» membership site

Selling a Membership Site as an Upsell

Will — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:01:35 +0000

Many entrepreneurs try to sell memberships directly to customers. If you are having trouble getting sales this way, a suggestion is to try and sell an inexpensive product which would be a small impulse purchase. Then try to upsell them on the membership as an add on, and also in future emails using an autoresponder.

So for the cheap instant access product (say $5) you can pull out content from your site and test different individual products to see what is selling better and that leads to more upsells. Try a wide range of products in your niche.

10 Recurring Revenue Models

Will — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:38:07 +0000

E-Learning Courses
People love to learn online. There are so many benefits to learning at your own pace in the comfort of your own home. You can offer a course or series of courses so that when people log in they get access to all the course material. You can add new material over time or update the material to keep it fresh. You can also have assignments and even discussion forums to increase interactivity. I current have 7 courses with each one having lessons for my Online Guitar Coaching program. This can be done using Moodle (open source, free) but I prefer Wordpress and Wishlist Member plugin, because at the time Moodle didn’t have any good payment systems integrated.

Print Newsletter
You can create and deliver a print newsletter to your audience. Many people still like to get this in the mail. You can eventually outsource the layout, printing and delivery so you don’t have to do this part of it.

CD of the Month
Put some audio files on a CD and send it to members in the mail each month. The audio files could be educational material or interviews with successful people.

DVD of the Month
Same concept as CD of the Month, only with DVDs. You can then put videos on the DVD as well using Camtasia (for capturing desktop presentations) or make videos yourself using a webcam or camcorder. I do my own videos using my webcam and I also have lighting and a backdrop to make it look better.

Fixed-Term Courses
I’m going to be setting this up very soon. These are also called Micro-memberships. Create a 6 month how-to course and deliver the content over time. This can be a benefit as some membership sites can be overwhelming to people with all the content being accessible at once. So drip the content to your members over time.

Membership Site
Some of these recurring revenue models don’t require the use of a membership site, which is a protected area of your website requiring a login (CD/DVD of the month could be done without a membership site). Membership sites typically give members full access to all the content, either via a blog, website or special download page with videos, audio, PDFs to download. I use Wordpress (free) and Wishlist Member plugin.

Video of the Month
A more digital approach is to send a video of the month, perhaps a lesson of some sort. Make it detailed with diagrams, PDF files and whatever else can full explain the topic. Tip of the month, Guitar lesson of the month and so on.

Coaching Program
Many people don’t take advantage of coaching which is huge business. Coach people on how to grow their business, play guitar, make raw food meals, strength training, setting up a website, becoming a realtor, and so on.

MP3 of the Month
Similar to CD of the month but in a digital format. I prefer to do everything digitally at this point since there’s nothing to mail and it’s all automatic (if you deliver via email or a membership site).

Product of the Month
You can send any other type of physical product such as clothes (sock of the month), guitar pedal of the month,

Membership Site Interview with Chris Garrett Part 2

Will — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:57:56 +0000

Here is part 2 of the interview with Chris Garrett about membership sites. Chris turns the tables and asks Stu McLaren from Wishlist Member questions about. Here is part one in case you missed it.

Some of the topics include: what forum plugin to use, how to protect the forum, having members pay by installments, integration with 1shoppingcart, using ip address protection to avoid username/password sharing, URL redirection, Flexi pages widget (I use this in the right sidebar for page links), Widget Logic (show widgets depending on user logged in, etc), TS Custom Widgets, WP Polls, Comment Length Limiter, Audit Trail (see where members are going – this is a big one I am going to try), Download monitor (also cool for seeing what people are downloading).

Note that if you integrate with 1ShoppingCart (1SC) at this time, you can’t use paypal for subscription payments, because 1SC doesn’t support paypal for subscription payments. So I use PayPal directly without 1SC.

So check out part 2 of the interview with Chris Garrett about membership sites.