Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

Here is part 2 of my presentation about how to launch, grow and make money with a membership site. Part 1 is here.

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Transcript:

All right, so, that’s the next common question. What do I charge for this? I have no idea what to charge. So, Emile and I have come up with a super secret formula for determining exactly what you will charge for this and it works extremely well. So what I want everybody to do right now is either to write down or think in their head a price. There’s a price, I know, that you’ve probably considered charging on a monthly basis or an annual basis or six months of your content. I want you to picture that in your mind. Ok? Here’s the secret formula for determining what the pricing will be, this is very easy. Triple it. If somebody is willing to pay $9 a month for something I promise you they will not flinch at paying $27. Now that doesn’t mean that you can charge $400 for a hobby site or a site on gardening where it’s, , something they do in their leisure time. But what I’m saying is that I see time and time again that content creators always undervalue your content. For whatever reason, it’s just human nature I guess, we feel like the content that we create isn’t as valuable as something somebody else creates.

So immediately I want you to think of tripling whatever you were thinking about charging. Obviously the sites that sell memberships to a business where you can make money from it, for instance, a small business or, in my case, trading where you can actually make money from making trades on stocks and options and the futures that the traders that I’m talking to are talking about, you can charge more. But, your tendency is going to be to undervalue it, under price it so make sure you really get what’s truly valuable for you. And the honest truth of this is, is it’s going to be worth whatever you say it’s going to be worth. People are going to, unless you are totally outlandish, whatever you say it’s worth that’s what people are going to have in their mind as being worth. So, and it’s always easier to do a sale later and bring the price down but, rather than raising it, unless you’re doing some kind of promotion. But, you obviously can’t raise it for member’s that are already in, in the program. You can, but you’ll probably lose a lot of them so, always err on the high side. You can always bring it down or run a sale or do something later if it’s not drawing the audience that you wanted.

So with that pricing, there’s a couple ways you could start. I always recommend doing a charter membership. In other words, if you haven’t started a membership site and you’ve got the site up for a while, give those early adopters an incentive to come on and join you. Maybe it’s because you don’t have a ton of content behind your membership wall, maybe it’s because you’re still working out the bugs of the software and sometimes, , a piece of content isn’t there or there’s a 404 page or something. So, say look, we’re going to do this, I’m just getting it started, there’s some great information in here but because you’re a charter member, because you’re the first on board, I’m going to give you a great discount. And if you’re charging 99 bucks a month, give it to them for $29 a month. And they get to keep that monthly membership price as long as they stay a member. So it’s great to help you with retention and it’s also great to make sure that you reward those people for coming on board first.

Free trial with auto start. So, you’ll probably find some people that will do a free trial without collecting the credit card first. And while you’ll get a ton more people in your free trial if you don’t collect the credit card I’m going to tell you that if you do collect the credit card first, even though it’s free and you don’t charge the card for 2 weeks or 30 days, that’s the way to do it. You’ll convert a lot more of those people than you will with a free trial.

You could try the free trial without getting the credit card but I’m telling you a lot of people will not do it, they’re just going to come in over and over again for that free trial.

Getting the credit card up front ensures that you can start charging it if they decide not to cancel and it keeps you from somebody creating 15,000 Yahoo addresses and using a different one on a different dial-up IP address every time to get the free trial stuff and never having to become a member.

So, you’re not going to get as many members doing the free trial if you request a credit card but it’s the way to go. I’m telling you, you’re going to convert a lot better and you’re going to get people that are more serious about it especially if you have a forum or message board, you don’t want a lot of people in there who are just in it to check it out and they’re going to put a lot of junk posts up there. You want people who are serious about it, giving them your credit card, them giving you their credit card tells them, tells you, sorry, that they’re serious about it.

You can go low dollar free trial. You can go dollar for the first two weeks or $7 for the first seven days and then $99 thereafter, that’s another way to do it too. At least you’re getting something, they’re paying something, they’re going to put value on that thing, they’re going to probably become more involved in the site even on the free trial because they paid something for it. If it’s a buck, they’re going to put a value on it and participate because they’ve paid a dollar. It’s just the way human nature is.

Higher dollar trial and lower thereafter, so, in our case, one of the things we’ve talked about doing since we’ve got 180 interviews in our library already is charging $99 for the first month and $29 for every month thereafter.

