Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

If you’ve watched “How To Start a Membership Site” Parts 1 and 2, you know I’m a proponent of emailing your list at the very minimum, every other day. And in my post about “10 Things I Learned…” I said this:

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.

It’s hard work emailing your list with quality content every day. No one said this would ever be easy. Well, plenty of people say it but they have no idea what they are talking about.

I received this email today from a reader:

Hi Tim,
I’m loving MemberCon.com but I have one question. I took your advice and started sending one email per day to my list. Since I started doing that, my unsubscribes have gone way up. So much so that I decided to go back to once per week. Any advice?”

Sure, if all you want is numbers, stop emailing your list altogether. Then no one will unsubscribe…

OK, sarcasm is done. Here’s my advice: It was working – don’t stop!. Yes, of course your unsubscribes are going to increase when you are emailing daily. In fact you want your unsubs to go up – it means the non-buyers and non-action-takers who are dead weight on your list are removing themselves from the process. It is exactly the behavior you want to see.

If you are providing quality information, mixed with a healthy dose of requests for action (take a survey, buy a product, download a white paper, watch a video) you are going to quickly rid your list of people who are not passionate about what you offer. But your conversions on every action you are asking your list to take will also rise. Soon, your list of 2,000 or 3,000 subscribers will literally blow away far larger lists from websites that send soft, feel-good “newsletters” with tons of links that no one ever clicks on. Sure, they have huge numbers, but their lists are lethargic and make them very little money if any at all.

Do you want to make money or do you want to be popular with thousands of Twitter followers and an email list of 100K? I’ll take the money, but the choice is yours.

email marketing, site marketing how often should I email my list?

One of the best ways we’ve found to build traffic and an email list is to partner with websites that have the audience you want to capture. The larger we grow, the more people approach us to do the same thing. It is a fantastic way to grow your list with the right type of people (buyers) and get a spike in traffic at the same time.

But (there’s always a “but”), trades or barters are fraught with danger. You want to make sure the partnership is fair and you get a similar amount of new subscribers and traffic. Your email list is your money-maker and should never be traded lightly.

Follow this short checklist with every marketing barter and you’ll stay out of trouble. Our policy is that my partners have to agree to all of these points or no deal.

1. NEVER actually send your list to anyone else. Besides being a major breach of your subscribers’ trust, your list is sure to get out into the wild and lose value immediately as it gets passed around to all your competitors. Instead, you will be sending a message to your own list on their behalf through your own email system. They never actually get to see the list.

2. Write the email yourself in your own voice. Sometimes the partner site will want to provide specific html code for their email. That’s a deal-breaker for me – and it won’t work for them anyway. “We’ve tested this email and it works great!” they’ll say. Well they haven’t tested it with my list and I know what works. If you’ve been sending emails written in your own voice for months and then hit them with some big block of graphics, two things will happen. It will get very little response and you’ll get lots of unsubscribes. Neither is a happy thing.

Instead, offer to take a list of bullet points they provide and work it into your own email that matches the voice, relevancy and length your list is accustomed to getting. Your partner will get a much better response rate and your unsubs will remain at the normal rate.

3. Match dedicated email for dedicated email. This means if I send a dedicated message to my list, my partner will do the same. We don’t send newsletters with lots of links to lots of different pages so we’re not able to do newsletter mentions for newsletter mentions. Newsletter mentions are crap anyway and never result in traffic.

I’m still kicking myself for not following this rule early on. We were offered a mention in a newsletter that supposedly went to 129,000 subscribers in exchange for two dedicated emails to our list of 5,000. Surely, I thought, 129,000 subscribers would result in some clicks! Our two dedicated emails to our list resulted in 624 clicks to their site. Our newsletter mention in their email resulted in exactly 26 clicks. We got ripped off.

4. Check out the landing page your subscribers will be sent to. We’ve turned down several trades simply because I didn’t like the page they were sending my subscribers to. It’s not that they were offensive or irrelevant. It’s that they didn’t have a strong call to action. I want my partner to get a great response rate, but actually, that’s not my biggest concern. As we’ve mentioned many times, we train our list to take action when they receive an email. If they are taken to a page that doesn’t get them to take action, they are less likely to take action the next time I email them even though it is an email about something completely unrelated to the previous email. It’s a scientific fact. OK, well not scientific, but I know it to be true. We’ve monitored response rates from email to email and those with unexciting landing pages previously had lower response rates for the next message. Meaning, we’ve had to re-train the list again to take action.

