Seven Things #5: Continuity Not Memberships
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Although Dr. Mike Woo-Ming wasn't the nicest guy at the Warrior Event in Austin, he did have a lot of really good information.
He gave me a really cool AdWords idea: Instead of blindly bidding on a keyword, he chose the top ten sites in the Google search results for that keyword, then placed AdWords ads and limited them to appear on AdSense ads for those pages that appeared in the top 10.
Not just those domains... those exact pages.
At the end of his talk, Mike said, "I don't do memberships... I do continuity." He didn't explain himself and I had to ask him about it during the hotseat Q&A session on the final day.
Here's the explanation: Running a membership site is too much work. If you don't provide new content to a membership site every couple of days, people will complain and unsubscribe. If you want a recurring income you can still promote membership sites... as an affiliate. Don't be responsible for the membership content.
Before coming to the event, I was against starting a membership site. During the event I was ready to start my own membership... but that little bit talked me out of it.
Now, I'm back in! Why?
Jason and I have enough content. (I don't think I could start a membership site on my own.) We have a huge stockpile of content ready to go, we got a lot of practice pumping out products quickly from our Product University class.
Look at that, 16 live posts and 80 scheduled posts... for a total of nearly 100 posts! I am finishing up March 2009 this week. That's the only way to do it... knock out one month completely, knock out the next month completely...
Our original plan was to kill ourselves and spend 1 week out of every month recording 25-ish interviews. That would have been stupid and would have burned up our content too fast.
Instead, we scheduled the interviews once per week. To fill out the rest of the week, Jason and I each recorded some 20-minute videos on our own. (When making the bonus materials for Product University we got a lot of practice pumping out 20-minute video products quickly.)
So, our formula consists of: Monday, a video by me... Tuesday, a video by Jason, Wednesday, one of our interviews converted into video... Thursday, some product we had secured the rights to... Friday, a question and answer session... and if we still had stuff to give, we'd fill up Saturday and Sunday too.
Why not join to see for yourself how we structured it?
We've filled up every single day of the month so far. Since it's all scheduled several months ahead of time, all we REALLY have to do is answer blog comments. We've had a couple minutes every day to fill up a Saturday or Sunday slot too.
We also know the demand exists. Our own product creaton low ticket items sold well. Our high ticket items sold well. Now it's time for the next step (recurring).
One last thing. You don't have to kill yourself when you make a membership site. Just figure out a way to schedule content to get released most days of the week (like on a blog).
We almost killed ourselves trying to come up with content the first time around. When we did the Product University class, we hosted TWO webinars per week when one would have been fine.
Heck, how much PLR or MRR content is sitting on your hard drive? Could you assemble some of that into a membership site?
Or maybe you just freelance. If you are a successful freelancer you know that your best business comes from repeat clients... so why not get them in a membership site? If you're a writer, guarantee a certain number of articles per month. If you're a copywriter, guarantee a number of autoresponders, solo ads, or sales letters per month. And so on. Why go to all that trouble of begging for money every month?
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i’ve been running my own membership site for over a year now and i dont have any problem getting content.
i set the expectation pretty low when people are signing up “4 new videos a month”
it’s a lower end membership: between $10 and $30 per mo (i test different price points)
to get content i either: do the videos myself based on member questions or feedback.
or i just go and find high quality limited license PLR videos…tons of which can be found on our favorite forum…I think of this as having a friend do the videos for me.
it takes me all of like maybe 1 or 2 hours a month to put up the new videos on my site.
My membership site does take some ongoing effort on my part..but it’s easily worth it for the ongoing income it creates.
–Corey Lewis
http://easytechvideos.com
Great ideas Robert. Could you expound on how to target your adwords ads to only display on the top ten listings. I’m going to be using Adwords shortly and would like to do this.
Thanks
Shelby,
You just search for your keyword in Google, copy the top 10 search result URLs (the actual PAGES, not the whole domain name)…
Then when you create your AdWords campaign you target the content network and paste in those URLs to target. Google will throw out those URLs that don’t have AdSense on their pages.
