How to Build Lasting Membership Sites that Never Lose Subscribers, Need Only 2 Hours of Work and Keep Printing Cash Even As You Relax on Your Dream Vacation in the Caribbean!
How would you like to start making money on autopilot using a proven system?
Let me be very honest with you – I won’t insult your intelligence by explaining why membership websites are great for your business. Odds are, if you’re reading this, then you probably know all about the breath-taking profit potential of even the simplest membership website…
But if you’re reading this, then I can also guess that you haven’t got a membership site of your own.
Chances are, the following issues stopped you dead in your tracks:
- You heard that membership websites need a lot of investment to become profitable. You need some fancy-shmancy script to make them work, and then you have to waste weeks fighting the brutal battle for your first subscriber…
- You’ve been told that membership sites aren’t as profitable as everyone claims them to be, and that all your hard-earned subscribers cancel after three months, leaving you with a lot of wasted effort and squandered profit potential…
- You’re worried that running a membership site is like slaving at a second job – you have to keep pumping out new content week after week, or start seeing your subscribers drop like flies…
Now… What if I could show you how to create a profitable membership website that kept churning out money month after month, even year after year – without spending thousands on development or working feverishly every day just to keep your subscribers.
Let’s begin our membership mastery journey together in this 12 part blog post series (yeah, that’s huge, I know). We will cover every aspect of starting and maintaining a membership site – from concept, research, selecting tools, and marketing to sustaining the ultimate profits.
Introduction to FTM Sites
It is no exaggeration to say that income streams that continue to churn out cash even when you sleep are the Holy Grail of Internet Marketing. In fact, it’s a pretty good bet that the attraction of such profit streams that generate guaranteed income month after month is one of the reasons why you got started in Internet Marketing in the first place.
However, as you know by now, most ways to make money online fall well short of this notion. In most cases, how much money you make online is determined by the amount of effort you’re willing to put in – and the second you stop investing that effort, your income will plummet.
Membership sites are different – once you have convinced a subscriber to join, he will continue to generate income for you month after month (provided, that is, that you’re able to provide sufficient valuable content).
This is where a lot of regular membership sites struggle. If you’ve ever been a subscriber yourself, then you probably know that content tends to be great for the first few months, and usually starts to go downhill from there. Incidentally, this is also the reason why the average subscriber rarely stays for longer than 3-4 months.
Fixed-Term Membership sites – also known simply as FTM sites – are profoundly different. Just as the word “fixed†implies, the objective of such a site is not to keep a subscriber signed up continuously, but to create a consistent stream of content for them for a fixed period of time.
Unlike their regular counterparts, FTM sites build upon the idea of a course, rather than a collection of content. This is a very important distinction; because it means that content provided by FTM sites in one month inevitably builds upon the content released in the previous month. In other words, there is what I choose to call a progression of value – every month, new content takes the previous month’s content one step further.
This is more important than you might think – so let me illustrate the difference with a specific example. Let’s say you’re running a FTM site on organic gardening. Your unique selling proposition is a 12-month long course on how to take care of your garden without using chemicals. Since you only release new materials once a week, members need to stay subscribed for the entire 12-month period – otherwise, they will not get full value from the content you have to offer.
Now contrast that with, say, a regular PLR membership site. A user signs up, pays their monthly fee and receives access to a vast collection of PLR material, whether in the form of articles or e-books. After 3-4 months, they already have more PLR content than they know what to do with. The result? Predictably enough, they unsubscribe – because they’ve already gotten all the value they need from this site.
As will be discussed throughout this blog series, FTM sites feature some of the highest customer lifetime values found in the realm of Internet Marketing. Let’s say you charge $39 a month for access to your site – assuming that you provide enough valuable content to compel the user to stay for the entire 12-month duration, the lifetime value of this customer would be 12 x $39 = $468. This is an incredible amount by any standard.
The simplest way to think of a FTM site is to liken it to a university degree. For example, to get your Master’s, you need to attend a defined number of courses spanning a little bit over a year. If you stop attending or skip any of these courses, you won’t get the degree you seek – it’s as simple as that. This alone provides powerful incentive for students to keep going all the way until the end.
FTM sites are exactly the same – and in this coaching, I will show you how you can design, create and market a profitable FTM site full of compelling content.
We kick off the next part by looking at some of the factors you need to examine in choosing the right niche for your FTM site. Once you know your target market, we next look at the technical elements of setting your site up (although daunting at first glance, you will soon discover that creating the site itself is actually pretty painless and straightforward, especially if you use the right software for the job).
The next lessons address the ever-important topic of creating content for your FTM site. After all, this is what users are paying you for, and this is what you will really need to deliver – and, occasionally, overdeliver – on.
I will also discuss in great detail how to market and monetize your site. There’s no point in developing winning content if you’re not putting it in front of the right eyeballs – but, in the final analysis, even that is useless if you’re not making money with it. Monetizing a membership site is often a very different beast from everything you may have heard about so far – and, frequently, recurring membership fees are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Finally, I will also cover how to increase member retention rates and reduce attrition. It is a well-known fact that most members do not stay longer than 3 months. However, as you will discover in this chapter, the FTM model allows you to dramatically improve upon this figure – and even develop a sneaky mechanism for penalizing those who unsubscribe!
Ready to make money with your FTM site? I sure hope so – ‘cause we’re off, and the ride will be wild!
So give a little more thought to this concept, and then get ready for the second part of the series next week. Set aside a schedule for yourself and keep a pen and paper handy as next part onwards we will be taking lot of practical actions (no theories here, sorry)
Next Week’s Lesson – Choosing Your Target Market
Choosing the right market is essential – and take it from someone who has launched a bundle of info-products of his own only to see them flop in the most embarrassing manner imaginable.
Effective market research is critical to the success of any product – and FTM sites especially so. As you will see in next week lesson, membership sites of this kind are a profoundly different marketing proposition from regular information products.
And yeah, don’t forget to leave your feedback 😉
You can meet Deep Arora, read more of his tips & tricks and watch some of his free videos at www.SiteJerk.com.