This leads us to the most important consideration…

4. Trade on quality of list – not pure numbers. Our lists, because of the way we develop them, grow them, train them and get rid of non-action-takers quickly, are AWESOME. Sorry to brag, but it’s true. I would put the responsiveness of my 5,000 against most lists of 50,000 or more any day. But most people don’t work their lists like we do. We have lists of buyers, not subscribers. So rarely will I trade lists on straight numbers. This ruffles feathers occasionally but tough donuts.

Our lists are GOLD and if we do a trade with you, you’re going to get some unbelievable response rates and I want the same from my partner lists. Unless I know how a partner site has developed their list and has the same philosophy as we do about it, we’ll normally need them to mail to at least 25,000 people to get similar conversion percentages.

Sometimes its hard to discuss this one without sounding like, “Your list sucks and ours rules!” but it has to be done. In the end, they are believers and are more than happy to trade again (usually sooner than we are).

building your list, site marketing email marketing, email newsletters

A quick update on our changeover to a $1 trial period for 7 days. As you may remember, I posted a few weeks ago about our change from offering only a one-year or lifetime membership to a $1 teaser rate for the first 7 days and then $39 per month thereafter.

I’m pleased with the numbers so far. 26.6% of the $1 subscribers are “sticking” and converting to the $39 monthly membership. I honestly have no idea if that is above or below the norm for sites in our industry – that’s something I need to research a bit more.

I do know that our conversion on the upsell (the offer we make to them on the thank you page immediately after they sign up for the $1 membership) is very low – only about 6%. I think it has to do with the way we are selling the product. I currently do so with a short video of me explaining what they can buy, but I’m not pleased yet with they way I’m explaining it. My poor brother is having to deal with a new video almost daily that I am making in order to perfect the pitch.

But overall, I’m pleased with the conversion numbers.

Next interesting thing to watch is how long we keep those members at $39 per month.

One thing we are still battling, though, is momentum. We get a nice spike in traffic whenever someone sends an email promoting our site, only to have it come right back down to our daily average. We never seem to keep that traffic. I know why – I’m just not sure of the solution.

We don’t have a blog on the site and so there is nothing there on a daily basis to bring them back. Yet if we offer some new form of content each day, it may decrease our $1 signups because we’ll be giving too much away for free.

Our mailing list, however, is growing as we capture those people who come in. So we’ve been monetizing our list in other ways with affiliate offers. In that sense, the revenue IS growing, albeit not nearly as quickly as I would like.

I’ll keep you updated!

building your list, selling content online, site marketing free trial conversions, membership attrition rate, membership stick rate

I was watching World News Tonight (ABC national evening news) and was surprised to see a membership site featured as the final story.

The site is RethinkAutism.com and features videos for parents of Autistic children. Touted as a much cheaper alternative to hiring experts to work with children who suffer from autism, members pay $100 per month to watch videos of experts working with children of autism so that they can do the same exercises and tasks seen in the videos themselves.

It’s an excellent example of how $100 per month can be downright cheap compared to alternatives and a great example of a niche continuity income website business. The reporter practically sells the service by remarking what a great value it is.

Here is the link to watch the video clip: http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=9070241

Congratulations to RethinkAutism.com for the publicity – I’m sure they have a few more members this evening! And to their public relations team that no doubt pitched the story to ABC News – nice work!

creating content, online entrepreneurs, selling content online, site marketing continuity income, passive income, recurring revenue

Emile and I are going to be hosting a free webinar this Thursday, October 22 from 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm Pacific.

In 50 minutes, we’re going to go through the tips, tricks and lessons learned from running our membership site, TraderInterviews.com.

This is content we’re going to sell down the road, but since this is our first webinar, we’re inviting you, dear reader, to join us on the house.

It’s going to be an honest, no holds barred discussion of things we learned the hard way about what it takes to make real money – quit-your-job kind of money – selling content online.

We’ll be recording it, but only people who register to attend will get a free video recording so be sure to register even if you can’t make it to the live webinar. And of course if you aren’t there for the live recording you won’t have an opportunity to ask your questions.

Here’s the registration link and we’ll see you Thursday!

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/805924473

membership site webinars, selling content online, site marketing, starting a membership site