Why membership sites? Because they accomplish two very interesting objectives:

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2 Passive Membership Profits Why membership sites? Because they accomplish two very interesting objectives: 1-they give people with advanced degrees an opportunity to teach what they know for profit, instead of working at a Starbucks. Often times people who have very niche degrees seem to suffer the worst fate postcollege. I m still not sure why people go to college for 17 th century Russian literature or Feminist Dance therapy, but I know for a fact that they do. If you re interested in either of these fields, then there are certainly others on this planet of more than 6 billion people. 2-recurring revenue is the sweetest of incomes possible. You ve already done the hard work of getting the degree, you might as well get paid for it. Automated residual income is the answer my friend. This book will show you how and in fact I believe that I am crazy giving this book away for free as a

3 bonus when I could easily have charged $97 for it. How do you make 6 figures a year? Well the easiest way to figure this out is that you need 8 people to pay you $1,000 a month or 4 people to pay you $2,000 a month. Now that isn t always easy to do, unless you have business owners paying you that much money each month because the average person doesn t have that kind of money to throw around. Membership sites offer an amazing benefit of turning those figures upside down. Instead of needing 8 people to pay you $1000 a month, you need 1000 people to pay you $8 a month which is when you do the math about $96,000 a year. Anybody can more than live off of that level of residual income. Even better, you are going to make supremely powerful content that is going to net you far greater than only $8 a month, per member.

4 Membership is an attitude, an emotion. A subscription is just a financial arrangement, membership organizations are mission driven and about connections among members. There needs to be a bigger picture, this creates loyalty and more money in your pocket, less likelihood of cancelations. Give people access to something and they will create an ongoing relationship with an opportunity for benefits on both sides.

5 Think about Netflix, the value you get from Netflix extends beyond subscribing to get movies, the value comes from being part of a membership that gives feedback and reviews of movies and TV shows so when you re binge watching and complete a series you can move on to something else that is highly recommended. There are many Recurring revenue models to consider. Offline models: magazines, book clubs Online models: author, speaker, coach, internet marketer, membership sites, newsletters A simple newsletter could be offline/written and printed or an . A physical printed newsletter is a bit more of an effort, but yet is a proven method. People stay onboard longer with a physical newsletter. If you re just starting out a simple newsletter is a quick way to get started making

6 around $10-27 per month. Some can be even more expensive perhaps you re doing stock broker training, some of those go for $297 per month. Education based membership sites are a great example of a way you can use your college degree to pay off your student loans. You can give people continuous value by doing weekly or bi weekly webinars or teleseminars and keep them abreast of whatever niche you re in. a lot of people in the internet marketing world will give you free access to software or extras and bonuses to people who maintain their status as a paid member each month. The smaller the niche the better the membership site. Software service is some of the best business models around clickfunnels and leadpages where as you will soon see people use for their lead capture pages as well as their sales pages the pain of disconnecting from them is enormous. If you re completely established using one of them or perhaps something more like an internet hosting company like justhost or bluehost, the pain of moving all of your sales pages, leadcapture pages

7 and even your hosting is enormously frustrating so very rarely do people even cancel. People stick around longer for software than just information. Done for you Templates/Done for you Niches/Lead generation: You create something that is done for you on a monthly basis with a new niche to promote with sales pages, graphics, lead generation pages, sample ads for facebook and banners, pre-written s, etc. weightloss, personal development, etc. This is an outstanding option for people in the computer arts field, the kind of people who went to for profit schools like Katherine gibbs or ITT tech (which no longer exists) or any other school you saw advertised during Jerry Springer and Maury Povich and now you can t find any work. You can never lose in making templates/graphics and ads for people. Done for you funnels creating already done clickfunnels and leadpages funnels that are high converting people will pay for monthly. Coaching programs (high ticket/low ticket) high ticket is where you meet personally at a seminar and low ticket is when they pay you monthly

8 online to mentor them through your teaching method. One on one coaching where you look over their shoulder and personally guide people, hands on with the client. You can do once a week skype calls, google hangout or you can do webinars or tele-seminars however you want to do it. How do you price these continuity models? 1. You can sell it straight up with a membership site that is say $47 a month, without a free trial or a $1 micro-commitment trial it is extremely difficult to do. If the prospect does not know you, like you or trust you this is an extremely difficult sale to make. 2. Free trial and $1 trial is the ultimate way to sell, like Netflix does because it works. 3. Gift/bribe/bonus to sign up. Why not give people enormous value just for signing up? Free ebooks or templates or a free newsletter or some other great bonus a free webinar to sell someone on a recurring continuity business strategy. Make people sign up just for the bribe let alone the benefits of the

