Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

I recently spoke at Blogworld Expo on starting a membership site. The presentation features the lessons Emile and I have learned over the past year about what works and what doesn’t for launching, growing and making money with a paid membership site. (Part 2 is here.)

4 ways to watch/listen/read:

1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:

Transcript:

So let’s talk about the tips and tricks that we’ve learned in organizing a membership site. And the membership site that Emile and I have is called traderinterviews.com and it’s a membership site for online traders and online investors.

And one of the things we started to see about a year ago was that advertising just wasn’t cutting it. We were basically spending all of our time on the phone, selling to advertisers and it really wasn’t making us that much money. We were putting a ton of work into the site and we realized, eventually, that that was not going to be the way that we were going to make a company out of doing advertising. Because our site was niche enough that when I went out and talked to the eTrades and the Ameritrades and Schwab’s of the world, we realized that our traffic just wasn’t big enough, we were getting maybe 60,000 unique visitors a month but for those guys they want millions of visitors, they want Yahoo type audience. And so, we spent all of our time on advertising sales.

And so we decided back then, I think it was in April, to go full on with a membership site because we knew we could make a go of that.

So, if you have any questions while we are going along, I’ll try to monitor the windows here and I’ll probably do most of the question and answer toward the end.

So, we’ll get through the PowerPoint presentation here and some slides we’re going to talk about basically the things that we’ve learned in this 9 months. Things we’ve done really well, things that we’ve crashed and burned on just to give you an idea so that when you go to start your own membership site you can hopefully avoid some of our pain and take advantage of the things we did well that you can go right away to and know that they work.

So, let’s get started with that. The truth of the matter is, is that for 99% of the websites out there, the blogs out there advertising is not going to cut it. In fact, it’s probably going to be member supported sites that actually make you money for the most part. And we’re not talking about $50.00 a month or $100.00 a month on affiliate ads, we’re talking about trying to do quit your job kind of money. Because I think that’s the kind of business’s that I’d like to see happen with the membership site.

Certainly with our site, we’re making, finally, quit your job kind of money with this site although we’ve got a long way to go with traderinterviews.com. But there’s some things that we’ve tried that worked out very well and I really think that subscription content is the new trend. I think most people are going to realize, pretty soon if they haven’t already, that some Amazon affiliate links on their site, some Google ads on their site just really, for the most part, isn’t cutting it. It is not making the kind of money that you want to make to turn this into a business. And the more time you can spend on this the better content you’re going to have and the more time you spend on it the more money you want to make from it.

So hopefully, eventually, you’ll be able to quit the job entirely and do a membership site as a standalone business.

So let’s just, really quickly, talk about the tools that are involved in doing this. So, very easy to set up a membership site these days; most bloggers are working on WordPress or if you’re a pod caster you’re working on WordPress, but it is a really simple way to get in there and start doing a website very easily with everything built in, SEO, search engine optimization and all of the tools.

So many people are using WordPress now that there are thousands of plug-ins. Pretty much, I can tell Emile now that I’d like to have our site do this and he can go out and find a plug-in for WordPress to make it happen. So, if you’re not, if you don’t have a website yet or you’re starting one, I highly recommend WordPress as a foundation. I don’t think we would start a site these days without using WordPress just because it makes it so easy to get started.

You need a membership gateway like amember.com which is what we use or premiumcast.com if you’re doing a podcast, but you need the website which is WordPress, the membership gateway which puts a wall up between visitors to the site which just come off of the street and your member’s who are paying for content. There’s a, amember does a pretty good job of doing all the functionality that you need pretty easily. There is some coding involved in getting it set up, I’m fortunate enough to have Emile, a software engineer as a business partner and my brother and so we have done that pretty easily. But one of the things we’re probably going to do a webinar in in the future is how to install a member, just kind of a tour of the features and so, it’s an important, obviously, step in starting your site.

There are also WordPress plug-ins like wpwishlist.com, wp-member.com, these are the plug-ins that you can use with WordPress directly if you want to to start up a membership site pretty easily. Some of those, like I think wpwishlist is a 180 bucks if I’m not mistaken, so, they’re, , go out there, we’re actually going to be putting out a post of kind of like a comparison of all these different WordPress plug-ins to show people what’s working, what kinds of features they have, how much they cost and kind of our evaluation of those things.