So, it does a couple of things. It, if you have a site where you’re going to get a lot of attrition, meaning people can get everything they need, download it all and then leave after one month at least you’re getting that high upfront fee and then if they continue on they’re rewarded for that with a lower fee. And also it allows you to have a huge library of things as you build it and still not have everybody come in for one month and then leave. So, it’s definitely an option if you’ve got a big library of content already built. The higher dollar free trial and then lower after is the way to go.

Lifetime membership. We’ve had some success with this. People sometimes like to know that they can spend money with you one time and then be done and not have to worry about being charged every month, not being, not worrying about being charged every year, that they pay one time and they have access for the rest of their lives.

Now, the truth of the matter of this is really it’s lifetime, your lifetime, their lifetime, that could be a long time, the fact of the matter is really, who forgets about the subscription first and it’s probably going to be them. That’s the truth. Two years from now will we have our lifetime members still logging in? I don’t know, we haven’t seen that yet. We haven’t done a membership site that long yet, but it’ll be interesting to see how many lifetime members we have that come in and grab the content still week after week.

But no matter what pricing model you take, this is the truth, is that without urgency nothing will happen. And I thought this, I thought we’re going to put great content out there, we’re going to put some of the best trading and online investing content known to the free world out there behind our membership wall. This thing’s going to sell itself. I wish that were the case. You will get one or two members a month that way. But if you don’t make something to generate that urgency whether it be a discount to a certain time or you’re going to offer a bonus that you’re going to take away after a certain time, you’ve got to do something to get them to do urgency. Because even if it’s the greatest content in the world there’s something about human nature, if it’s available today and available tomorrow, I’ll just wait ‘til tomorrow. And that’s just the way we all operate. So, make sure you do something to create urgency.

Here’s what we did to create urgency. And both of these ideas made $7,000 each in membership fees. So, back in April we decided that we were going to do something to create some urgency because we were getting some members but it wasn’t a lot. And this is an actual screen shot from very early on when we started our membership site back in April. And as you can see here there’s 35 subscribers between April 26th and May 2nd and we got about 4 more between May 3rd and May 9th and here’s what we did. We closed the site to new members. Some of the traders that we interview have nothing to sell themselves and they’re just guys that make millions of dollars trading from home because they’ve figured out a way to do that. And they don’t want the world always knowing about that, so what we said is look, we’ve got a lot of members here we’re trying to service and we’re trying to do good content for, we’re going to close the site. And we closed it for about 40 days and that sense of urgency, even though they could wait a month if they wanted to, that urgency got 35, almost 40 people to sign up, we made about $7,000.

Then we did something to draw urgency again in June, June 21st through June 27th and the 28th through July 4th, made about another $7,000 and this is what we did that time. We offered a lifetime membership and we haven’t offered it since. But we got about $7,000 worth of income because we offered a onetime offer for a lifetime member they paid one time and they never had to pay again.

So, we did one other thing that didn’t work quite as well but still generated $4,000 worth of memberships and that was right in here, between these two periods, May 31st to June 6th, June 7th to June 13th, we got about 20 members, a little over $4,000 and what we did was we had bonus PDF’s and we took them away. We said these five great reports, and they were really good PDF, solid information reports, we took them away and said they’re not available and they haven’t been available since until the lifetime members. If we offer a lifetime membership, we’ll be giving those away again.

But just taking something away, you’ve got to do that to generate sales. There’s people so bombarded with information out there and so many offers these days that if you don’t give them a reason to do it by a certain time they won’t do it. Now you’ve got to stick to that because if people find out that you just keep extending the deadline, extending the deadline it’s going to lose its effect. You’re going to cry wolf and then nobody’s going to believe you anymore when you say you’re going to take it away. So, you got to just take the risk and if it’s closing the site or taking PDF’s away and make it happen and really stick to it so that people believe you and when you run promotions they work, they’ll continue to work.