9 actual service you are providing. Making people money, will make you money. Teaching people something they re passionate about, will make you money. It could also be a donation to a charity. How To Create A Membership Site With WordPress Using My Secret Weapon. Set up a website using WordPress, there are a ton of youtube videos on how to do this. It s important that your site is based on the WordPress platform as we are going to be using a membership plugin to take care of all of the back end stuff that is required for the running of membership sites. JustHost offers a one click installer for WordPress if you get stuck. Also you can get a domain & hosting really cheap to get started with. If you are as technologically impaired as I am just use my SUPERWEAPON go on fiverr.com and use my guy Hetarth (his link is below). He is the man and tell him that Brian Kane sent you. I trust him implicitly, I would not tell you to outsource to someone who you cannot trust, I have personally used him many times for many projects, all of them were completed in less time than he needed for a very fair price. If you re too lazy to hit someone up to publish your membership site for you then you are too lazy to run a membership site period.

10 87f4d3b12987 if you don t have the money and/or you want to go the cheap way then use my free method below. Installing The Free Membership Site Software To be clear, this is the free option and the above option is a paid one! In your WP dashboard, go to Plugins > Add new In the search box type: S2member and click search Now select the S2member plugin and Install it on your site: S2member is a Wordpress plugin and is an excellent membership site software they offer a completely free version and a paid version. The free membership site software is probably more than enough for the majority of you. It is very

11 capabie and offers several necessary functions including payment integration with the leading payment gateways like: Paypal, Clickbank, Google wallet and Authorize.net. Below I have included a screenshot of the many functions that the free and paid versions offer.

12 Once you have S2member installed, I will go through how to set it up correctly. How S2Member Works It s important that you understand how the membership site software works. So here is a brief step-by-step description. Step 1 When a visitor decides they want to join, they will be taken to a membership options page also called a join or subscribe page. This is where you list the details of your membership site such as the price of your product or service, and the actual payment buttons are listed here like PayPal or Google wallet for them to click on in order to subscribe. Step 2 When the visitor clicks the payment button (for simplicity let s say the PayPal button) they will be taken to the PayPal website where they check that the details are correct and agree to the terms. Once they have finalized their payment they are returned to your site where they create a username and password of their choice, which allows them to login to the member s area. The new member then receives an automatically which contains instructions and useful information pertinent to their username and password. Step 3 Now the new member will be allowed to login. The first page that they come to is the home page or Login page. From here you

13 can then direct your members to other areas of your site that are protected by S2member. At some point a non member will try to access your pages protected by S2 member and they will automatically be re-directed to the membership options page, where hopefully they will sign up. Point is, they cannot access your protected content and only members can. Step 4 They will be re-billed every payment cycle until the member cancels their subscription the S2member software automatically handles this for you. Let s say a member cancels their subscription on June 7 th and they have actually paid up until June 25 th S2member will automatically sync with PayPal in order to allow the user to still be able to login up until June 25th. After June 25th they will no longer be able to access to your protected content and you do not have to memorize anything or worry because it is done for you automatically. Setting Up Your Membership Site First you must create two new pages called: 1- Subscribe This is your membership options page. 2 Members This is the first page that new members will see. Once you have completed this we can set everything else up. Here is what you need to do: > In your dashboard, click the S2member tab > Click on General Options

14 You will be presented with this screen: We ll now work through each tab to configure the settings. First, hit Deactivate safeguards: Select YES Security Encryption Key: Click auto generate and then copy and paste your unique key into Microsoft word and save it so that it is safe. Local Host WAMP/MAMP Developer: This doesn t effect you

