Which One Should You launch First: A One-Time Product or A Recurring Subscription?
If you have never launched a web site before or sold anything online, especially digital products, then I would NOT recommend starting with a subscription-based product right out of the gate. And on top of that, you should DEFINITELY not start with a high-ticket 1,000 dollar product. In the beginning, you will not have the copywriting skills, the marketing skills, the positioning skills, or the product development skills, or the ability to recruit JV's and affiliates, or the savvy to put it all together. No matter what kind of a superstar you've been in your day job, you simply won't have those skills when you are first starting out with your own membership site.
Let me quickly touch upon the 3 basic monetization models. I call these DIY, DWY and DFY. DIY stands for Do it yourself, DWY stands for Done With You, and DFY stands for Done For You.
DIY is the very basic level which is the basic fully automated online course where everything is delivered digitally. This is similar to the 1-site license we offer at DigitalAccessPass.com (DAP). Where the person who downloads the software can watch documentation videos and read how-to setup documentation and set up their web site themselves. Of course, we offer a lot of ticket-based support, but they don't get any 1-on-1 calls with us.
DWY - Done with you - is slightly more advanced where you do things WITH them - again, to give you an example of what we do ourselves, we set up our users' membership site by working alongside our Platinum users. We do it on a live 1-on-1 call. Either myself or my wife Veena Prashanth - we will get on a call with you and ask you what you want to accomplish, what kind of content, what kind of products you wish to sell, and we tailor the set up of DigitalAccessPass - DAP - to fit your specific needs. There is simply no other program that is better than the 1-on-1 coaching and consulting we offer. So that includes the software and the 1-on-1 setup and training. That's your classic DWY - Done With You. You can charge more for DWY compared to DIY.
And then there's the top-most tier - at least, it is top-most in most niches. Which is DFY - Done For You. We don't offer a Done-for-you option in our business at this time. In this model, the client does not want to do it themselves, they don't also want you to do it WITH them. They just want YOU to do it for them and tell them it's done.
So at the lower end of Done-For-You are SEO services, marketing funnel set up, setup of big CRM's like Infusionsoft, traffic generation, Facebook campaign set up, etc - they all fall under this umbrella of DFY. Now, to this same tier, if you add 1-on-1 coaching and consulting, where you work with your clients first, find out their needs, customize the solution specifically for their needs, and THEN ALSO offer the backend services to get it done FOR them, that's probably where you can charge the most.
So back to Keith. You said you are already selling a $1000 product upfront, followed by a monthly fee. That is absolutely a great model to follow. If you are already successfully selling a high-ticket item, then there's definitely no need to swap that out for continuity. What you are doing is already the best of both worlds - a big upfront payment, followed by continuity.
This is the DFY tier I was talking about earlier. So if you were doing marketing consulting, then the big upfront fee - whether it is $1,000 or $5,000 or $10,000 - all of that goes towards, say, your initial coaching and consulting where you work with clients 1-on-1, figure out their requirements, analyze their business, find areas for improvement, come up with a plan to optimize their funnel, get more traffic, get more leads, improve conversion, and so on. And that's what the initial 1000 or 5000 could be for.
Once that initial part is done, you could present them with a fantastic project report that summarizes all of the work done so far and tells them what they need to do next in order to get to where they want to be. And that's where your add-on services could come in, and you say, Hey Ravi, I have a team that can take all this stuff off your hands. And now here's 3 different tiers you could come in at for these services.
And that would be your continuity tier, where you create 3-tiers - say, Silver, Gold and Platinum, with each tier offering more benefits than the other, and that could include not just your team's time, but also your own ongoing consulting and review of the business roadmap.
Now, most importantly, remember this: Even if you launched a 100 dollar month program directly, your member would have to stay for 10 FULL months before you can earn that same 1,000 dollars from them. So 10 months of fees - if they don't cancel, if their credit card continues to work - if you keep delivering, if they don't lose focus - 10 full months of all that, at 100 dollars a month, would earn you 1000 dollars. BUT... if you are ALREADY charging that 1000 upfront, then your subscriber's lifetime customer value goes way way WAY up, because they are STARTING with a payment of 1000 dollars. And after that, all of the continuity payment you get from them is pure gravy.
