449: Create Passive Income Membership Sites for Your Online Business

Robert Plank 0:00 Marketer of the day number 449, create passive income membership sites for your online business. Hey, this is Robert Plank. Welcome back to the marketer of the day podcast. No guest today, but what I'd like you to do is, if you're listening on the app, go right now to marketer of the day.com/ 449 and once you get there, you'll see a link to LinkedIn. We've posted the text of this episode on LinkedIn, and you can go over there to leave us a quick like, a quick comment, whatever. So marketer of the day.com/ 449 to get the link to LinkedIn to leave a comment about passive income membership sites. So here's why this is so important, because way too many people get confused, stressed and overwhelmed when they hear about creating a membership site. They envision things like maybe a crazy, huge site that requires tons of planning, upsell software and quizzes, basically a huge package, a huge monster, sounds like a lot of work, right? Maybe people think when they hear a membership site, they think about a tip site that delivers one good tip about something every day, maybe a tip about how to shave better. But who cares? Right? Who cares about little tips that sounds like tons of work to create something that nobody wants. And then, when I'd say, how about you make a membership site the usual other immediate knee jerk response idea, thought is a site filled with interviews or monthly content, and frankly, I mean that one sucks also, right? Because if you have a site just full of just a bunch of noise, a bunch of nonsense, a bunch of wasted time. How is that helping anyone? And what's the urgency someone is going to have to not only join your site in the first place, but then, once they join, what's the reason for them to keep coming back and keep getting value, to justify the thing that they're paying for? Because if someone joins a course, but they don't log in and use it, and you don't give them a reason to and they're not motivated, they're not going to use your stuff. So all those above options, the huge package, with all the upsells in the software, a good bunch of good tips, or a bunch of interviews, those are all different recipes that lead to the same thing, failure, a site that you've spent a lot of money and a lot of time on and a lot of effort on that took months and months to get off the ground. Once I got off the ground, it didn't sell. What the heck happened? Well, let me give you the far better solution, because a number of things might have happened. Some combination of things might have happened. So let's just go back to square one and then move forward in time and figure out if you missed anything, or, even better, what you can do in your next membership site moving forward, because you're not just gonna make one membership site and call it a day. You'll make many, many membership sites throughout your online career. So here's what you do. Step one, find a real need, find that overlap between the thing people are asking for and paying money for and something that you can deliver in a step by step, solvable and complete format, making money online. That concept, that's not a good solution to sell if you yourself aren't making money online because you can't provide the step by step actions if you only know the generalities yourself, makes sense. I hope so. If you can teach your own unique book writing method. We have that at make a product.com. Maybe you teach your own unique step by step Weight Loss Solution. Don't know anything about that. Maybe you have a way to make money, trading stocks, all these sorts of examples, this, these sorts of things. These all solve a problem, but people will pay money to get the solution of that problem, selling courses about how to get better grades, couponing and how to play the tuba for school. All those are bad ideas. Why is that? Well, no one is successfully selling those solutions. And if you think about it, the buyers of like a buyer of a had a clip coupon course, a buyer of a how to play tuba. Course, those are not the buyers you want, better buyers, or things like how to fly drones, how to play guitar and piano, or maybe your own unique take on dating and persuasion. This ticks all the boxes people want it and they're willing to pay money for it. Huge difference. Step two, decide what people will have, not what they'll know, not what knowledge they'll have, but what will they have. What will they have created or built or assembled after they take your training and that first module you provide give them something they will use tonight. You want to do that for every module of your membership site, but mostly that first module, quick gratification, quick result. What will they have in place tonight? And then, depending on what you're thinking about in your course, your training, slice or categorize it into four modules of 60 to 90 minutes each. That means, if you create that journey. Own racing course. Don't just make a big, long, six hour, 10 hour thing. Don't make a bunch of little five minute videos until you're done. Plan this out a little bit, 60 to 90 minutes each for modules. If you create that drone racing course we're using as an example, then the end goal is that by the end they not only own a drone, but they pilot it. They have piloted it, and now, now that's their end result. Work backwards and decide, what big win will they get the very night they join and watch your first module with that big win. That's module one. Module two is where you sneak in what they really need. Module three is where you give them a long term solution, and this is usually where we work a traffic component into one of our courses. So we'll teach how to make a book, How to Make a podcast. But then in module three, we'll say, well, here's how to get traffic to your book or traffic to your podcast. And then module four, it just gives you up. So finishes up all those loose ends, wraps everything up and maybe adds some case studies. So once again, module one, big win. Module Two, sneaking what they need. Module Three, long term solution and module four, loose ends to wrap up or case studies, going back to the drone racing course example. Module One, show them how to install a special drone flight simulator software and get them to order a small play drone online. Module two, get that small drone flying with some simple maneuvers. Module Three, more advanced flying and racing. Module Four, fly the big drone. Maybe get into drone photography and rental ways that you can make money from your drone or use the drone in interesting ways, other than just flying it around. We launched a course about Facebook live a few months ago, and it was called video sales tactics. You can find it at video sales tactics.com and here was the setup for that module. One was to run your first live stream. So really important. There a lot of other courses. If they were just flying by the seat of their pants, maybe the course