15 unless you are setting up s2member in a local host, so just ignore it CSS/JS Lazy loading: Leave this one on the default setting they offer s2member Security badge: This is optional. I wouldn t bother with it, but if you wish to display a security badge then you may. Configuration: This one is important. Be sure to enter the address you want associated with your membership site, enter the from name and your support address if it is different. Usually I leave the New user configuration set to no Open registration: If you are going to offer a Free level of membership then select YES if you are only offering paid levels of membership then enter NO. we ll come back to this one in a bit. Membership Levels/Labels: This is where you set the different levels of membership. Most people name them bronze silver gold platinum you get the idea. I will be covering this topic later in the post and it s not something you have to set up immediately. Login/Registration Design: S2member uses the standard WP login forms, but you have the option to customize the login page to fit the design of your site. There are lots of options here and it s really down to your preference. You can add a logo, change font, size, background color etc. Registration/Profile Field options: I select YES for all options, but if you prefer the user to have an auto generated password then you can choose this option:

16 Login welcome page: Remember the members page and the login page you created at the beginning? Well this is where you select you Members page. This tells the S2member plugin that your Members page is protected from non-members and it also re-directs all members to this page after they login. Membership Option page: This is where we select the subscribe page that we created earlier. This is the page that displays your payment buttons and is the page that nonmembers are directed to when trying to access a protected members page. Member Profile Modification: This is optional. You can enable your members to edit certain criteria in their profile. URL shortening service preference: I go with the default option which is tinyurl HIT SAVE ALL CHANGES After you have completed these steps you have the foundations

17 of your membership site set up. It s time to set up your payment options. Set Up PayPal Payment Options S2member allows us to fully integrate with your PayPal account so that everything is handled automatically; however, there are a few things you need to set up in S2member and your PayPal account. Below you will see a screenshot of 6 tabs for you to customize in your PayPal options in the S2member tab. PayPal Account Details If you are using PayPal as a payment option then you will have to fill out all required fields. You will need your: PayPal merchant ID Your PayPal address Your PayPal API username ( In PayPal click >Profile >API ACCESS) Your PayPal API password Your PayPal API signature You must access your PayPal account in order to find these details. Once you enter them you will be asked if you want Developer/Sandbox testing. Make sure you select NO when

18 your site is live. Enable Button Encryption: I always select YES. This will produce encrypted PayPal buttons, which makes it safer for you. Enable logging routines: Select NO. If you ever experience any issues then turn this feature on and you can view all of the logs to detect errors. PayPal IPN Integration: This does not require you to enter any details but you do need to login to your PayPal account and enable your IPN >Account profile > Instant Payment Notification Preferences > Enter settings and turn IPN ON PayPal PDT Identity/Auto-return Integration: Login to your PayPal >Account Profile > Website payment preferences > Make sure the auto-feature is turned ON Check the screenshot below you will then be shown a PDT token. You have to enter this here: Sign up confirmation This is already pre-filled for you but it allows you to edit the confirmation that will be sent to your new member after they have completed payment. This is useful and you should customize if need be. Specific Post/Page This is for if your visitors pay to access just a certain part of your protected content on your site.

19 Instead of actually becoming a member. Automatic EOT behavior: Basically, this tells S2member to cancel a members account if they cancel their subscription payment, open a dispute or have a refund. This is what makes the whole thing run so easily. This is a clever feature built into S2member and there are a few options for you to choose from but the pre-filled settings are fine. Here are the settings that I use:

20 Those are all the required fields that you need to fill out for your membership site to function properly. You might notice that there are other tabs that we haven t covered, but don t worry you don t need to worry about some of them. There are other features that you can use if you are operating a more advanced membership site or you want to integrate an affiliate program for other people to sell your site for you. Also you have options for all sorts of download restrictions if you are selling downloadable products. These options can be easily google searched or youtubed. Setting Up Your Payment Buttons Go to S2member > PayPal buttons For now we will presume that we have just 1 standard level of membership, and we want to charge $30 per month, but we also want to offer a discount to more committed members. So lets offer 6 months membership at $150. Click > PayPal buttons for level #1 Access Fill in the options. For our example above, this is how you fill it in:

21 Let s say you are offering $30 on a monthly basis you do have the option to offer free trial periods, new member discounts and other options. Once you have filled in the options simply hit Generate Button Code Copy the code that becomes highlighted and then simply paste this code onto your subscribe page that you created earlier. Now you can create a completely new button for $150 on a 6 month recurring basis. Generate the button and then copy/paste it onto your subscribe page. Your options are endless. There are so many different variations that you can make any payment offer that you want. Advanced Membership/Payment Options The example above is the most basic set up you can have, but you will find that as your site grows, you will want to add different levels of membership, or even a pay per post option. In order to set up different levels of membership: go back to the > S2member > PayPal Buttons page.