Now, another thing we tend to forget, is that a 1,000 dollar customer's mindset is going to be WAY different, in a good way of course, it's going to be WAY better compared to a 100 dollars a month client. No offense to anyone paying less. That's just how it is for the most part. Who would you rather serve? The person buying at the dollar store? Or the person buying at Walmart? Or the person shopping at an expensive jewelry store? See what I mean? The more expensive your product is, and the more they pay you, the more fun they usually are to work with, they require less hand-holding, need less support, will bother you less, will praise you more, and will refer more clients to you. Weird, but true! I didn't make that one up, ok?
That means that if someone paid you 1000 dollars to begin with?? then the chances are very high that they will continue with your 100 dollar a month continuity afterwards. Because if they could afford to pay you that much upfront, then they definitely value their time... and what you are offering them in return. And they will not have a problem paying a small percentage of that to keep getting that value from you.
Now, if you - Keith - had said you're not converting enough people to your 1000 dollar program, and because they don't get in, they're not even getting to the point of continuity, then that's an entirely different issue altogether. I'm going to talk about that in a different episode, because this topic is way too important to be left unfinished.
Anyway, for now, the quick summary for you, Keith, is this: You are already selling the perfect hybrid model. Get a big chunk upfront, followed by continuity. This is probably THE BEST monetization model there is as far as continuty goes. Because the standard stick rate for the average membership is like between 3-6 months. That's like a very generalized number of course. But if you're getting lock in from them to the equivalent of 10 months upfront, and then add to that the mindset advantage you have with such customers paying for high-ticket items, then you now have the best kind of membership site there is.
Big Chunk Upfront - Plus Backend Continuity - Membership Thy Shall Maketh Successful, like Yoda would say.
All this and more in today's episode #14. Show notes available at http://SubscribeMe.fm/14/
When should you NOT drip content? Are there situations when content dripping is not right for your members? What do you do in that case? Do you simply allow access to everything from day 1 and risk getting ripped off? Or is there an alternative to content dripping?
#1: If you want your members to feel that you are continuously creating NEW content, fresh off-the-press, fresh-from-the oven type of freshness, then you should NOT use Content Dripping to make it look like it's new or just created. That is NOT what content dripping is meant for.
Your members will figure it out that the content that you are dripping was probably created a while ago - sometimes maybe months or even years ago, because there is bound to be some kind of a trail - like comments from other members, or references in the content to dates or events from the past. So DO NOT use content dripping to try to fool your members into thinking that the content is freshly created. You shouldn't do that with content dripping or with email autoresponders.
#2: Another reason why you should not drip content: is when you have a LOT of modules, and there's a chance that your audience might not want to consume it in the same order that it is dripped. Let's take the example of a physical fitness course. Within the main course - that we will call "Get The Body of your Dreams And Keep It For Life", you may have a long-term strategy and schedule for losing weight and keeping it off. Your modules might be Cardio, Thighs, Abdomen, Shoulders, Arms, etc. And you may be dripping the content in a certain order. And someone who joins your course gets the Cardio module on week 1, Thighs in week 2, Abdome in week 3, Shoulders in week 4, and so on. If someone joined today, and after week 1, they just don't care about the Thighs module, and they want to skip ahead to the Abdomen module from week 3, then since you're dripping content, they cannot fast forward the content. But at the same time, you may not want to make everything available from day 1. In fact, let's even say you're dripping content monthly, and not weekly. And what if they want content from Month #4 to be available today? You want to drip content, but they don't want you to drip content. So what do you do in that case?
Many years ago, at DigitalAccessPass.com, with the help of a DAP user's tiny little spark of an idea, we came up with the concept of what we called the Credit Store. The idea is, that instead of dripping content based on YOUR personal preference, you instead give CREDITS to your users, and then they can take those credits and redeem them for specific modules in your content store.
This is similar to buying tokens at the local fair. You buy tokens at the entrance, and you can use them on any game or ride in any order, as many times as you want, based on YOUR preference. Similarly, when someone signs up for a subscription, then with each monthly payment, they get, say 10 credits. They can take those 10 credits and go to your Credit store - which is basically your Content Store. And there, they see the Cardio module for 3 credits, Thighs for 2, Abdomen for 4 credits and so on.
This is an extremely powerful alternative to Content Dripping. And at DigitalAccessPass.com, we launched the Credit Store plugin a few years back, and it has been a huge hit among those who want to offer their members this kind of flexibility of redeeming content, while not giving away the farm on day 1 and still maintaining control over the security of the content.
