The Arrogant Alchemist – Membership Sites – The Things They DON’T Tell You

Saturday, December 26th, 2009 at 1:55 pm

Welcome, Everybody!

As you all know, we’ve been talking about Membership Sites here and how to use PLR products as a foundation on which to build your membership site. And it seems to be a pretty hot topic of conversation, both here at The ‘Dome and on the Warrior Forum as well. We all have different topics that we watch for on the Forum and one of mine is PLR. I like to buy it, I like to use it, and I like to see what other people are doing with it.

A lot of the WSOs I’m seeing tell you to take a PLR product, like an ebook that tells you how to create a blog, and break that ebook down into bite size pieces and drip feed those pieces out, over a period of time, to the members who have joined your site. And that’s all well and good. That’s how I learned blogging. Way back when, I joined The Niche Blogger membership site. And that’s what The Arrogant Alchemist is selling with HIS WSO.

But what those WSOs don’t tell you is how to get people to join your membership site to begin with. They just tell you how successful they can be once you have one up – and have MEMBERS!

So, let me tell you what I’ve learned…

Don’t – Don’t try to set your membership site up in 5 days like I did. I started on Tuesday afternoon at Ground Zero. I had no experience with the Micro Membership plug in, I had no idea how I was going to configure navigation on the site, and I didn’t even have any product ready to put on the site.

- As I’ve said before, I have tried other membership scripts. And, while they might do more than Micro Membership, I had no idea what those other features were, or why I might need them, or even how to use them if I DID need them. So Micro Membership, with it’s low price tag and excellent support seemed like a no brainer choice for me. However – as with any new program you put on your computer, there is a learning curve with Micro Membership. This learning curve ate up three days worth of time for me. I literally spent a good, solid 24 hours just sitting here clicking pages and links to see where they went because some of the navigation is pre-configured in the plug in. Now, it probably won’t take YOU this long, because most of you are not nearly as air-headed as I am when it comes to computer stuff. But just be aware, no matter what script you use, you’re going to have to install it and learn it before you can use it.
- Once I DID figure out what I was doing with Micro Membership, my mind map that I had created for the site went totally out the window. So that had been wasted time, too. Set the site up first, see how it works and where everything goes once your members get in the front door, THEN configure your pages and navigation.
- Don’t try to rush through preparing the content for you site. In my case, we only had 5 products that we needed to load up. But we may have done better if we’d had more products and some Freebies to attract people. I think when people enter a membership site, they expect to see lots of pretty, shiny things, and, because we’re selling custom products, we just don’t have that much “Stuff” to put out there for people to “Touch”.

Do – Do your research! I’m on a lot of lists and I get email like you wouldn’t believe. And, believe it or not, I open just about all of it. I’ve gotten some great Freebies that way, but I also do it so I can study the way other people sell.
- I had noticed that just about every email I got was sending me to some type of membership site. But what I failed to pay attention to was the step BEFORE the membership site. 99% of these sites started off with some kind of special, or Free, offer. And then once you got to that product, THEN they told you about the benefits of membership. I had almost set $97 ebooks Book-Of-The-Moth Club up this way but not quite. What I did was include all the info, that special offer AND the membership site info, all on the same WSO. What I should have done was just offer my regular WSO which is special pricing on custom Ebooks, and then, after the sale, taken them to a page about the membership site. So, remember to include this extra step in your plans.
Do – Do launch your new membership site during a slow time of the week. Whether you’re launching on the WF or not. I had planned to launch on Saturday because I know the forum would be busy for the weekend. Thankfully, I did NOT anticipate the following:
- The Warrior Forum was slow because it was the last weeked before Christmas. I subscribe to almost 30 different threads on the forum and only 2 of them had any traffic at all over the weekend.
- We launched at 6PM on Saturday, and within just a few hours, the mods at the WF pulled my WSO to the Classified Ads section where it effectively died. (We were using templates for our ebooks that we downloaded Free off of some site we found and didn’t realize that they had the creator’s name embedded in the code. So the WF thought that all of our ORIGINAL ebooks we were selling were PLR. This took two days to resolve.)
- Because it was a slow weekend and we were bumped to a different forum, out traffic was very light, which gave me time to see where the bugs were in the system and get them fixed. If we had gotten hit with the traffic we normally get for one of our WSOs, we could have had a confusing mess on our hands just trying to make sure we had everything covered. As it was, all links went exactly where they were supposed to go with only 3 people having problems navigating the site.
Do – As in any other type of Internet Marketing, you need to know who your target audience is and THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN BUYING FROM YOUand create your product to meet their needs.
- In my case, these are two different groups of people. My target audience, the people who I want to sell to, are people who understand the value of creating their own ebooks and what can be done with them. People like you and me who know that that ebook should just be the first thing your customer sees on your site but definitely not the last. The people who are buying from me are the people who put an ebook on their site and sell it for $17 and that’s it. I’ve been marketing to one group and selling to the other and it’s just by sheer luck that I’ve sold anything so far. So, I’m now in the process of tightening up that differential and putting marketing in place for BOTH groups.
Don’t – Don’t stop tweaking once you have the site up. It can always be better!
- Watch the sign up process, watch your members progress through the funnel. Fix links and make that process as easy as possible for them. The more they have to think about each step they take, the fewer steps they’ll take.
- Watch your conversions. How many people have clicked to sign up? How many have signed up? What level are they going to? And then look at what it will take to get them to the next level. It could just be that they don’t understand what you’re offering. Or maybe they can’t see how to get to the next level. Or maybe they don’t see the value in progressing any further. And if they ARE going to the top level, then add another level!

So, here’s what I did…

I moved everything we have to offer over here to this blog. That way, everybody can see it. On the membership site, all of this information is covered up until the person joins the club. And that’s fine. It creates an impression of elitism and let’s people know that we’re not just dumping PLR out to the world. But this way, the people who don’t want to join the membership site, can still order ebooks from us, they just won’t get the extra bells and whistles that the members get.
After moving everything over here, I then linked it all BACK to the membership site, so they CAN see what they’re missing.
I tweaked the WSO and took out references to the membership site and just put up our standard WSO offerings, but it’s also lined to the club on the backend.
I cleaned up the navigation on THIS blog to make everything easier to see and find.

So, essentially, what I did was, cut more doors into the sides of The $97 Ebooks Book-Of-The-Month Club, making it easier to access, and marking the path better along the way. So, I guess The Arrogant Alchemist HAS, in a way, taken over the dome. Because now it’s being used as a Billboard for The $97 Ebooks Book-Of-The-Month Club! OMG! That just occurred to me while I was writing this paragraph! Why, that little $#!#$$%^$%^Q@!!!

However, all he’s managed to get his grubby little fingers on is the outfield fence. He’s out there with the ads for chewing tobacco and beer and he’s still far away from the pitcher’s mound. All I have left to do now is get the rest of that 5 Grand!

If you’ve been thinking about starting your own membership site, don’t forget to check out Ralph Pruitt’s Guest Post here at the ‘Dome. He’s got some really helpful advice for you and he’s the guy who created the Micro Membership plug in – so he knows what he’s talking about.

I’ll be back on Monday to let you know where we stand and to talk about the actual content for your Membership site.

In the meantime, I hope everybody had an Awesome Christmas! I know Boo and I did. We spent the day watching our favorite move and calling friends and family to with them all a happy holiday and rub their nose in the fact that we were sitting outside on the patio while they all had to huddle indoors out of the cold.