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23 In the RED highlighted box is where you can add the different levels of membership. Here is how that works: Previously, we set up a PayPal payment button using the Level 1 Access and we were charging $30 per month. Now lets say that you introduced even more great content or a more exclusive service. You can create a new level of membership (Level 2 access) and charge more for the service. You can charge $50 per month for your highest quality content. In the future you might introduce a new product or piece of software and you can create a 3rd level of membership, and you could charge say $70 per month. The default names for the different levels of membership are: (Level 1 Access) Bronze (Level 2 Access) Silver (Level 3 Access) Gold (Level 4 Access) Platinum These level names are standard, but you can rename them anything that you want. Let s assume that you set up three different levels of membership s2member will apply all restrictions automatically to your members This is how it would work- Level 3 Members ($70 per month) would have access to: ALL level 3, level 2 and level 1 content Level 2 Members ($50 per month) would have access to: level 2 and level 1 content only Level 1 Member ($30 per month) would have access to: only level 1 content

24 This is quite easy to understand and existing members can upgrade or downgrade to a different membership level without taking out a new subscription. Pay Per Post/Page Option Below I attached a screenshot and I highlighted in Green this option to charge your visitors to view only a certain page or post on your site as a one-time fee. A pay-per-post visitor will not become a member and this feature works totally independent of the membership levels, but they do gain access to 1 specific piece of content. There are many examples in which this feature is useful. For example you could write a How To guide and then cut off the content half way through so that your visitor has to pay in order to unlock the remainder of the guide. You could save your really good articles and charge visitors a small fee to read them. So here s how to set them up: Below in Green I highlighted the PayPal pay specific post/page buy now button click on that tab. It is very similar to the previous PayPal button set up, except this time you must choose which Page or Post you would like to restrict. To do that go to: S2member > Restriction options >Specific post/page access > Now enter the page ID of the posts/pages you want to charge for. This restricts the page and stops people viewing the page who have not paid.

25 Once you re done go back to the PayPal pay specific post/page buy now button tab and fill in the details like we did before. Enter your price, description and currency then select the post/page that you are creating the button for. You will see a drop down list, simply click on that and select the page. Click > Generate Button and copy the code Setting up pay per posts is easy. How To Set Up Your restricted Content Now that you have your membership site set up, it s time to add restriction rules to all of the pages, posts and categories that you want for members only. If you have just 1 level of membership, then you simply assign level #1 access to all of the content that you want hidden for members only. The easiest way to do it is to go to the posts or pages you want to use, and click edit. You will notice in the screen shot below on the right side bar that there is an options box for S2member, click on the drop down menu and select level #1:

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27 Make sure to click update after you have done this to implement changes. What this has just done is: a) Made this post/page viewable to paying members only. They can only access this content by logging in. b) You ve restricted all non members from seeing your content, and if they do try to access it, S2member will re-direct them to your subscribe page. Creating multiple levels of membership This is the same as before only this time you have to choose which content you want for different levels of members. Level #1 being the lowest and Level #4 the highest. Just select

28 which level you want for each of your post/pages. You re done you now have a fully functional membership site ready to accept new members and payments. Now you must create amazing and valuable content for members to want to engage with. How do you build up your fan Base? One of the toughest tasks that most membership site owners face is building their membership base of people willing to pay a fee every month. The key to success is to build trust and a relationship with your members and to keep coming back and commenting and engaging with them. Do not make a membership site and then disappear on these people, you need to constantly engage with them. Make sure that you send them s about it as well because the perceived value is to be able to connect with you, the expert in your field. But how do you do that before getting them to sign up? That s easy you give them a Free membership. You can either: Offer a Free 1 week trial Offer a free level first level of membership Or Offer a FREE membership service on a different site, but in the same niche. You can either do this on the same site or have a completely separate site for building a free membership base, or in other terms, an list. If you found me through stumpagenius.com, then you can see exactly how I use that website to build an list through my free membership site