The blog update email for this post mentioned the Membership Sites on Crack report, and I wanted to give big props to this. No way I’m gonna be able to do a membership/continuity site any time soon, if ever.
I bought it anyway, because I’ve learned I can count on great stuff from you. I’ve got a batch of new sites I’m working on for the new year and that little report had some ideas on re-purposing existing content that I’d never thought of before. I made a number of changes in my battle plan thanks to that little(well, not really that little) report.
So if you haven’t bought the Membership Sites on Crack report, do yourself a favor and search on this site for the link and buy it.
Way to go scheduling content 3 months in advance. Very impressive.
Thanks Ryan. What’s really funny is, if you ignore the videos I have to create (just taking into account Jason’s videos, the interviews, and bonus products) we are already at the end of April 09.
Robert,
You are right on!
“Traditional” membership sites (whatever that means) put you on a treadmill that you can never escape from.
I have been looking at your new continuity model very closely.
You and Jason have a winner, I think.
Exactly!
To be honest, I wanted to use this membership site as a day job income replacer. Don’t want to replace one day job with another.
Hi Robert,
I’m so impressed with you anyway, and this post was yet another example of how you work “smart” instead of hard.
What would you suggest if you have a solitary membership idea? I don’t have anyone to help me create content and like someone else said, I certainly DO NOT need any more work or another full time job added to my over-full platter.
Thanks for *any* insight you can offer.
You & Jason & the ladies have a fantastic holiday in Hawaii – it’s still on my list of places to see so have some fun for ‘granny’ will you?
Donna 🙂
If you don’t have a business partner, then you put that half of the money you WOULD have paid to that partner, to outsource even MORE content creation… in addition to what you are already doing on your own with articles and video.
Robert,
that is a genius genius genius tip!
I’m very very excited about it.
Why dont you charge a one tim efee to read you blog? 🙂
(you would have to change the tagline though :D)
Just consider these posts the “free trial” … if you want more then buy my stuff or join the membership 🙂
Placement targeting is the cat’s meow.
Adwords Digger (a.k.a. Adsense Finder) is a free software tool that automates the process somewhat.
I was kinda torqued when I found it, cuz I was going to develop something similar and sell it. I still might. And I see Armand Morin is comin out with such a software for like $197. Not sure what it does that Adwords Digger doesn’t. But for the amount of work that can be saved by automating this process and the raw power of placement targeting, you should look into them.
Hah, I saw that product of Armand’s too.
I was laughing about it on the phone with Jason the other day because back in the day when I was screwing around with pay-per-click, I coded up a simple script to hit up the Google API to accomplish the same thing.
Took me about 15 minutes if that. Worth $27 or $47 maybe not but $197.
It looks like Armand’s software is faster (Adwords Digger looks like it hits the URLs one at a time where Armand’s loads them in parallel. Armand also supports Yahoo and MSN PPC even though I’ve never found those worth my while.
May be a worthwhile script to put in your membership site.
I’d say it would easily be worth $27. Probably $47. Especially if you take member feedback and updat it occasionally.
Hell, you could even give it away to anyone who accepted a trial offer to your membership.
Lance
P.S.
I had a little laugh at Armand’s $197 price tag as well. But I have no doubt he’ll be able to sell it. If it’s fast, reliable, and supported it very well could be worth the price tag. I was going to have something similar developed for personal use and MAYBE sell it in the price range you mentioned (or give it away).
Hi Robert.
I still don’t understand the difference beetween continuity vs membership.
Please could u explain a little bit more concisely.
Thanks and merry xmas to u and ur buddy, Jason. I’ve bought each and every product u’ve lauch and that i could be need (even those that i couldn’t!). and i’m – of course – seriously considering to proudly join ur club 😉
Armel:
Membership = you handle the orders, customers, deliver new stuff on a regular basis
Continuity = automatic money coming in on a regular basis… might be a membership, might not
So Dr. Mike was saying never run a membership site, just promote one as an affiliate.