Finally, another reason to NOT drip content, is when your content could get outdated quickly. Like stock quotes, or financial news, or current events, or when you're following a certain company or trend or current event. You absolutely cannot queue up any content, because by the time your content gets dripped, in weeks or maybe even in months, then it might already be outdated partially or even entirely.
So those are the 3 major reasons when dripping content is NOT a good idea.
All this and more in today's episode #13. Show notes available at http://SubscribeMe.fm/13/
To drip or not to drip. That is the question.
In this episode, I discuss 5 reasons why you may want to drip content in your membership site.
1) If you have a lot of content to deliver in your online course.
2) If you have a structured online course, where things have to be delivered in a certain sequence.
3) If you want to put in most of the work up front and set up the content to drip slowly over time.
4) The Halloween-Candy analogy: . You give it to them little by little. To extend the value of your content, even if your members know that it is already there, and you give them a sense of anticipation and excitement. You can even tease them what's coming up. Almost like a trailer for a move that hasn't been released yet.
5) Finally, two important reasons to drip content, is to prevent a) your members from feeling like they're getting ripped off, and b) to make sure YOU yourself don't get ripped off.
So, why did they even bother creating a type of content called a Post? Isn't everything just a Page? Why did posts even come into existence in the first place? To answer that, we need to do a quick 1-minute flashback to the time, when the word "blog" came into being.
Did you know that the word "blog" is actually a short form for "Web Log" as in, a online log of events. Like a personal diary. On one of my web sites early in 2000 - a lot of web site owners did this - used to have a link in their menu called "Web Log". I certainly did, and it took the visitor to a page that had an online diary of sorts - the kind that we would publish on Facebook today.
A typical WordPress blog shows all of your blog Posts, in reverse chronological order. And if your blog is set to show the latest 5 posts, and you keep publishing new posts ever week, if I go to your blog in 2 months, I will see an entirely new set of blog posts on the front page, assuming your front page IS your blog. So if I am on your blog, and I like one of the posts I read on the home page, and I want to send the link to a friend, then I can't send my friend to just your home page, because depending on when the friend visits your home page, that post may or may not even be there. And so each post needed a more permanent link in order to be able to share with friends and index in search engines. That permanent link came to be known as the now famous "permalink" in WordPress.
Then, there is the WordPress Page, with a capital P, which is a more static entity. There's no rolling sequence of pages. A page is a page. It's just there. It has a link. Which is a permanent link.
So, when should you use WordPress Posts and when to use WordPress Pages?
In today's episode, I give you all of my deepest, darkest secrets... about Fiverr.com - including the most awesome Fiverr freelancers that I've had a tremendous experience working with!
In the last episode, I mentioned 3 of my favorite outsourcing web sites. Check out Episode #9 for that.
In today's episode, I go deep into one of them, which is Fiverr. I've found some really cool uses for Fiverr, no matter what others tell you about fraud and low quality of work on Fiver. I've had nothing but great experiences working with Fiverr Freelancers, especially when it comes to unusual, wacky and odd jobs.
In today's Part 2 of my "Top 20 Favorite Tools" series, I get into more detail about outsourcing services and a couple of really neat tricks to get the biggest bang for your buck.
In the last episode, I talked about tools that I use for communication, a 3-pronged data back up strategy, video creation, and finally Graphics and Image creation. So make sure you listen to that one first.
Category #5. Outsourcing:
There are 3 major sites we use for outsourcing work in our business. 1) Upwork 2) 99Designs & 3) Fiverr
Each of them has a different utility. So when do you use which web site? And what is the best way to use them? All that and more in this episode. So be sure to check it out.
Show notes available at http://SubscribeMe.fm/9/
In today's show, I'm going to list my top 20 tools, that I simply couldn't live without. And won't live without.
Show-notes and links to everything mentioned on the show, are available at http://SubscribeMe.fm/8/
#1. Communication: Skype
And for business communication, I use Gotomeeting.
#2. Data backup: When it comes to keeping our business data safe and backed up, I use a 3-pronged approach. I use Carbonite, Google Drive and a local hard-drive.
#3. Video creation: Camtasia Studio, Jing, Powtoon, iPhone, Audio downloaded from Audiojungle.
#4. Graphics & Images: Canva, Box Shot King, Gimp, and Jing
More tools coming up in the next episode. So stay tuned.