Ok, the best way that I know of to sell a membership site, to sell memberships is to tell a story. And here’s what we do, I put a video on the homepage that says how I learned how to trade and it’s me basically talking about why I started traderinterviews.com and the importance behind starting the website in the first place. And it’s very easy to do. I record audio, I make slides and PowerPoint, I save them as JPEG’s, there’s an option to do save as JPEG’s, and I sync the audio and slides in Windows Movie Maker which is free, available in Windows. If you’ve got a Mac you’ve got all those tools plus and even better tools. So, tell your story, use a video to do it ‘cause you’ll find that some people don’t want to read your information about how great your site is, they just want to click play, sit back and watch the material. So, make a video, I highly suggest you do that, it will work really well.

And you sell your membership but of course by giving away things. And the way that we do that is when somebody first comes on to the list we, the very first email they get from us is just pure free stuff. Here’s a free audio interview, I make no mention of our membership site, what it costs, deadlines coming up, nothing. The second email is more free, I might, at the very end mention hey, , we’ve also got this membership site, I’ll be telling you more about that later. And then the third email free, again, it’s a free piece of content, all of these have free pieces of content in there but slowly, but surely I’m bringing up the volume on the sales piece. Ok? I’m, on the third email maybe I say hey, we’ve got a sale that’s starting on Wednesday, in the meantime, don’t worry about that now but just keep in the back of your mind that Wednesday the site goes on sale, here’s your free piece of content. And then by the fourth or fifth email it’s a full on sales pitch. Now here is our AWeber account, we’ve got 17 emails in our follow-up or our auto responder chain. In other words, when somebody joins our list they get, automatically from day one, 17 emails that we’ve loaded up in here before we even send them anything new.

And I highly recommend that you use a service like AWeber or IContact or CustomContact, one of those, because it allows you to load up emails that go out automatically without having you do anything.

So, these first five emails are pure content emails. They do have an increasing sales pitch. By the sixth email I’m really pitching. The eighth email, right here, is a full pitch, there’s no content, there’s not a thing, it’s just here’s why you should join our site.

Now, our highest unsubscribed rate is surprisingly is not after the eighth email. I thought at first, well, if I don’t at least give them something, some kind of piece of content they’re going to totally unsubscribe. Actually, that’s, it’s about even, eight’s about even with the rest of these, the highest one is message one. And that’s just like people that come to your website homepage and then leave right away and don’t look at anything else.

For whatever reason after message one they don’t think it’s for them. Which is fine, you want as many people off your list that aren’t prospects as quickly as possible. So if after message one, which is only pure content, I haven’t pitched them a thing, and that’s the highest unsubscribed message, let them go. I pay for every subscriber that’s on our AWeber newsletter list so I want people who are not prospects off my list as quickly as possible. And if they unsubscribe after one email where I am not selling a thing, they’re definitely not prospects.

So, don’t worry about selling at the very beginning but at least five or six emails into it, it should be a full on pitch and if they do unsubscribe because you’ve given them a full on pitch, again, they weren’t a prospect for you at all anyway. So let them go.

It’s basically what we call the long sales page. , we’ve all seen those internet sales pages that go on forever that make you scroll 50,000 times in the sidebar, it’s like that only what you’re doing is you’re turning it on its side. And a guy named Jeff Walker kind of coined this, you turn the sales page on its side and you slowly drip them content through email to get them to become members.

Now, I already said we use AWeber.com, here’s a book, the Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing. I’ll send you these slides later if you want to email me. But, in fact, I know everybody of course who’s registered for this so I’ll send them out to you. But, that’s a good book and I’ve read it and it’s got some good ideas for email marketing. You might want to check it out.

Places to learn about list building; listbuilding.com, sneakyemailtricks.com and of course membercon.com, we talk about that stuff as well.

Again, if you can’t write this all down no problem, I’ll send you the slides.

So, here’s how our sales funnel works, and we’re still working on this, we are still tweaking, we are by no measure have reached the pinnacle of membership site start up yet with this thing. But, it’s starting to work really well for us and here’s what we do. Everybody that comes to our site we are trying to get them to do one thing and that is join our email newsletter. So, we’ve got the light box, we’ve got the subscription on side here that does get used here occasionally though not very much. We direct them to this page and at the top of every page it says are you looking for the 5 free interviews? And it sends them to this page, enter your email and we’ll send you highlights from 5 strategy packed interviews with great traders. Ok, they enter that in there, that’s the first step and we’ve got them into our email system.