29 and my opt-in pages. Method 1 Offer a Free Trial People like to try things out before actually jumping in and purchasing. One of the features of S2member is the ability to set up a payment option that gives the subscriber a trial period of usually one week, and unless they cancel within the trial period, they are automatically billed at the end of the trial and their paid membership begins. Your offer may look something like this: Free for 7 days, then $20 a month I showed you how to set this up before. The PayPal button options with S2member are endless and you can create all sorts of scenarios that put money in your pocket. The advantages of using the free trial method are that you greatly increase your membership rate. Providing your service/information is good, but you will gain a lot more members than if you didn t offer a free trial. I highly recommend it. Method 2 Offer A Free Level of Membership Another feature of S2member is that it gives you the option to use different levels of membership, as we already discussed. You can offer different levels of membership and charge different amounts depending on different levels of service you offer. This gives you the opportunity to offer 1 free level, and 1 or more multiple levels. How To Set It Up Go to > General Options > Membership levels/labels Here you can re-name your levels, Level #1 is called (Bronze) so I would re-name this to something like: Free Access or

30 whatever your preference is. Obviously your free membership will be your lowest level of membership. Now all of the posts/pages that you want available to Free Members you just select Level #1 access. You can do this on the actual edit view of the page like I showed you earlier, or you can go to > Restriction options and select the page ID s. Now this means that all members from your lowest level (Free Access) members & upwards will be able to access these pages. For your paid members, Re-name Level #2 access to something of your choice Paid member or elite member or silver member. Now these will be your paid members and every post/page that you only want accessible to paying members you simply add the appropriate restriction option to that page. Non members can t access any of your restricted content and free members can only view certain pages which you have specifically chosen. Paid members can view all content on your site Method 3 Build Your Membership Base On A Separate Site This is the foundation of Stumpagenius.com where I use trivia and my free membership site to gain s and then get them to join my other membership sites which are paid, and it is something you should seriously consider doing. Most of the big earners online do this. Even some offline businesses have free membership sites that extend to paid ones on different sites. marketing is powerful and most people can t resist joining a free membership site. If you can build a free membership base then you can set up new paid membership site and have real paying members anytime you like.

31 Why Is This My Favorite Method? You only have to focus your attention on building traffic to 1 site: Every time you launch a new membership site in that niche, you get paid subscribers from day 1 without any other source of promotion. It s called bridge marketing the idea is that if your niche is fitness well you could build a free membership site that is more broad and use the paid membership sites on something more niche like vegan cooking, crossfit, High intensity training kettlebells or some other more niche concept that people are willing to pay you in order to learn about. In essence, you are creating a bridge from one similar concept to another similar concept. Any time you release a new product or service that you want to promote you already have a customer base. Affiliate marketing can put some serious money into your pocket by selling someone else s product or service to your already available client base that trusts you. By offering a separate free service you get the chance to build trust with your subscribers help them when they need it, give them good quality free content or offering them something of value for nothing. When you have done this you have just massively increased your chances of gaining paid members and eventually earning affiliate profits as well. So go ahead and build a big free subscriber base with a free membership club and then build mini sites around it and get paid residual passive income. How To Build Your Free Subscriber List, Traffic & SEO Building an list requires targeted traffic to a squeeze page also called an opt-in page also called a landing page and the concept is pretty simple you basically get an and a name in

32 exchange for an ethical bribe. When it comes to driving targeted traffic to an op-in page, there are a number of ways to do that. If you want to take the SEO (search engine optimization) where you use keywords in order for Google or Bing (or any search engine really) to pick you up for a search, then there are a number of routes that you can follow. This can be easily Youtubed or you can find someone on fiverr.com who can do the basics for you at a fairly cheap price. Any marketing company can be hired for this, but personally I think your best option is to outsource this unless you want to spend the time learning it. Wordpress plugins like Yoast SEO are good options as well. I honestly suggest the paid route and the most popular sources are Facebook ads and Google Adwords. When it comes to paid traffic it is important that your landing page converts well, meaning that a significant amount of people give you their address in exchange for your free gift/ebook/ course/ mind map/free video etc. The main purpose of your landing page is to capture the visitors address, if that isn t happening then you need to tweak it. How? Give them an intelligent reason to sign up. Offer them something of value try to spark excitement, or curiosity. Webinars:

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34 I would suggest you get either clickfunnels or leadpages to create your opt-in pages, thank you pages, sales pages, webinars pages, etc. for all parts of your funnel. Also, you will need an auto responder like Aweber or Getresponse to create your s inside of. How To Keep Your Members Happy Building a free subscriber base and then getting them converted to paid members is only half of the job. If your members are going to keep paying you every month you better make sure to provide them with continuous value, up to date, and fresh information. There are whole bunch of different types of membership sites that you can create, and these are the most popular, and usually the most profitable, just figured I would throw some more ideas at you: Software Subscription