- Ravi Jayagopal
http://SubscribeMe.fm/8/
Why not simply use email to deliver content? Why bother with a membership site, membership software and all the setup & maintenance headaches?
Let me first show you how to create the world's quickest membership site - in just 4 hours.
Step 1: Signup for an account with Mailchimp. They allow you to have up to 2,000 subscribers on your list, and send out 12,000 emails per month. So that's about 6 emails per month. Go to subscribeme.fm/mailchimp, and get $30 in free credit to use when you exceed 2,000 subscribers.
Step 2: Load up all of your course content into an email autoresponder sequence, set up these emails to go out once a week. You could even start with just the welcome email and content for module 1, since you will be dripping the emails over time.
Step 3: Create a one-page landing page through a free WordPress.com web site.
Step 4: Log in to Paypal, create a buy button, and put it on your free one-page sales page.
That's it! You could be done with this basic membership set up in about 4 hours. And you could launch it tomorrow.
So, if creating a membership site with just email can be done in 4 hours, then why even bother buying specialized membership software? Why bother with all of the setup and maintenance headaches of installing and running your own membership site, and spending time and money setting up a member’s area, and creating your content online, and protecting that content? So why bother with all that work?
In order to automate everything for yourself and your customers, you need a web site. And simply throwing up a WordPress installation on your site is not going to help you automate payments, automate member-account creation, automate content delivery, send out follow-up and marketing emails, allow members to access private content, watch videos, listen to audio, download reports and documents.
In this 6th episode of Subscribe Me, I have a special interview. No, it's not me interviewing someone else. Instead, it's ME being interviewed on somebody else's show.
I was a guest on the Thriving Entrepreneur Radio Show hosted by Steve Kidd. Steve has an amazingly gentle way of asking great questions, while offering his own perspective along the way. And Steve has a program called "Write Your Best Seller" where he helps you become known as an authority, get on TV, become an amazon best seller among a host of other promotional services. Check out his program by going to SubscribeMe.fm/authority/ .
After he interviewed me, I wrote to him and asked him if I could publish the interview on my own podcast to my own listeners. And he very generously agreed. Thanks, Steve! So check out Steve Kidd interviewing one of the most awesome people I have ever met... that's ME! :-)
In this 5th episode of SubscribeMe, I pick the brains of Ryan Lee, a veteran online marketer from Connecticut, Host of the Freedym show at Freedym.com - and one of the earliest people to start a membership site online.
Ryan started his first membership site in 2001. The previous year, in 2000, I had just moved to New York (from India) with my wife and daughter (my son was born in the US several years later). Ryan has seen the evolution of the Internet Marketing industry, and has launched many successful web sites. He has previously been a writer for Entrepreneur.com online magazine, and lives in Connecticut with his wife and 4 daughters.
On the show, Ryan and I talk about the early Google, the now defunct Goto, ClickBank, Paypal, hustle, "Ask and you shall receive", the importance of building a recurring-income based business, personality-based marketing, emailing you list without worrying about unsubscribes, how much of yourself should you share with your audience, and keeping your members around for long and reducing churn.
Ryan's enthusiasm and energy is contagious, so listen to the show and you will get inspired and take home lots of actionable tips.
Cheers!
Ravi Jayagopal
In today's show, we have a question from Michael Britt, a Psychology professor who has been super-successful at creating lots of content, has millions of downloads of his podcast and his youtube videos, but has not had much success at monetizing 9 years of hard work.
A weak call to action, content all over the place, not focusing on one sub-niche at a time, trying to be everything to everybody, spreading yourself too thin.
The problem might be that you've just kept creating content for years, without any kind of structure or specific goals. And you've been creating products without identifying who your target customer is.
When I go to your web site, I can't really make out who it is really for. Is it for students studying psychology for a college degree? Is it for the casual person looking to learn about psycology? Is it for people who are looking to learn more about psychology because of a loved one who has an issue? The content is just too much, and it is all over the place, from what I can tell.
You have a very weak call to sign up for your newsletter at the top. Doesn't state any benefits. Just "sign up for my newsletter" is not going to cut it. Instead, it should be something like "Get the top 10 memory boosting tricks that are borderline illegal, have been baffling both scientists and students - and will rewire your brain like you are Sherlock Holmes". Have a nice digital image of a great report. Say how many times it has been downloaded. Why it helps. Benefits. Who all it helps. "Whether you are a teenage student or you are 60 years old and you have just been diagnosed with Alzheimers".