When they click on the confirmation page we give them this, it says your time of your joining the mailing list is perfect. We’ve got some terrific traders lined up the next few weeks. Enjoy the five free interviews, the first of which is headed to your inbox right now.

And then Emile’s designed something that’s very clever, it’s a cookie that gets set on their machine that says in 72 hours, basically 3 days, almost 4 days, your one year pass is going on sale for $399 and it starts a countdown clock. That countdown clock does more to generate urgency for us than anything we’ve ever used is a countdown clock. It actually makes it hit home for people that in a certain amount of time something is going to happen. So that’s their first indication that something is going to go on sale for them.

And then we slowly take them through these messages, 1 through 5 and then 6, 7 and 8 and by the fifth email, ‘cause we send one a day, the next time they go into get that last free piece of content, it says one year pass now on sale for $399. So, we charge normally $1,147, we’ve actually raised the price of the one year pass, it’s now $497 on sale. But they’ve gotten five pieces of content, one a day, they’ve gotten an interview every single day, by the fifth day we think they’ve had a good enough idea getting all this free content to know if the site is for them or not. So then we give them 72 hours to become a member at the discounted price and then that discounted price goes away. If that countdown clock clicks, kicks down to zero, the price goes up to $1,147. Now if somebody has called me, which has happened, and said hey, I was out of town, can I get that discounted price? I’ll give it to them. Ok? But, I don’t go on and continue to continue extending this over and over again because again you want that promotion you do in the future to have impact. And if you don’t, if you just continue to extend it and do these fake countdown clocks, it’s not going to work for you. So, we give them 72 hours to become a member at a highly discounted rate and then that’s it.

So the point of all this is that you can promote your, obviously, your content via your website but what really works, what sells the membership for us is not our website, it’s the email drip that goes out every single day. It’s that constant contact, here’s another piece of content, here’s another example of what we are, that’s the stuff that sells our website, not, or excuse me, that’s the stuff that sells our membership site, not the website itself.

So how do you keep members? That’s a big deal. Attrition is a big deal, especially in the financial industry where we are here, if you keep somebody for five or six months you’re doing really well. People come in and out of this industry very quickly and they try different things. So, but then we found a few things that we can keep them on board.

So why do they cancel? We think we give great content out there, why are they cancelling? Well there’s a couple of reasons that we found out. They don’t understand how to use it.

We think our site is pretty simple. We have a library of audio interviews with traders about how they trade. Pretty simple, you buy, you pay for access, you go in and download what you want, we upload a new one every week. But the truth of the matter is if you don’t show them how to use that, how to play the interviews, what you should be thinking when you’re listening to the interviews, what kinds of things should I be picking up while I’m listening to these interviews or reading this article? If you don’t really explain in simple, stupid terms about how they’re supposed to use this content they will unsubscribe, we found that.

I don’t know if that means you create a FAQ video, I think that’s a great idea to show people who it works but you’ve got to do something.

We had this problem; before we started our membership site we had been doing interviews for almost two years. So we have 180 interviews that are anywhere between 30 and 40 minutes. I mean literally, 80 hours of content already in there when they become members. People can become overwhelmed, they don’t know where to start and you could have the greatest content in the world and tons of it. And it’s counterintuitive because you think the more great stuff I have in there the more likely they are to stick around and get through it all. But the truth is, is that if they get overwhelmed, that there’s too much in there, if you don’t guide them from where to start. Here’s where you start, after you’re done here then go here, they’ll get overwhelmed and they’ll cancel.

You haven’t communicated regularly with them. Now this is probably the most controversial thing I’ve said in the last couple of weeks when I’ve done this webinar and when I did it at the show was that I think you should be emailing your list daily, every day. Now, that’s a lot of work for you because you don’t want to send them garbage. And because if you send them garbage just to get an email out on a daily basis they’re going to unsubscribe and they’ll probably report you as SPAM.

You need to have daily contact with them because there’s something about that familiarity, something about reaching out to them every single day that increases conversion to become members. They feel like they start to get to know you. That’s a lot of work for you though, all the onus is put on you because to put out a daily email with good stuff is hard, it’s a lot of work. You got to work really hard to make sure that every email you’re sending out is valuable, has good information and is pointing them in a direction that you want them to go. So it’s hard to email every day ‘cause we know we have to get that schedule out but we have to make sure the content is good. So, every day, at the very least every other day, but I highly recommend you try it daily.