35 One of the most popular types of membership site is a Software license based site where you pay a monthly or yearly fee to access certain software. There are lot of these kind of sites in the SEO and Internet marketing niche and you have probably come across a few of them already. Examples are exactly the ones I just listed like: Clickfunnels, Leadpages and Aweber. Netflix has a great subscription model and you need to be thinking about these kinds of different business models for your own topic/niche that you are knowledgeable about or went to college for. Start looking around you for how many of these types of businesses you can spot. In order to keep your members subscribed, you need to make sure that your software does exactly what the user wants. Customer support is an important factor along with regular software updates, so don t even think for a second about bouncing on these people this isn t Ron Popeil you don t set it and forget it. Teacher/Mentor There are a lot of membership sites that offer tuition or advice on specific subjects. If you are going to run this kind of site you could either update it every month with new content and tutorials, or you could have all of your content pre-written and automatically send it out to members via an auto-responder with s through Aweber. There are plenty of internet marketing sites, the industry is super saturated, I highly recommend you do not enter it. In fact, the entire purpose of this book is help you not enter the internet marketing world-but use the knowledge it provides in order to further advance some information product goal that you have, most likely using your degree in some way that is far sexier than just reading a boring book or taking a very expensive college course.

36 Service Offering a service such as Forex tips, sports betting tips, stock and shares etc. This type of information is a good way to run a membership site because the member is paying you for updated information. Provide good insight and your members will keep paying you monthly. Adult If you decide to go down this route and I don t get free access, we have a problem. Just kidding, not really. Ease up, I m single. Community If you have built up a really good quality community then you could charge your visitors to become exclusive members. Some of the top forums on the internet charge for exclusive community access. You can charge to access an elite group of people. Building long-term members boils down to one simple rule: Offer a great service. Give your members information that they couldn t find anywhere else and solve problems with your solutions. People will keep on paying you monthly if you solve a problem for them, even if it is boredom. People get bored and if they re passionate about talking about a subject they want to access like-minded people. Once you ve built the membership up you can do live in person meetings with expert panels and the sky is your limit. Keep in mind that the majority of searches on Google are from people search for a solution to a problem. Give people the answer to their problem and you are on your way to a successful business.

37 Starting or adding a membership site to your business can continually reap massive profits. If you have a lot of information to offer and can solve a problem, then this maybe a great opportunity for you to boost your income. Just a few years ago there was no such thing as membership site software or wordpress plugins like S2member, everything had to be done manually with programmers and coding and designers, today everything can be set up to run automatically from capturing leads to driving traffic and putting people into an autoresponder, you no longer need to put an ad in your church bulletin hoping it will send you a viral wave of website traffic. How Not To Let Your Membership Site Suck Be Accessible To Your Members When people join your membership site, they want to feel like they have personal access to you. By creating a membership site and then backing yourself out completely from communicating with the members, you are removing one of the biggest factors that could keep your members around for a very long time. These days, giving your members the perception of having personal access to you is the new way to build in that maximum perceived value. Being active in your forum, personally responding to s from members, and offering webinars or conference calls can go a long way in making your members feel like they have personal access to you, the expert.

38 You Are Not Staying In Tune With What Your Members Want One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they create membership sites is that they create content based around what they want to talk about as opposed to creating content based around what your members want to learn or what solves their problems. It seems to be a very common mistake that content creators teach over the heads of their members. If you want to ensure that your members stay with you for a very long time, it s important to bring yourself back to their level and remember some of the struggles and stumbling points that you encountered when you were getting started. A monthly survey of your list and constantly engaging the members in your forum or by helps. Survey monkey has a free version that you can use to survey your list/forum. You Are Not Engaging Them Through Multiple Forms of Media If you really want to build the maximum level of engagement that makes your members feel like you are really taking care of them, you need to avoid relying on only one form of media. It is simple to make video after video and put them inside of a membership site. If you re good at creating videos, that s a great start, but it s not going to keep them coming back craving more. Video may be your favorite way to teach, but it s not all of your member s favorite way to learn. Experiment by adding written articles on your site. Make text transcripts and audio versions of your content. People love options.

