My Interview with Ryan Lee
Ryan Lee is the Continuity King.
After I wrote that sentence I thought, “ContinuityKing.com is a great domain name – wonder who owns it?” Ryan Lee does.
I called Ryan to do a quick interview about his thoughts on membership sites, growing an online business with integrity, and dealing with the time pressures of being an online entrepreneur.
As usual, four different ways to listen, watch or read:
1. Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):
2. Download the full mp3 file here
3. Read the transcript (below the video)
4. Watch the video:
Transcript:
MemberCon.com: Hi, everybody Tim Bourquin here from MemberCon. I’m going to talk with Ryan Lee today and a lot of you probably know of ryanlee.com. He’s a pretty much a leader in terms of membership sites and giving advice and education and coaching for membership sites, but I met Ryan at Blog World Expo really briefly. Ryan thanks very much for joining me on the phone today?
Ryan Lee: I’m excited to be here.
MemberCon.com: I watch your videos and of course you notice right away that the domain is your name, you’re branding yourself as the product, was that a conscious decision because I always think down the road of selling it and branding yourself as a person is tougher to sell while, but you make more money while you own the site. Was it a conscious decision to kind of make it your brand?
Ryan Lee: Yeah. And you know what it’s a great question because for years I fought it. I fought branding myself because of your exact reasons like it’s really hard to exit, but for me this is one component of my business is something I’m going to do forever. Like I’m Ryan Lee, just like Donald Trump, he’s Donald Trump, Martha Stewart is Martha Stewart. She’s not going to sell Martha’s. She’s always going to be doing whatever she’s doing, but what I’ve also done is build a lot of other business that aren’t depended on my name. I own a lot of membership sites. I own one called strengthcoach.com. My own software called Fitness Generator, a Nutrition Generator, and I own a lot of different properties that are not necessarily tied into my name. So Ryan Lee is kind of the umbrella for a lot of my Internet marketing stuff, but there’s still a ton of things that I own that are not my name. Like I have a new magazine coming out, it’s going to be called Dot Com Lifestyle and I could have called it like I could have been kind of an egomaniac and called it Ryan Lee Magazine or something like that, but I wanted to build a separate kind of brand, and I set up some separate corporations for some of these and separate merchant accounts. So if I were to sell those, it’s easy to just slice off little pieces of it.
MemberCon.com: Yeah. I’m glad you brought up about the magazine again too because I want to talk to you about that. You’ve got the recurring revenue report, which is a printed newsletter and a CD.
Ryan Lee: Correct.
MemberCon.com: And then you talk about doing an actual print magazine now?
Ryan Lee: Right. In case, I don’t have enough on my plate.
MemberCon.com: OK, you’re right, exactly, exactly. But I’m curious about that decision because of course prints are having a tough time right now and Internet is all about making it easy for digital downloads and things like that, did you find that people are signing up more for membership stuff these days if they get something physical on mail?
legal issues, online entrepreneurs, starting a membership site, subscription pricing
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.
