Before we get into the nitty-gritty about how to create a membership program, I want you to imagine for a moment that the year is 1996.
It’s early December and you want to rent a Christmas movie for the family.
You’re walking into a Blockbuster video to rent Jingle All The Way (it just came out!)
In 1996 that was big business. There were lots of movie rentals stores in every neighborhood.
You walk up to the counter and are standing in a long line because it’s Saturday night in December and everybody wants to rent a movie.
After hearing about 3 or 4 conversations you didn’t want to hear you finally get up to the counter. The clerk is a twenty something disheveled young man who doesn’t appear to be in any hurry.
He asks for your card. You give it to him. Surprise, you owe a late fee.
$42.97? What? That can’t be right!
The clerk just looks at you with a blank stare…
the people behind you start to grumble with warnings of “hurry it up…”
Now believe it or not that was a reality in 1996…
But in 1997, everything began to change.
Netflix was born.
They offered a monthly flat fee subscription service with no late fees.
Imagine that for a second?
No more going to busy Blockbusters on Saturday nights.
No more “surprise” late fees.
No more lines.
No more showing up at the local movie rental store only to realize they were out of the movie you wanted.
It was brilliant because it eliminated a lot of problems people were having all at once.
And then in 2007 Netflix moved to a streaming model and absolutely changed the game. They were inspired by YouTube.
And with that inspiration, they eliminated another problem for customers…
The problem of waiting for movies to come in the mail.
Flash forward to today.
Netflix has over 137 million total subscribers worldwide, including 58 million in the United States. They are in a word… dominant.
Their entire business has always been based on an idea of “continuity.”
That is the idea of income that comes in automatically every single month until someone cancels.
This week I want to talk with you about passive and recurring income.
I believe that it is one of the most important things you can do if you want to create a sustainable income online.
There is a lot to be learned from a company like Netflix, but you don’t have to be a pioneer or even have some kind of crazy original idea to begin a continuity program that can make you a sustainable monthly income.
Okay, the first thing I want you to understand is membership programs do not need to be hard at all. You don’t need a complicated piece of software to do it.
You don’t have to be some kind of super experienced expert, and you don’t need to work tirelessly every single day creating content all the time.
So if you felt that way about membership programs, toss that way of thinking out. It won’t help you at all. It’s a limiting belief and it’s not true.
Here’s what you need to run a successful membership program:
1. Master Plan
You need a plan for benefit (what will you provide your customers every month?).
2. The Automation
You need an automated system to sell the membership program and collect payments automatically for you every month
3. The Security
You need a simple plan for security. Something that makes the benefit you provide exclusive for your members.
That’s it.
The Membership Program Master Plan
It’s the most important of the three.
When you think of a membership program I want you to stop thinking in terms of “content provided” or “software access” or anything else like that.
I want you to think in terms of benefit. People pay you every month for a specific benefit.
It’s up to you to make that a great benefit but also something that is going to be easy for you to maintain. It’s completely up to you to make that “benefit” passive.
So how do you do it?
A great way to do it is to leverage something you are already doing.
Let me give you an example.
Imagine you are already blogging. You are publishing a new blog post every single week. These blog posts sometimes have affiliate links so that you can earn some money. Some of them you are just trying to use them to build audience.
Now blogging can be hard work. It’s a commitment.
Why not double dip? Why not leverage some of the work you are already doing anyway?
How can you do it?
What if you create a simple membership program where the benefit is the right to use your blog content?
You decide on the license. You decide how and in what way they can and can’t use your content. And for this license they pay you a simple flat monthly fee.
Now You Have Created an Extra Income Stream and You are Doing No Extra Work For It
Consider credit card companies for a moment.
Credit card companies made over 60 billion dollars this past year from interest charged to customers who used their cards. But they didn’t stop there.
They also charged the merchants a per transaction fee for the right to accept their card. They call that Interchange income and they made over 42 billion dollars from that.
Think about that for a minute.
They are making twice as much money from charging not just the cardholder for the right to use the card, but also the merchant for the right to accept the card.
It’s really amazing. They are double dipping to the max.
Imagine for a moment that you are just starting out online.
What could you possibly offer as a benefit to people?
You have no experience. You have no results.
Should you just wait on the membership program until you have some experience under your belt?
No way. That’s the way of the chump. Time waits for no man.
The fact is you do have something you can leverage. Look to the work you are already doing.
When you are new you are:
- learning constantly
- buying products
- testing products
- reading
- watching
- listening
- networking
Start a “Learn out Loud” Club
Every month you spend an hour talking about the things you have discovered, the things you have learned, the things you have tried that month.
What has worked. What has not worked.
Helpful services or people who are good to network with. Great Facebook groups to be a part of.