would have ended with running their first live stream. But why not start it with that? Why not start it with the simplest, easiest, quickest way to live stream and then build on to things from there? So anyway, module one, run your first live stream. Module Two, stream with screen capture, module three, recording and playback. Module Four, live interviews. The important thing to notice in this setup where we said, module one, run your live stream. Module Two, add screen capture, module three, record and playback. Module Four, live interviews, the important thing to notice is we didn't have a module saying getting started with live stream. We didn't say the basics of live streaming. That might be a slide in module one, but we didn't say, here's the entire history of Facebook live streaming, or here's an introduction to drone flying. That's a waste. That's like getting back to school curriculum stuff. Instead of trying to be formal like school, just jump in and you give me what I need right away. Think about this. Kindle books are 99 cents. Udemy course, they have all kinds of different subjects, 30 bucks, and those are all about the tips and the tidbits and the intro chapters. But instead of making something like that, you want to create something that people will pay big money for. And then moving on to step three, set up the pieces. The pieces are WordPress, Wish List, member, paper, template and PayPal. So those might be tools that you're not familiar with, but let me just repeat real quick, Wordpress, which is a place to create your website, Wish List, member, which controls access to that membership site. You've created paper template, which gives you a landing page you can use to sell that website, and then PayPal, which is a way to create a button to accept payments. Someone goes to what's called your sales letter, your paper template page. They click on the PayPal button, and then that gives them access to your wish list member site. So a couple of different pieces to do what you want, and I want to keep things simple for you. And here's why, because I bought a membership course once, a course about how to make a membership site, and in the very first couple of minutes, the instructor of this membership course told me to write a 200 page book before doing anything else. I'm thinking, what I just bought this membership course. I want to do it in the next hour, and now he's saying we'll spend the next couple of months making a book. Now I've also bought courses where the person creating the course said, Well, you could host your site with this host or that host, or this service or that service. Or here are these different themes. You can use woo themes or eye themes or a Theme Forest, or they say that you could use stripe or Paypal or Clickbank or thrive cart, so they're right there. I

Robert Plank 9:49 mean, it just threw out like 20 different options. That's all super confusing, and that's a good way to feel like you're full, like your stomach's full, by eating up all the facts, but you have an actual. Only done or anything. So instead of all that, instead of confusing you or giving you choices, this is what I think you should do. Here's what I think you should do, and feel free to agree or disagree with me here, here's what I think you should do. First, install WordPress. This hosts your website. You can click you can add a page, you can add content, that sort of stuff. Then install the wish list member plug in on top of WordPress, this acts as a gatekeeper. This means that you can someone can click a button and pay you money, and then this creates an account for them, if they cancel, if they stop paying, or if they refund, or whatever, their access is revoked. And then you can personally or manually add access to individual people, if you just want to keep it simple. So so far, WordPress host your site. Which list member acts as the gatekeeper. Paper template is the sales letter for your site. The PayPal button takes payments on your site, and then the membership designer theme gives you the design for the inside of your members area. And I hope that's not too many moving parts, five different things. Maybe you've heard of some of those things, but that is the those are the tools, the pieces I put in place to make my own membership sites. And inside our course called membership cube.com we walk you through all of this, and it's easy and it's step by step, simple, and it's great, even if you've never done it before, all the software is included, and you own the software that way, you're not hanging on or you're depending on someone else's platform. You do these couple of steps put these things in place. It's simple, but it can also scale. If you want it to. We do need you to grab a domain which is a.com address, and we show you how to get that. We show you how to hook it up to a web host in membership queue as well, and that gets you online. And then you can just add content, maybe you film on your iPhone or your computer screen capture software you upload to YouTube, set that YouTube video to be unlisted, and Paste the code into your site. If that's what it takes to get the job done. Is 100% perfect. No, but it gets you started. And we also include in membership cube a video player, plug in if you'd like to do things properly. And then step four, it's where you set up some extras. But you don't need fancy software to do what you want. Here's a great example of an extra goodie you can add in your membership site that requires zero software. You ready. It's called a challenge. Here's an example of a challenge inside of a course. In our course membershipcube.com we show you in the first module how to set up your site and make it possible for someone to pay you for access to that site. After showing how that's done in that first module, we end with four action steps, or what we call a challenge. And there's a special area on the site where you can just click and we ask you four questions. The first question is, what will be the name of the membership site that you set up? Second question is, what price will you charge for that membership site? Third at what URL or web address will be I be able to type in to load your site, and fourth, what time and date will that site be set up? Let me back up and repeat that here. First name of your site, second price you'll charge. Third URL will you where you will have that site, and for what time and date will be set up? Four quick questions, pretty simple, and we do that sort of thing for every module. Remember, before I said a 460, to 90 minute modules in your course, for each module, we end with those four questions. Usually the first question is some kind of a naming question. So maybe later in the course, we would ask, what is the name of your first module or something, but we ask four questions. Usually, the first question is a naming question, the second, usually, but not always, is a number question, the third is a proof question, and the fourth is a time and date