Here in Southern California, kids everywhere will be heading back to school next week (including my 11-year old daughter). In sympathy with all of whom will, no doubt, be required to write an essay about what they did this summer in English class, I decided to write my own essay about what I learned these past few months.
But first, a little back-story for those new to MemberCon.
I started my membership site for online investors and traders (TraderInterviews.com) back in March. Prior to converting it to a paid site, it was advertiser-supported. That is to say that I made about $200 a month from cranky advertisers and Google AdSense. So perhaps a better phrase to describe it than “ad-supported” would be “ad-supplemented – barely.”
I also found myself on the phone constantly with advertisers who wanted to know just a single number: unique visitors. I don’t blame them. Believe it or not, most die-hard marketing people are still stuck in 1999 and are simply looking for pure traffic. For whatever reason, they talk all day about quality, yet they still base their decisions on just pure volume.
I’d enthusiastically answer, “I get about 12,000 unique visitors per month and about 60,000 page views!”
Silence.
12,000 unique visitors and 60,000 just wasn’t enough traffic to make it worthwhile for either of us. A CPM model wasn’t going to pay me enough to put all the time into creating the unique content, and it wasn’t enough traffic for them to bother, regardless of how highly-targeted my visitors were.
At some point during one of those hundreds of sales calls when I was trying to convince a company to spend $500 and getting nowhere, I realized that a membership model would be a much better fit. I also realized that I needed to document all of the decisions and ideas I had along the way which I am doing on my blog at MemberCon.com
So here are the 10 things I learned this summer running my membership site:
1. For 99% of the content sites owned by individuals, the membership model will always make more money than an ad-supported model.
The trouble with a small content site is that you’re stuck in this advertising dead zone. You’re not big enough to attract consistent advertising or even an ad network company to sell ads for you. But you’re not going to make enough money with AdSense to make it worth your time. If you produce high-quality content for an audience willing to pay for it, immediately switch to a membership model. I guarantee you’ll do much better even with just a few members than you will trying to make money on a CPM model. My income from the membership site is more predictable and I’m making a lot more money now that I have made the switch. I also don’t have to cold call advertisers anymore which I hated.
2. Email is still king when it comes to sales
This one still surprises me. With everyone talking about Twitter, Facebook and every other form of social media (and we use all of them), marketing to our email still blows them all away when it comes to sales. If you aren’t building an email newsletter list right now, start immediately. Create a 2-3 page report with great tips and information and use it as a carrot to get people to sign up for your newsletter. Offers I make to my email list convert better than a blog post, Tweets or all other social media – combined.
3. The fastest way to build an email list is a “lightbox” on every page of your site
You’ve probably seen them before. The “lights” go down on your site behind the box which offers something of value in return for their email address. Usually you can customize it to present itself immediately when the visitor comes to your home page, after a few seconds, or when they leave. I’ve found that immediately is too soon, when they leave is often too late and after about 6 seconds on the site is perfect. With the exception of pages where you want your visitor to take some sort of action (like signing up as a member), put your lightbox on every page. We had a signup form for our newsletter in the left margin of every page for months and averaged 2-3 emails per day. We put the lightbox up and it immediately jumped to 25-30 emails per day. It works. Anyone who complains wouldn’t have bought anything from you anyway.
4. The more you email your list, the more money you will make
Now before you gag on your donut, I’m not talking about spamming your list every hour with junk. But I am saying that when we started emailing our list every day, membership sales increased dramatically. Every email doesn’t have to be a pitch for something. It can be your thoughts and a link to an interesting article or blog post without any offer at all. But there is something about getting a regular email every day that garners familiarity with your membership product and site. When you don’t send regular emails, your subscribers are less likely to become members because they don’t feel like they know you. I wouldn’t send more often than daily but don’t ever send less than every other day to your list.
5. Don’t stress out over people who unsubscribe from your blog or email newsletter
I used to get all worked up every time I sent an email and saw a few people unsubscribe. Or if my RSS subscriber number went down my head would nearly explode. No matter how great the content of your email or blog post, people are going to leave. You could give away the secret formula for Coca-Cola and tell them that in the next email you’re going to reveal who really killed JFK and you’d have people unsubscribe. The fact is, those folks were never going to become members or buy anything you offered them anyway. If they don’t think your free content is worth sticking around for, let them leave. Your conversion numbers will improve because only the people that are truly into what you are offering will stick around. Because I outsource my email newsletter delivery, I pay for every subscriber. I don’t want people on the list if they aren’t interested. Stop trying to figure out why some people leave and just continue creating awesome content.