Or if you have to host one, make it as hands-off as possible… for example, automated article submission service. You pay the bills to keep the lights on but that’s about it.
What Jason and I have done is pretty minimal, about 2.5 weeks of very LIGHT work puts us over 3 months ahead, because we’ve become so good at quick product creation.
If we had tried our membership without getting that advice we’d probably still be working hard every week to try to keep up.
Just a general question…
do you split test your blog in any way?
how?
Nope I don’t, there are better things to split test.
If you Google the Web Site Optimizer Plugin for WordPress, you can get a split test plugin… but I’d rather not since there are already so many traffic leaks and so much content on a blog.
I love working with Robert on the membership because the parts equal more than the whole. If either of us did it on our own, we wouldn’t make nearly as much money as working together and splitting the revenue. Since we’re able to combine our talents, we can create so much quality content without killing ourselves, that it’s fun.
And because we’re almost finished up with april already, all we have to do really is just hang out in the community and chat with our members. That’s a great way for us to add value.
The other great thing I like is that we’re able to create good content that is valuable and that can help you, but just doesn’t fit in any products. So you get the best of both worlds — the sexy stuff, and also the stuff that you need to know to grow your business.
-Jason
Yep, it keeps us from wasting too much time on random forums too.
Congratulations, Robert and Jason! You’ve conquered the major stumbling block of aspiring internet marketers: Content Development.
I can find people who will help with technical stuff and traffic-building. But good content? Hmmm…
And the ones who can pump out the content (i.e., Robert and Jason) are busy with their own products.
Anyway, I just wanted to thank you. You have inspired me to come out with a product in 2009 (not in the internet marketing niche).
Here’s to a prosperous 2009 for everyone! 🙂
Manuel
That’s why you need to outsource the low level stuff that takes 80% of the time, and do the leftover 20% high level work yourself.
So the high level work on your part would be, make the outlines and ask the right questions… outsource to low level people and call the content “articles”… then turn the articles into video on your own.
If you just outsourced articles, made them into video yourself without thinking, and then ad-libbed 2 or 3 related bonus videos on your own, that would be one kick ass $47-$97 product you could knock out in a day.
Hey Robert, saw you a few people mentioned my new software here. I just wanted to clear up a few things though about it.
1.)Yes, the software will be selling at $197 but it also does many things others can’t.
– It does NOT search Yahoo and MSN’s ads, it actually searches Yahoo and MSN’s search results. This way you’re getting top 10, 20 or top 30 URLs of pages with adsense on them.
– Yes, it’s multi-threaded so it it’s blazing fast.
– It supports proxy servers in case Google blocks your IP
– It’s been tested over 1 year with real results.
Here’s the big reason why the $197 price tag.
I’m also selling the software with a FULL VIDEO TRAINING COURSE on how to use Google’s Site Targeting. You actually see my setup campaigns inside my adwords account. I show in part how I drive over 100,000 visitors to various sites using this method.
More importantly… I teach 3 secret methods which no on has a clue on about site targeting and how it works.
I didn’t mean to hijack the thread but I just wanted to make a few things clear about the software and the product.
Have a great holiday everyone.
Armand
Hi Armand,
Hey do you have a projected date to when this software and course will be available and is there a place we can sign up to get notified of its release?
Thanks,
Stephen
Armand,
Thanks for the clarification. For a fast, relaiable solution and training, I’d say $197 is fair. Especially considering the type of people who are seriously using placement targeting. They’ve got bigger fish to fry than sweating a $200 software that’ll save them a ton of time.
AND NOW BACK ON TOPIC…
Robert and Jason, are you at all concerned about the pre-loaded information becoming outdated? A lot can change in 4-5 months. Do you have checks and balances in place to perhaps review the content before it goes live in order to see if anything needs to be added, subtracted, or otherwise edited? Or is most of the content pretty much evergreen?