question. So notice how back in that membership site. Example, the first question was a naming question. What is the name of your site? The second question is a number of questions. So what price will you charge? We might have asked something like, How many members do you want, or something like that, but just a quick number of questions so that we can quickly know what we want, where we want to go. Okay, so we used to have our members post a quick comment under that module to declare what they were going to do. So the goal here isn't to say, here's the assignment, go out and come back and report. The goal is to make a micro commitment. Take two seconds to commit to that quick action and answer a couple of quick questions to make those early decisions. Let's jump into another fun example. Let's say we were making a course about video marketing. The first module could be about recording your first video and posting it to YouTube. You'd explain what needs to be done, and then the challenge the assignments for the end of that module could be Question one, what is the name of your first YouTube video? Question. Two, how long will your YouTube video be? For example, three minutes long. Question three, what is your YouTube channel URL so we can watch your first video. Question four, what time and date will your video be posted on YouTube? So do you see the template again, naming question, a number question, a proof question and a deadline question. Now step five, add those nice to haves in after you get your first wave of members. For example, many people say they want to form a message board inside their membership site, but would you really let the techie details of figuring out that message board, delay you for weeks or months. Most people let that happen, which is somewhat a decision to not take action. They might not realizing it, realize it, but letting those techie details get in the way is, in fact, a decision for you to not take action. As bad as that sounds. What if, instead of that way? What if you instead went the low tech way and just had a link to a Facebook group? Create a Group on Facebook only let in the people that you know are members, make a link from the inside of your members area to the Facebook group, and then you approve, or have your virtual assistant only approve people who appear in the Members list, what would really be the difference? Another great nice to have is a checklist that your members can check off to track their progress, or maybe add the ability to fill in templates or forms, or give them the ability to add their own private notes on your site, you can do all of that with our WP notepad plug in, which is yours free as a part of our membership cube, course. And what's great about this is you just add a plug in, and it adds all this functionality for you. No need to connect stuff, to get together or code a bunch of stuff. But here's my point, but please don't add that sort of thing until your complete site is in place and at least one member has paid you this entire time. I've been talking about you selling a course where you charge one single payment of $97 or $297 they pay one time they get access to your course, which means four modules or milestones, and that's what they pay. Splitting things up and offering a five payment plan option is something we show you how to do later in the course, once you have the basics down and you want to beef something up that's working, we have a whole module in our course that covers copywriting, which means sales letters, and what word did you need to have on your site to get new members to Buy membershipcube.com, shows you how to add a beautiful dashboard, a table, and our WP drip plug in allows you to drip content, which is another nice to have with our WP kunaki plugin. You can collect physical mailing addresses to use for postcards, thank you, gifts, DVDs or send books or printed manuals to members. You can also use it to publish a directory of your members. You can choose those members, and it can be shown to the public or just amongst your paying members. So it can either be a public directory or a Rolodex amongst those members. There are so many wonderful possibilities for you and your membership site, but you must get practical and create that basic membership site that's making money so you have the motivation to add those goodies later. You are a business owner, and US entrepreneurs always tend to dream big and create huge goals, but that leads to biting off more than you can chew, being spread too thin, constantly switching gears, setting a pattern of incomplete, unproductive, busy work, action and ultimately, burnout. Big dreams and goals are wonderful, but what's more important is that you hit achievable milestones, so that you know your membership site is headed in the right direction, which means making more money, plus that gives you the motivation to keep going. Your internet projects are always more fun when they make you money, right? So one last thing, I hope that as you stair step your way into greater levels of income with your online membership sites, that you'll see the value in doing things serially, which means one at a time and not in parallel, which means all at the same time. Let's say you have three ideas for membership sites, and you estimated that they would get you 100 members paying you $100 one time, or that means $10,000 from each membership site. To keep the math simple, so three ideas, 10 grand from each it would also take you one month to create and launch each site.

Robert Plank 19:43 For me, at least, it makes a lot more sense to launch the first $10,000 site during month one, then launch the next site and the next, as opposed to waiting three months to get paid. There's also a much higher chance of success for you, since you won't be juggling multiple. Projects. It's also my hope that when you have success, you build out these membership sites. You could add a quick upsell to your single payment membership site. You could break off a piece to give away for free and build a list. You could cut up the payments to create a payment plan or a fixed term site, add coaching, help cells and so much more. We include all of that training inside membership q.com and we give it to you in the correct order so that you hit the ground running. And we bundle all the software, the plugins and the clones that you will want to scale. I'm Robert Plank, and I really hope to see you inside membership q.com very soon. So anyway, if you liked today's episode, make sure you head on over right now to marketer of the day.com/ 449 click the link to go to LinkedIn and leave us a quick like or a comment. I'm Robert Plank, and I'm an expert in membership sites, and I'm the co creator of membership cube, which is the best selling online course. That includes WishList Member and many other membership site tools that you'll need to generate passive income from your website. Discover more@www.membershipcube.com thanks and have a great day. You.