Essentially, you are allowing them to be a fly on the wall as you grow your online business. It’s like an ongoing case study. A backstage pass into the inner workings of your fledgling business.
All you have to do is write down some bullet points of things you have done this month, resources you have used and learned about, all the other stuff, and record a simple video where you are talking about it every month.
Charge a modest 10 bucks a month for that club.
The beauty of this is that you are already doing that work. You are now just allowing others to benefit from your journey.
Don’t think people would pay you to be part of your “Learn out Loud” club? You’re wrong.
The benefit is convenience and relevant information. They get to reap the benefits without having to go through the constant struggles of trying everything out and keeping up on it all.
It’s awesome because you can start a simple “Learn out Loud” club on day 1 of trying to make money online.
The key to successful membership programs that produce passive income for you is to focus on the benefit and to leverage work you are already doing to make life easier for others.
Think about what kind of work you are already doing to make money online. What are you already putting time and energy into? How could you leverage that to produce an extra income source?
This is game changing stuff and literally will transform your life forever.
The Membership Program Automation
Okay, so now you should have an idea in your mind of what the benefit is you could be providing to your customers.
Now how can we set this thing up so that they can buy it, you can automatically receive payments from them every month, and it’s all very hand off?
We need 3 things here for our automated system to work:
A Simple Sales Page
For the sales page, look around your niche and model your sales page after what is already working out there.
I’m not saying exact copy here, but close in spirit and design.
A Simple Download Page
Your download page is going to be the page that you send people to once they buy your membership program. Here is where you provide the benefit to your customers.
In our example we talked about a blogger who also offered licensing for his blog posts. He would put that license on the download page for his members to download.
In another example, we talked about the idea of starting a “Learn out Loud” club. The download page is where you would post your monthly video in a club like that.
Also this is where you could put any links to resources or downloads you wanted to share.
A Platform for Buying and Selling Products
WarriorPlus is a good example of that. WarriorPlus is a digital product platform for buying and selling products related to online business but you can publish products about anything.
On Warrior+Plus, people sell “digital products” such as eBooks, online courses, access to paid membership sites, and software.
WarriorPlus is absolutely free and it is going to allow you to create the “product” that is your membership program. It will allow you to enter in the URL for your sales page and your download page.
It will allow you to select recurring billing. And it will collect dues for you every single month (or however often you want to collect them, that choice is up to you.)
It will automatically send customers to your download page when they buy. Also, WarriorPlus will create buy buttons for you to put on your sales page.
It handles the “automation” portion of our set up.
So, now you have a master plan, and you know how to set up automation for the membership program.
But how to you lock it down so that only members can access it?
Let’s talk about it.
Securing Your Membership Program
Whenever you think about the idea of charging someone every month for a benefit, inevitably you think, “How can I protect this so not just anyone can get it?”
Now there are plenty of softwares out there that can do that for you. And some of those solutions are great, some of them can get a little complicated, and some of them can get expensive.
Here is what I suggest you do when you are first getting started…
Give your download page a really unrecognizable URL name. Exclude that page from search results, so the search engines will not pick it up.
And then the only ones who are going to find that page are the ones who have been notified about (from Warrior+ for example).
There are plenty of people fighting for rank on google and other search engines. It’s not going to be that hard to “hide” your page.
As far as the people paying you every month for the benefit? They are not going to be interested in just sharing your download page with everyone. So that is honestly a non-issue for the most part.
Now, when you start making more money, feel free to upgrade to a better security system. There are many out there. From Downloadxpress, to MemberSonic, to Digital Access Pass, there are plenty of solutions.
The thing is, the most important objective here is to get your business to profit. Not get bogged down with the technical aspects and added expense of membership program software.
So, when it comes to security, keep it as simple as possible. Accept that there will be a small amount of piracy no matter how much security you have, and focus instead on your paying customers.
Alright, so to recap here you only need 3 things to start a successful membership program that will generate passive income for you month after month:
One) The Master Plan
You need a plan for benefit (what will you provide your customers every month).
Two) The Automation
You need an automated system to sell the membership program and collect payments automatically for you every month.
Three) The Security
You need a simple plan for security. Something that makes the benefit you provide exclusive for your members.
That’s the blueprint. It’s up to you to make it happen! Remember, the best laid plans end in nothing if we fail to take action on them. Imperfect action always beats perfect thought alone.
Be relentless. Work on setting up your simple membership program, keep it moving forward!
Okay, that’s’ all for today.
Now we would like to invite you to some training that we have for creating and setting up sales pages and download pages for a membership site. Basically, the training covers everything about setting up a sales funnel. If you’re interested you can learn more about it at https://impc.ws/sfp