39 Some people like audio content because they can listen to it while driving or while out for a walk. I guarantee you have some members that have preferences other than video as well. Make sure you stay in tune with these needs by giving them options. Again, keep tabs on them through s. Send them s asking how they re doing with the content and even better is if you them asking them why they haven t started using your content if that is the case. This keeps them far more likely to stay a member longer because they feel like you care about them. You Are Drip Feeding All Of Your Content Think about it, does drip-feeding all of your content really make sense? Who could possibly want to have to wait months and months to receive your content? If you want to drip feed some content, that is understandable, but don t go over board. If you re creating content right now that you are really excited about and really passionate about, and it s only going to be seen by a small minority of your members in 4 months from now? Why should members that are getting on to the site today be seeing your oldest and possibly outdated content while only the few members that have been around since months are seeing the stuff that you just created and are really excited about? Drip-feeding makes sense if you ve created a course that has a specific end date. In almost every other case, you should avoid falling in to the trap of making all of your content drip-fed. You will regret it with a high drop off rate. You Are Not Setting Milestones For Your Members

40 I think most drip-fed membership sites are a bad idea. I think milestone-based incentives are an excellent one. If you give your members some sort of bonus to stick around and keep coming back, you will see your retention stay very high. I suggest offering bonuses to members once they ve been a member for thirty days (or just after the refund period), once they ve been members for six months and once they ve been members for a year. The problem is that the bonuses must be worth sticking around for so don t make lame bonuses. I can t stress enough how important it is that you offer members killer bonuses for reaching your milestones. You can offer hour long consulting calls, access to full products that you ve created outside of your membership, physical versions of your content shipped in the mail, or even be willing to purchase cool toys for them once they reach a full year. Even t-shirts and stickers work, as long as it is cool. Offering up these incentives will definitely keep people encouraged to stick around and pay attention. Your Barrier To Entry Is Too High There is nothing wrong with membership sites that cost $97 per month or even more. In fact, that is a pretty standard price point these days; However, $97 is too high of a price to pay today. If you lower the price that people pay today, you re much more likely to get them to jump on board. Telling people that they need to pay $97 now and then continue to pay $97 every single month to stay a member is a tough sell; However, telling people that they can take a test drive today for $1 or for free is a much easier sell and will greatly increase your odds of purchase. It gives them the opportunity to get inside and see that you really do offer a lot of value and that what you deliver is worth much more than the $97 per month that they will eventually pay.

41 Play around with offering trials of $1 or free for the first month just to get them inside. Once they have access to all of the valuable content that you re offering, they are going to have a real hard time canceling and losing everything you re providing for them. For some reason, selling things that end in the number $7 tends to motivate people psychologically to buy. Every membership site I have ever seen cost: $7, $27, $47, $67 or $97 a month. If you want to mess around with a slightly higher price for an introductory offer, instead of free or $1, I would try $7. I can t give you any more information about this, or why it works-it just does. You Are Not Reactivating Cancelled Members It has been said that the easiest person to sell to is an existing customer, which is the entire point of the $500 per day formula, marketing, membership sites and basically everything I ve taught you from this book, so far. Build an list of recurring customers. The next easiest person to sell to is someone that was once a customer. What do you do with the people who cancel? In almost all cases, you re letting them walk away and never hear from you again. What you should be doing is adding them to a list of cancelled customers and then following up with them via . Offer them bonuses, discounts, and special access to you for coming back and giving your membership another shot. You will be surprised at how responsive this tactic can be. Over time, you may be able to reactivate around 25% of the members that cancel just by offering a small incentive to come back and give you a second chance. If you re not doing this, you

42 are leaving money on the table. Miscellaneous I would also consider looking into a website called teachable.com which is probably a better option for newbies as they provide you with an easy option to create optin pages and sales pages so you don t need any other software to get leads and sales. All of that is covered in depth in the $500 Per Day Formula Ebook. Gamification is the system based around giving your members reward badges, achievement badges and rankings for accomplishing certain goals or tasks within your membership community. It is the ultimate system for high user engagement and I highly recommend implementing this into your membership site. BadgeOS is the best option I have personally seen and it is compatible with Wordpress so that is absolutely something to consider in order to keep engagement and retainment as high as possible. Running a membership site can be a very rewarding and profitable endeavor. If you get it right, keep your members engaged, and constantly strive to provide high quality content, you will find yourself running a very successful membership site with customers who absolutely love you. Don t make the mistakes above and you are practically guaranteed to build a following as well as a satisfying income for years to come.

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