So, really, you could start a membership website or a subscription website, WordPress is free, membership gateway or a plug-in, you’re looking at about 180 bucks, 250 bucks tops to just get it started, get it off the ground, so it’s really inexpensive to start one of these sites.

And then you need a PayPal account or an authorized.net type of account where you can accept credit cards. We accept both PayPal and authorized.net to accept credit cards. PayPal’s not my favorite thing to accept but I know a lot of people like to use it so we make sure that’s an option because I think we’d probably lose sales is we didn’t offer PayPal and or a credit card system so we use authorized.net to do that.

So one of the first questions I get is what do I do if I have a podcast and I’ve got an iTunes feed? Now, if you don’t have a podcast this may not make a big, a lot of difference for you, but if you do and you’ve got people subscribed to a feed already or even a regular blog feed, what we do with iTunes is we now put all of our free teaser content into that iTunes feed and we’ve created a new feed for our members. And iTunes is great in that you can, people can subscribe to a premium feed that has their username and password built in to the RSS feed and so they can get all of their member content, if it’s audio, if it’s a podcast in iTunes. It makes it very easy, they can use all of the tools they’re already used to using which you want to make sure you can make it as easy as possible to consume your content.

So let’s talk about the models of subscription sites and these are just a couple. There’s lot’s out there but I’m just going to give you a couple that you can be thinking about right away in terms of your own content and starting a subscription site.

So, ongoing monthly members, in other words, you just charge $28, $128, $928 a month and you try to keep members as long as you can, you provide that content to them. So it’s just a monthly membership, what you put behind that wall is entirely up to you. Some people put audio, videos, a message board, articles, but just, it would be an ongoing monthly payment that members make, just say members, pretty simple.

So a clear course with a start and an end. So, this is one of the things that Emile and I have really been thinking about lately is instead of just offering a huge library of material like we have with Trader Interviews, sometimes that can be overwhelming and there’s something about the fact that if it’s available today and it’s still available tomorrow then I’ll just wait ‘til tomorrow to become a member. And so that’s a constant challenge that Emile and I have had to kind of overcome and think about when we’re doing our site. There’s a lot of content in there so we’ve thought about packaging up all of our content, our articles, our transcripts, our podcasts and making it a start date and an end date and then open up to new students or new members once a month and they’ll all be on this same track together. So maybe we can start a message board and then it can all kind of commiserate together, talk, discuss what’s being taught in the, in the sessions that you’re having each month. And so, they go through this as a group. And in some sense there’s a, an ongoing membership site that goes on and on forever is a little bit hard for people to grasp. They think, oh, I’m going to get charged every month and I got to remember to cancel if I don’t like it, so having a course with a start and an end I consider to be a membership site as well.

All right, free giveaway and then forced continuity. So, this is kind of the hot model in internet marketing right now where you give away a CD, you give away a package of articles or a package of videos or interviews or something along those lines. If it’s a physical product some people charge shipping and handling and then they’re automatically in your membership program so it’s free or 6 bucks for the shipping and handling to join and then they start up with the monthly membership 30 days after that start which can be whatever you’re charging on a monthly basis, 47 bucks, 97 bucks, whatever that may be. So, that’s kind of the hot one right now that people say is working but it’s just one more option for you.

Courses with a higher level of detail; in other words, you’re going to create a beginner course, an intermediate course and an advanced course. You can buy one at a time, if you buy, , the beginner course for 199 bucks and they’re each a 199, maybe you sell all three for $450, give them a discount for buying them all at once. I still consider, even though it’s not a membership site per se, is anything you put behind a wall, any piece of content behind a wall, I kind of consider a membership site. And you can do this in the same way you could do with the course with a start and an end or you can just sell it outright and they learn at their own pace.

