Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

Mike McLin was an avid wakeboarder. He knew there was a market for instructional content for other wakeboarders to learn from experts but there wasn’t much available.

So Mike and a partner created a series of instructional DVDs and began selling them to the passionate community of wakeboarders. The success of those DVDs led to the launch of their current membership site, LearnWake.com. (Warning: don’t visit this site if you get jealous easily – it’s incredible and you’re sure to have a bad case of “website envy” all weekend.)

In this interview, you’ll learn how Mike made the transition from selling DVDs to selling memberships to his website. You’ll also hear him talk about how he tried to market the membership website the same way he marketed the DVDs and realized it was a totally different game. Finally, you’ll learn how he set pricing initially by getting into the minds of his prospective customers and how he gets through slow patches by marketing to a worldwide audience.

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

2) Download the mp3 file here

3) Read the transcript:

MemberCon.com: Hello everybody. Welcome back to MemberCon.com. Thanks very much for joining me for another interview with a membership site owner. Today, we’re going to be speaking with Mike Mclin. He has a web site called LearnWake.com. I was interested in talking to him about how he got into starting this site and what he thinks are some good ideas and tips for growing a membership site. So, let’s start with your site. First of all, it’s a gorgeous site. That’s kind of what attracted my eye in the first place. Do you design sites as well? I mean, did you do this thing all yourself?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: Yeah, me and my team, we pretty much built the site from ground up including all of the visuals and everything from preproduction all the way to the completed project. And we’ve also populated all the content that’s on the site, all the videos, motion graphics, and stuff like that.

MemberCon.com: How did the site start? Were you a wakeboarder yourself?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: Yeah. I used to wakeboard a lot. And I actually used to ride on the Pro Tour and stuff like that. I kind of was deep into the industry and knew a lot of the key people in the industry. And one of the largest wakeboarding camps where people go for instruction from all over the world is right here in my hometown of Clermont, Florida. So, we actually started at a DVD series, an instructional DVD series, and it took off and did really, really well. And we were thinking about making a sequel, pretty much, to the DVDs and we kind of started realizing the business model of delivering instructional content is actually much better suited for a web site than for DVDs because of all the interactivity you can do on a web site with forums and people talking to each other and asking questions. Plus, we started realizing that when we’re selling DVDs, you start off and DVDs sell really well. And then eventually, as they become older and mature, it stops selling in stores. Where a web site, a membership web site, is the complete opposite. The more you mature, the more money you make because the bigger your membership base became. So, that was a really exciting business model for us and we were just really interested in taking the next step in doing a membership web site and it’s worked out really, really well for us so far.

MemberCon.com: So, you kind of got proof positive that people would pay for this content by selling the DVD. Did you do any type of surveys or kind of focus groups to find out if there were other web sites out there that were selling content memberships or was this the first one that would be out there?

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online entrepreneurs, selling content online, starting a membership site LearnWake.com, selling online content