6. Stop trying to make every single Tweet, blog post or email message a home run
How many times have you worked on a single blog post for hours and hours trying to get each sentence just perfect? You adjust here, adjust there, so that your slight sarcasm comes through just right. And you want to end with a bang, so you work on that last sentence for 45 minutes. By the way, 140 characters shouldn’t take you 140 minutes to write. Enough! We’re not after the Pulitzer Prize here, folks. If you want to be a journalist, go work in journalism. If you want to grow a successful membership site, get your message out often and don’t worry about perfection. Your readers would rather have a post or email message with a few dangling participles than no post at all. So stop pushing the “Draft” button in WordPress and push the “Publish” button instead!
7. The best way to “sell” something is to tell a story
I’m not just talking about selling a product, although it works wonderfully for that. But if you want to “sell” an idea, an argument, or your membership site, the most effective way to engage your audience is to tell them a story. Don Hewitt, the creator of 60 Minutes who passed away last week, was a master of this (see my post about it here with videos). No matter what issue they were covering, he knew that the best way to get the message across was to tell it as a story. In fact, I would argue that telling a story about why you started your site and a few mistakes you made along the way will help you sell four times as many memberships than if you simply gave a bullet point list outlining the benefits of joining.
8. No matter how awesome your content, without something to create urgency, it won’t sell
When I first started my membership site, I had been creating a library of great content for several months. This was high-value stuff that really delivered great information to my visitors. The content we have behind our membership wall is outstanding and worth many times what we charge. I truly believe that and I get emails from members who agree. So when we launched I figured the value would sell itself. Cue the crickets. Unless you use some sort of deadline to get a value-added e-book, or a create urgency by getting a discount if they sign up within 24 hours, even great content won’t sell itself consistently. Some people close their sites and only open once per quarter for new members. We use discounts with strict deadlines. You have to create urgency with time deadlines and ideally, combine that with scarcity by limiting how many people can join in order to really get lift.
9. Whatever you are thinking about charging, triple it
It’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the more you charge for your content, the less people are going to buy. It’s simply not true. In fact, the cheaper your monthly fee, the less people value it and will actually not become a member simply because they don’t believe the value is there. This is not to say that you can charge $399 per month for membership site about gardening. But I can guarantee you that if you think $9 a month is what gardeners will pay, they’ll pay $27. And don’t bother surveying your audience to ask what they would pay. Nearly everyone who responds will say they would never pay a dime. The people who WILL pay for your content aren’t going to tell you such, they just enter their credit card number and become members. If you have a free site and convert it into a paid membership site, you WILL hear complaints. Ignore them – they would never become members anyway. Instead concentrate on delivering tremendous value to your paying subscribers and those numbers will grow. Don’t undervalue your content and neither will your prospective members.
10. The absolute minimum number of blog readers or email newsletter subscribers you need to start a membership site is….ONE
People constantly ask me now many subscribers or readers they need to have before they launch their site. The number is actually zero. My most successful membership site is about the content and not the community, so I’ve never had a forum or message board so I didn’t have to worry about it being a ghost town. Of course, you’ve got to have something behind your membership wall, so you’ll need to create some content to get it started (articles, podcasts, screencasts, videos, etc.) but if you wait until you have” X” number of subscribers (whatever you think “X” needs to be) you’ll never do it. Instead, offer a Charter Member price at a lower rate as a thanks to members who come on board early. As long as they stay members they keep that same low rate. It helps with your member retention and offers them a “thank you” price for joining when you didn’t have months of articles and other content already built.
When I hear everything online is headed toward being “free,” I chuckle a bit. Your content only “has” to be free if you want it to be. But if you want to get paid for all the hard work you’re putting into your website, take action and turn it into a membership site.
The day I decided to ignore everyone who told me that “content wants to be free” was the day my business really got started.
building your list, email marketing, selling content online growing a membership site
The Interview Income blog is written by Tim Bourquin and Emile Bourquin, brothers and owners of Ideas For Download. The Interview Income Blog is your front row seat to see what we've done that worked and failed in selling content online. Thankfully, we've been pretty successful but we promise to always show you the reality of building an online business.