And then you can break it into pieces. I’ve seen this work very well where people have said ok, the audio is free but I’m going to charge for the transcripts or the, if you’re there at these webinar like you are tonight here with me, it’s free, but if you want the recording of it because you can’t make it we’re charging for that. I’ve seen people charge a buck for the live stuff and then a hundred bucks for the recorded stuff. And it works because people are buying convenience. They’re buying access to that product, they’re also buying it so they can watch 15 minutes at a time or go back and watch it 3 or 4 times at a time or 3 or 4 times.

So, be creative in what you’re thinking about how you can charging. And even if you’ve only got one product, there’s probably some way you can kind of split it apart or break it apart and sell it in pieces or give some of it away for free and sell the rest.

So, we’re going to talk about how to determine your niche. And I have a pretty strong feeling about how you start this. You may already have your niche in mind and your product in mind which is great, but if you don’t here’s what I’ve always said to people, “Well, how do I know how narrow to get with my audience?” And I have a general rule for that, my secret formula is basically I want you to take the niche you have in mind and then slice it in half. Literally take that audience and try to lop half of them off and get even more narrow, and then, one more time slice it in half again.

So the example I use is my wife is a marriage and family therapist and we’ve talked about doing a membership site for her but she’s, her specialty is young, adolescent girls who have eating disorders who are athletes. So we said ok, doing a membership site for other therapists, that’s the big, broad picture, let’s slice that in half. Ok, let’s target therapists who treat eating disorder patients. That’s still pretty narrow but let’s go narrower, let’s go one more time narrower and let’s go therapist who treat eating disorder patients who are specializing in young student athletes. Now we got right in that sweet spot where a membership site can really be valuable to the members; you’re giving them very specific information that people are passionate about getting that information, it’s not easy to find because the more niche you are the harder it is to find that detailed information. So that’s really right where you want to be.

So take the niche you’re thinking of, slice it in half and basically slice it in half again and try and get really narrow. If you think you might be too narrow you’re probably in the right spot because this is a big world we’re talking about and we’re talking about the internet, we’re talking about the entire universe of people on planet Earth who can subscribe to your stuff is probably a bigger audience than you may think or you may first think. So, try and narrow your audience down as much as you can so that the information is hard to find, which means they’re going to want to pay for it and you can give them really solid detailed information which keeps them on as members month after month.

So how many subscribers do you need to start? Everybody asks that question. And what do I need? Do I need a thousand members? Do I need a thousand people listening to my RSS feed or my podcast? And my answer is always you need one. You need one because you’re going to create this content and put it behind a wall and yeah, you may need several articles or several podcasts to get started but especially if you’re saying I’m just going to get this started and for those who join me early on or become charter members I’m going to charge a really low price and as long as you stay a member you get to keep that price. There’s ways you can do this with just starting a little bit of content and have just one listener, one. If you wait until you have some critical mass of members you’ll probably never do it. So, do it right away, pretend like you have a thousand member even if you’ve got one great content for that one member, create great stuff and you’ll grow it organically from there. Plus it gets you off of, kind of get’s you out of your chair and gets it done. , there’s so many people that wait and wait and wait until the right time and it just will never happen, you got to do it now.

And how much content do I need to start? It helps if you’ve got a lot but we’ll also talk about how membership sites can have too much and overwhelm their members. So I would say have a month’s worth. Whatever your service is or whatever your product is, have a month worth of content if you can create that in advance, get your membership site launched and then create more and put more and more and more content behind the wall as more and more members join. So don’t wait too long. You’d be surprised, people get overwhelmed very easily. If you have just a little bit and you can say here’s where you start. And you can guide them through the content you’re going to do pretty well. So don’t wait, if you have a month’s worth of content that’s kind of the ballpark that I say it’s time to start.

So, my message to you is really I would like you to treat your membership site, or treat your site as a membership site right now even if you have no intention or you’re going to wait, you’ve got some things to, , get through the holiday’s or whatever. There’s always excuses so I would say start, it’s never a bad time to start, so, but treat your site as if it were a membership site right now ‘cause there are certain things you need to do to get your site ready to have paying members.

All right, so what is our number one, our number one secret success tool in getting new members? And you’re probably going to be surprised, it’s not RSS, it’s not pay per click, where are you? There it is, email marketing.

