: 141 of them accepted my $7 upsell containing 7 more videos and scripts (Urgency Tactics) ... 66% conversion rate there.

So the grand total was 352 sales for a total of $4,574... $4,320.56 after fees, but the number of sidetracked sales of other products, made up for those PayPal fees.

So why the heck didn't I do a dimesale or anything like that for this launch?

You don't ALWAYS need to repeat the same freaking exact process when you launch a product!

I used to have people complain about my dimesales (because they couldn't get in at a low price fast enough), this time I had people complain about the LACK of a dimesale (because he's used to getting in at a low price).

I haven't given up dimesales, but the effort that goes into pre-selling my list a few days ahead of time is a lot more valuable than doing all the steps to make sure my dimesale works correctly.

You don't ALWAYS need a dimesale offer, just some kind of scarcity.  Mine was really low-key... you get in now for $17, but after 48 hours it's $27.  No countdown timer, no ticker counting the number of sales... just a simple offer.

If you were on my list you got the Email Marketing on Crack videos that explained it...

• Day 1: Tell your list something's going on sale at such and such date and time.
• Day 2: Explain the biggest benefit.  (48 hour notice)
• Day 3: List out the rest of the benefits.  (24 hour notice)
• Day 4: Tell them you launched it.  (3 minute notice)
• Day 5: Tell them it's the last chance to get in before you close the doors or raise the price

That's it!  It's not rocket science. I only started applying this after people told me the dimesales didn't give them time to read the sales letter.

But when I replaced the dimesale with standard scarcity, I still made the same amount of money with less customers -- which means less support.

I know some of you guys might cry and say, "Yeah right, you couldn't have done that without your big mailing list..."  How do you think I built that mailing list up in the first place?  Product launches on forums to build my list.

One final tip about pre-selling your list: Have the product ready to go before you start pre-selling it.  I see lots of guys promote first and then end up having to push the launch date back.

But me, I used those few extra days to whip up an irresistible upsell offer (the extra $7 videos and scripts).  90 minutes of work netted me an extra $707 on that promo. 

My question to you today is: does working at a day job make me evil?

I have been balancing the day job and internet marketing thing for years.  It's not that bad.  I'm getting my first 3-5 year computer programming job on my resume, lots of free training that would otherwise cost $5000, really good health insurance, and a reason to get up in the morning.

I don't always work 9-to-5 hours.  Some days I work 6AM to 2:30PM, or 10AM to 6:30PM.  It's also not the most challenging job.  I don't have to work overtime, I'm not on-call, I don't take my work home.  So I'm free to do internet marketing stuff after work, during lunch, and on weekends.

Quick Story:

Sometimes I forget to pick up my paycheck at my day job.  Last month when I went to the receptionist to pick it up, one of my co-workers, a really cool woman in her 40's, noticed I'd taken a while to pick up my check.

She commented, "Someone else must be making those Mustang car payments..."

I told her nope, I pay for my car, but I wasn't making payments on the car... I bought it for $20,000 in cash last year.

She was surprised. I shrugged and said I'd saved up some money.  I forgot to add that I own a home at age 24, or that I pay double into my principal every month.

I also kept quiet the fact that I'd launched a product the night before, and made more in 90 minutes than she made in 30 days.

How about the fact that I dropped two months worth of pay at that job for a one week vacation in Hawaii during the winter break?

No one at work knows my secret, that I make more than my boss, his boss, and his boss.  Out of 800+ employees at my place of work, the only people who take home more money than me are the president and his 10 vice presidents.

When do you think I should quit?

When I have a year's worth of income in savings?  Don't give me that, "Quit when your internet job has replaced your day job" line.  I did that years ago.

I'm not going to be one of those guys who quits without health insurance.  When did you quit and do you have health insurance?  Who is your provider?

Once you lost that "time crunch" to get back to your day job, did it kill your productivity?

I am completely lost here... I had planned on being self employed right out of college but this REALLY nice and easy day job fell into my lap.  Some days it keeps my busy, some days I get bored and wish I could take a road trip or something.

Stay or quit?  Please tell me in the comment box below.  If I don't get ten replies maybe I'll just quit regardless.

As Dave Wooding said to me in an e-mail, "You must be doing something right."  Michel Fortin just promoted my Fast Food Copywriting product to his list which was awesome.  Terry Dean, Karl Barndt, Frank Kern, Glenn Turner, and David Deutsch all bought it from me!  How did that happen?

Heck, even Mark Joyner e-mailed me directly, and from his advice I changed my offer.  The original offer was $24.95 e-book and videos, with a before the sale OTO for a $97 product, and if they say yes to that, another OTO for a $247 product.

On Mark's advice, I made it a simple $24.95 sale but after the sale I hit them with a $217 upsell (upgrade to the $247 product), and if they say no to that, a $69.95 downsell (upgrade to the $97 product).

That changed the conversion rate from 2.5% to 5.9% on the front-end... thanks Mark!  And yes, the back-end is still converting (Cialdini Consistency).

What else have I been working on?  As soon as I got back from Affiliate Incubator, I bought Traffic Geyser and wrote 7 articles a day for two weeks.  99 articles, 99 PowerPoints made out of the articles, recorded into 99 videos with Camtasia.

Call-to-action at the beginning and end of the video, and my URL is the very first thing in the video description... very important.

If you remove the creativity and are super-motivated like I am when I write crappy sales letters that only convert at 5 percent, banging out an article in 7 minutes or a sales letter in an hour is no big deal.

I queued everything up so I post one ezinearticle and blast one video everyday on autopilot.  Sometimes I guest blog with a link to the YouTube, sometimes I'll copy a random ezinearticle to goarticles.

The results are hit or miss but it brings in just enough money to justify the one hour of writing and 30 minutes of video recording per day.  (One day, three different articles brought in three $19.95 sales I wouldn't have had otherwise.)  I'm just building backlinks for now.

That's what I've been up to this month, switching from 80% product creation and 20% marketing to 20% product creation and 80% marketing.

How much of your time is spent on product creation and how much on marketing?  What do you do for the marketing... videos, articles, PPC, forums?  Please share in the comments below. If I don't get 15 comments to this post (instead of the usual 10) I'm closing my Traffic Geyser membership and giving up video marketing altogether.