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.