Email marketing is our number one draw for our members. So, first things first, if you do not have an email newsletter list, if you’re not building an email newsletter list, start tonight. Start today to build that email newsletter list, come up with a product you can give away to bribe them to get your, their email address. And one of the fastest ways that we know how to do that, how to build that list fast is a light box.

Now a light box is one of those things that you install on your site that comes up and I’m going to show you an example of it in just a minute. But here’s how we first started with our email address. On the top left-hand corner of every page of traderinterviews.com we had an email subscription box. That red arrow is pointing to it right there. And we got, probably, 3 or 4 members a day subscribing to our newsletter. It’s just, everybody’s kind of used to seeing a subscription box on the left-hand side, it’s not out there enough, it’s not calling attention to itself enough. So if you’ve got one of these and you’re not having great luck this is why we suggest you go to a light box. And a light box is this, it darkens the outside of your website and pops this up and we say 5 free interview highlights sent to your inbox. Top traders discuss their strategies. Enter email, send the free interviews. Now there’s a whole variety, we could do an entire webinar on just how to design this light box and Emile and I have tried a bunch of different things. But I would just suffice it to say that people sometimes say, “Well, , those light boxes, they’re kind of annoying, they’re in the way.” They work. That’s all I can tell you is they work. We went from doing 3 or 4 subscribers on our newsletter to about 40 a day right after we launched this. And now we have days when we have 25, we’ve got 31 today, we’re still trying to figure out how to do this. We’ve had says we’ve had almost 200 if somebody’s done an email for us and promoted for us.

So, they can click the close box, I know, some people have just a version to light box or pop-ups but it works folks. I’m telling you it works. This is the fastest way to get people’s attention that you have a newsletter and that you’re offering something.

Now, you’ve got to offer them something good. In this case we offer them 5 free highlights of interviews. But, you’ve got to offer them something to get them, bribe them basically, to join your list.

The one we used it’s called actionpopup.com. That’s where you go get this action pop-up and they kind of have some support there on how to install it and that sort of thing. Emile and I always think the founder of this site looks like Anthony Michael Hall from Sixteen Candles.

All right, now, if you have an aversion to the light box and you don’t like that, although I’m telling you it works, I highly suggest you do it. But, if you don’t like it there’s another thing that people have said it works almost as well and that’s the slide up. And you may have seen this on some websites where at the bottom part of the screen, after you visit the site for about 15 minutes, it pops up from the bottom and doesn’t block the screen, but just comes up from the bottom, it kind of catches your eye. That works as well and you can get that at instantslideup.com.

But one of the things I want to say about the instant pop-up, let’s go back to that screen for just a second. For this light box, what Emile and I did is we designed it so that after they’re at the site for 15 seconds, which believe it or not, in internet time is a long time, if they’re here for 15 seconds or they go to leave the site the light box pops up. Now they can click close and close a tab or just leave the browser, they don’t have to do anything obviously, but that’s where we’ve kind of found the sweet spot where we leave them on the site long enough that it doesn’t pop up immediately. In other words, they’ve got a chance to see what our site is and get some picture in their mind of what we’re offering and then the light box comes up. I think if it comes up instantly it’s probably a little bit too quick. I haven’t even decided whether I like your site or even whether I like the way it looks and you’re popping something up to me. 15 seconds, while it doesn’t sound like a long time, believe me, if people come into your site and leave they do it within about 10 seconds normally. You probably, if you looked at Google analytics and seen people come to your home page and leave, they do it very, very quickly, so 15 seconds is a long time.

All right, so instantslideup.com if you don’t like the pop-up version.

Now, one of the things that I said earlier was that I think you should try, start treating your site as membership site right away is because subscribers on your list, to this email list, you have to start thinking about them, that they are on your list for one reason only. Does anybody think about what that reason is? They’re there to buy from you. That is it. That is why they’re on your list. We stopped thinking about trying to build our list from trying to get as many people as possible to going to we want people on our list that buy from us. That’s why we’re doing it. We like giving information out there but ultimately we’ve got to pay the bills, we want to make money on this, this is a business.