Not enough content; this is rarely a problem because of the second one, overwhelmed is more common. But if you don’t have enough, if you’ve got one article in there and they’ve paid $97 for the first month obviously they’re going to unsubscribe ‘cause there’s not enough in there. So you got to have at least enough to keep them going for that month.

There’s no time to consume the content. This becomes more on the excuse side I think, although you hear it a lot. I don’t have, I just don’t have time to watch your site. Well, my sense is that if the content was good enough, if we’d done our job they’ll make time for it. Ok?

So you’ll get that excuse, you’ll get that reason and perhaps it’s true for a lot of people, but my sense is is that I’ve not done one of the other things well and because of that they’re giving me the no time excuse.

And they don’t value what they’re paying. If for some reason you’re grossly overcharging for what you’re doing, we’ve experimented with some different prices on a monthly basis. Or if your choices aren’t clear enough, in other words, if I can come in for a month and grab everything and then leave the same way a guy who pays four times as much for an annual membership is getting then your choices are a little bit out of whack and we’ve had to deal with that.

We actually took away our monthly membership, we only offer a one year now. We’ve done that just recently but I think it’ll work a lot better.

So, you got to make sure the value is in line with what you’re charging.

Some common mistakes of membership site owners and then we’re going to get to some questions. I see a bunch of them here popping up so, we’ll get to those, I promise.

Common mistakes that people will make, we’ll go through this quickly. There’s too much in the free trial. When we first started doing the free trial we gave them six full interviews that were 40 minutes each, one a day. Most of the time they got to the end of the five days, they hadn’t listened to all of them because they had to listen to 40 minute podcasts each day to get through all of them. And by the time the fifth day came around, they said well, I haven’t even gotten to these five that I got as free trials, why should I join? We boiled it down to six minutes each day and it’s been a lot better.

Under pricing and undervaluing goes back to that triple it guys. Whatever you’re thinking about charging you got to charge more.

Not emailing frequently enough. If you’re only emailing once a week, not nearly enough; they’re not going to develop that relationship, they’re not going to be trained that when you send them an email you want them to take action. Weekly’s not enough to get them to train your, not enough to train your list.

Waiting until all your content is built. If you wait until you’ve got months and months of content, you’ll never get there, you’ll never do it. And my mantra to you today is get up there and just start it.

Giving up too soon. It does take time to do this, guys. It takes time to get members. We’ve had days we have no members, we’ve had days when we’ve had 12 members. You don’t give up too soon, it does take some time.

Not selling other people’s products if they don’t buy yours. So, we tried initially, first push our list, of course to buy our products. But, it’s just not going to be for some people. And if we’ve got people that are in the industry that may be competitors to ours, they may find values in theirs that they don’t find in ours for whatever reason. I try to let my ego step aside and not, , I think we’ve got the greatest stuff out there, but for whatever reason if somebody doesn’t find our stuff valuable, they might find somebody else’s valuable. So, email out to your list, after you’ve tried to get them to convert to you and they don’t, about your other competitors out there. You can make some affiliate money that way, it’s worth doing. At least you’ll make some money doing that.

And finally, a guarantee with teeth. Instead of just saying money back guarantee, which everybody loves of course, try this, try doing it where you say give it some teeth, give it some specific criteria. In other words, for ours we say if you don’t make a trade on a stock or an option or a future or a 4X, if you don’t make a trade that is at least 500 bucks in the time that you’re a member, we’ll give you your money back. Well my members hear, our membership is $500 for the year. So we’re saying if you don’t make a trade because of something you heard on our show that makes you 500 bucks that this thing pays for itself, we’ll give you your money back. So instead of just doing a money back guarantee, put some teeth behind it, put some criteria behind it, give it some criteria that says if you meet this and you still haven’t gotten to your objective we’ll give you your money back. It makes the guarantee just have more teeth and more believable.

So, thank you very much for joining me in this experiment. Thanks for your patience as we got used to the software, we’re going to be doing more of these with entrepreneurs. So some of them might be paid but some of them will probably be free to attract attention. We’ll try to give great information in the free ones as well. But, thanks very much for being here. I appreciate it and we’ll see you next time.

starting a membership site