Dream Team of 5 Tools You Need To Create A Membership Site.
Let's do a quick flashback. Back in April 2015, LinkedIn purchased online learning website Lynda.com for a cool $1.5 billion. Lynda.com, at its very core, is nothing but a membership site offering online courses with videos and checklists and PDF document downloads.
So when you have a membership site that earns recurring revenue, you increase the value of your business as a whole, and that makes it easier to sell your site to a prospective buyer in the future, if you ever decide to walk away from it all. So a web site with recurring revenue has greater lifetime customer value, which will help you sell your site for a lot more than if you had just one-time products. Which is why a site like Lynda.com could get a valuation of 1.5 billion. Of course, they had millions of members, but the point is, that they weren't just regular members, but members paying a monthly fee.
And you too can create your own mini version of Lynda.com.
Here are the 5 members of Ravi Jayagopal's Membership Site Dream Team:
1) Content Management System
2) Theme
3) Media Host
4) Payment Processor
5) Membership Plugin & Marketing Platform
So which ones did Ravi choose for his dream-team? Listen to the show to find out!
So just how important are memberships and subscriptions? I read this article from marketwatch.com, which is a web site published by Dow Jones, and tracks the financial markets and apparently has more than 16 million visitors per month. And I'll link to this article in the show notes - http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apples-iphone-payment-plan-could-upgrade-the-stock-2015-09-16
So here's what it says - and I'm quoting verbatim here...
The headline: Apple’s iPhone payment program could upgrade the stock
The subheadline: Upgrade program, launching with iPhone 6S, could drive Apple shares above $200
So let me give you the context. Recently, with Apple's iPhone 6s and 6sPlus launch, they announced that they would offer new iPhones on a payment plan, and people can get a 1 year payment plan or a 2 year plan directly from Apple, and not worry about extending their phone contracts. So you basically pay the cost of the phone directly to Apple, and in return you can get a new phone from Apple every year, or 2, depending on the payment plan. And apparently, Apple in turn also gives you some premium support and service.
So back to quoting from the article: It says... Apple Inc.’s new iPhone upgrade program isn’t going to just benefit users who want to get their hands on a new phone every year, it could also give a boost to Apple investors.
"By encouraging customers to upgrade more frequently, the program — which takes effect later this month with the launch of iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus sales — could produce more sustainable iPhone revenues, driving earnings per share higher and producing a better stock multiple."
Ok, now pay attention to this next part: "Analysts at UBS, who have a buy rating and $150 price target on the stock, said this week that the installment plan “could be a big deal” for Apple and drive its shares higher than $200. “The iPhone begins to look more like an annuity and less like a hits business,” UBS analyst Steven Milunovich wrote in a note to clients this week. End quote.
Now think about that for a minute. To give you some perspective, Apple is the world's most profitable company not in the world, not just right now, but in the history of the world! Apple is the largest publicly traded corporation in the world by market capitalization, and Apple last year became the first U.S. company to be valued at over US$700 billion. Yes, that is 700 BILLION - with a B! A monthly payment plan is nothing but essentially a subscription, and this is really Apple's first big subscription-based product - of course, I'm not including the underwhelming launch of Apple Music. And people in general are agreeing that Apple adding essentially a subscription-based product to its offering, is going to make it look even better, and make its shares become even more valuable!
Even A 700 Billion dollar company can do better by adding a recurring subscription model to its business. I hope that right there makes you seriously consider adding such a subscription model to your business.
Don't worry, you don't have to figure it all out by yourself. I will help you get there - all you have to do is to just keep listening to this show.
SubscribeMe.fm is THE podcast that teaches you all about about creating a highly profitable, long-term business with online courses & membership sites, using recurring subscriptions.
In this podcast, and I don't mean just this episode, but the entire series, I'm going to be talking about how you can build a successful business by creating subscription-based products and services that bring in recurring income month after month... where you don't have to go hunting for new customers all the time, where you can focus on creating a remarkable product - like Seth Godin would say - A product that your customers love, where they keep paying you to keep delivering your product or service, and where you get to actually focus on your remarkable product - and improving it and adding to it over time, and you get to focus on, quote unquote "Enchanting" your customers, like Guy Kawasaki would say.
The main focus of this podcast will be how to make, market and monetize your online digital content. But here's a a list of other topics that we will get into in this podcast series.