So, will some people say I’m not going to come to your site if you have the light box or if you start emailing me too often I’m going to unsubscribe? Yes, that may happen but the people who are passionate about the subject and as long as you’re putting good information out there, they will stay subscribed. You’re going to get people who unsubscribe.

, Emile and I have agonized when I see people unsubscribed from my list after an email. I put out, probably what I think is the greatest email ever and I get unsubscribes. You could tell people that the next email you’re sending out is going to tell you who killed JFK and they will unsubscribe, that’s just the way it is. So, we try not to take it personally anymore, we try to do the best we can to put great content out there, but ultimately, you have to realize that people are on your list to buy from you and you want to train your list to do that.

Now, woops, back it up there.

What I mean when I say train your list to understand that? I can always tell when we do joint promotional ventures, I’ll send out an email for somebody who’s got a similar product in the trading space and they’ll send out one for me and we always direct them to a page on our site for the 5 free interviews. That’s our hook, that’s our hook to get them in. And I can always tell when somebody has trained their list to act because they will get a very high pick up rate, a very high conversion rate. They’ll send out to 20,000 people and 2 or 3 thousand people will click on the link in that email, that’s huge. But I can also tell when people haven’t trained their list because somebody will say I just emailed out to 40,000 people for you. Awesome! And we’re thinking fantastic, we’re going to get tons of email subscriber sign ups. And we get 20.

So, you have to train your list from the very beginning to know that when I send you an email it is for you to take action on something. Make your emails short and my advice would be to never have more than a link to one thing in your email. I know it’s very hard, in newsletters, we think, we send out newsletters and I’ve got this article and this little box and I want them to go to 5 different places. The fact of the matter is that they’re probably going to click on one thing in your email, one link. Chances are they’re not going to come back to click anything else. So, in every message you send out it should be one link and I don’t mean one link in the email linked to it 4 or 5 times, well maybe that’s, 3 or 4 times at least, but only have one message in your email and you want them to go to one place. In other words, you are training them that when you send an email there’s one place for them to go, not six different places, not read this article over here, read that article over here; you’re going to send them to one place. And that’s really how you’re going to see your conversion on your email list really bounce up.

Even if it’s just to a free thing; we send out stuff to our email newsletter list to an article that we’ve posted or an article that we like online, we link to that one thing. We don’t try to get them to go to five different places because the honest part is they’re not going to, they’re going to go to one place so make it count.

So what should you give away as a teaser to draw your email list? And we made this mistake, we are a podcast, a paid podcast and we used to do interviews with traders, audio interviews, that’s what we’re selling you. When you become a member you are buying a membership to a paid audio site. Well, what we were giving away at first was five PDF reports on trading. And then one day I was just sitting there and something, I saw a video online or somebody said something to me and it clicked. I’m thinking why are we giving away PDF reports to get people to sign up for a list of a site that you’re paying for audio interviews? So, we changed it and we’re giving away 5 teasers of interviews, they’re basically getting 5 highlights or teasers of what they would be getting as members and we saw our conversions go up quite a bit when we started doing that. ‘Cause it just made sense to people, we drove it home that this is what you’re going to get as a member. So what you should give away is just whatever you’re going to be selling or whatever you’re selling access to, that’s what you should give away. Ok?

And there was a tendency, even for me and my brother, to hold back the best stuff. Let’s leave the best stuff for the members and, , our second best stuff we’ll give away to the newsletter list. It’s the opposite. Give your best stuff away, you’re going to have to put good stuff behind the membership wall for sure, but you want to make the best impression possible. So we took 5 of the interviews that I thought out of the 180 we’ve done, these are the 5 best we’ve got. And I boiled them down, they’re 40 minute interviews, they only get 6 or 7 minutes of them but it’s great stuff. And so make sure you give them, if you have, if you have articles behind your membership wall or you want to or it’s a podcast or whatever it is, give your best stuff away for free. Even if it’s in a condensed version, it doesn’t have to be the first thing, maybe just a teaser, make sure it’s your best stuff, keep that in mind.

building your list, email marketing, starting a membership site how to start a membership website