This video explains how two companies are
adjusting to what their customers want:

http://bit.ly/WLInsider

Is your business doing the same?

Watch the video to find out.

Enjoy!

Will

P.S Don’t disregard this “trend”. As the
video explains, it’s responsible for one
customer spending over $80,000 during the
last 5 years with one of the companies
featured in this video:

http://bit.ly/WLInsider

—–
NOTE: I am a compensated affiliate for
WishList Products.
—–

Here’s a great video from Stu McLaren on 10 Membership Site Business Models.

I use Model #1 the Publisher Model and use Wordpress (free) and Wishlist Member plugin to protect my content.

However, when I checked one of my affiliate sites for membership sites I found that I had made $407.71 in November! I haven’t added any affiliate links to Ryan Deiss’ site recently so it could be from an older blog post or sidebar link. But actually, Ryan does a lot of ‘back-end selling’ where he sells lower priced items to get people into his funnel, then upsells them later. Some of the products are recurring so I might have to try marketing them some more!

Another thing to note is that for the Learn and Master guitar affiliate sales I didn’t do anything new this month. So the existing YouTube videos and blog posts are still working for me (and should for a long time to come). So you put in the work and hopefully over time you get the rewards off of the single effort.

So we have:
$313.22 my guitar product/membership sales
$9.98 back pain site
$37.94 adsense you tube videos
$407.71 Ryan Deiss continuity products
$1.89 amazon affiliate sales (guitar books, ets)
$19.80 share a sale Learn and Master (they have 2 different affiliate products)
$29.10 Wishlist Products (membership site plugin for wordpress)
$1 Sponsored Tweet! (advertiser paid me to do a tweet about Microsoft!)

So the grand total in November 2009 was……..$820.64 there’s been no money spent on advertising these affiliate programs…just sweat equity! This is a new record, yahoo!!!!

The results were $398.99 for the month of October, so about $200 less than the last couple months, mostly due to less sales of Learn and Master Guitar.

This came from $57.89 from Google Adsense (YouTube video ads) and $341.10, mostly from guitar lesson related sales (Metal Method, Learn and Master Guitar and my own guitar lesson products from Online Guitar Coaching. No sales from Amazon and internet marketing materials (Ryan Deiss was minimal as I did nothing to promote them).

On the positive side, other than making WAY more on my IT contract (5 figures for about 5-6 week of half day work), I got re-inspired to add some new continuity programs – these will be some fixed-length modular courses (eg. Blues guitar level 1) that might last for 6 months as a membership program. Others will be ongoing such as a live video streaming guitar lesson each month, Guitar lick of the month, Song of the month (where I transcribe and analyze a guitar song and/or solo).

So I’ll be testing some new product offerings and seeing which ones are more popular. I’ve also focused on creating and expanding a Facebook fan page – and getting people to sign up by offering them a free live guitar lesson.

Another cool tool is the Wibiya toolbar that you can find at the guitar coaching site I mentioned -shows up at the bottom and I hope it increases the Facebook fans and I can also send them notifications on new webinars, sales, offerings, etc. Lots of exciting cool stuff happening!

As you know part of my monthly income comes from having a membership site for guitar lessons. If you pick up a copy of the Wishlist Member plugin for your membership site (the one I use) during this month of October, you can get a free copy of Gary Vaynerchuk’s newbook called “Crush It”. The second gift is an exclusive interview with Gary. Later this month they will be interviewing Garyin person and during the interview they’ll dig deeper into Gary’s strategies for creating anonline following and how it relates to membership sites.

You can get more information about the Gary Vaynerchuk Special Offer on their home page (click the image).

Here’s a new interview with Chris Garrett about membership sites and thought you’d like it: Chris Garrett (a high profile blogger) was interviewed on how he has developed several membership sites using WordPress. The whole interview is available for free. I figured you would like to listen

Chris talks about pricing strategies and the ‘Bikini Concept’ as well. Not sure if/when it will be taken down but right now you can download the whole interview about membership sites here.

I haven’t got a lot of support for this venture over the years and have spent many years doing day jobs that I absolutely hated. I’ve been very inconsistent over the past few years until recently when I’ve been ‘between contracts’. I’ve been off work since november and have spent most of my time working on my sites, while I burn through my savings.

My wife Bonnie asked me to add up my sales for this month of August so I went into paypal, google adsense and various affiliate networks. I was happily surprised to see some half decent sales.

The breakdown is as follows:
-my guitar lesson online courses and membership site $286.27
-2 guitar lesson affiliate products $215.38
-internet marketing affiliate products – $29.16
-google adsense – $73.57

For the guitar lesson affiliate products I’ve done a video review using my webcam and posted on youtube and other video sites using TubeMogul (free).

For internet marketing affiliate products I put links within my blog posts and in the sidebar of my blog on membership sites.

For Google adsense I have 50+ videos on guitar lessons at Youtube.

For the guitar lesson site, I created a membership site at $19/month using Wordpress and the Wishlist member plugin. I also took some of the content and made a few other products at $29 (Canon Rock Video Lesson) and $97 (Fretboard Blueprint) for instant access to the videos.

I’ve just used Wordpress and organic search results, no PPC. I’ve used market samurai a little for keyword research but not for ads or articles. I use Google reader and google alerts to get posts in my niche, then I post these articles or write my own on my blog. I haven’t done many articles recently for EzineArticles (free).

Make sure your niche has a product focus – for guitar lessons we have books, DVDs, online courses and even guitar gear (guitars, amps, pedals, etc). Digital cameras is another one. I’ve just created a back pain blog since I’ve suffered with this for 2002 and have a lot of experience with treatments. There are a fair number of products associated with back pain, besides books, such as inversion tables, exercise balls, and other related products.

I post this to encourage those that are discouraged and to mention that this takes time to develop. I hope you will all work at it each day until you reach your goals. This is an emotional roller coaster. I happen to be excited after I just added up the results, but many days it’s discouraging as nothing happens. We can only control what we do – implement the system day after day with consistency.

Will

There are many ways you can teach online, from doing one on one webcam video lessons via MSN Live Messenger, Skype to group webcam lessons via Ustream.tv. This would be for teaching or tutoring as you would do in your home or at a a business location. This is great for making real money. At some point you will want to try to get away from what is called ‘hourly-based revenue’. You only get paid when you work, when you don’t teach you don’t get paid.

You can create websites and blogs that teach and earn you revenue by putting ads on your site – whether they be Google Adsense or you try to get sponsors to buy ads on your site. So the content is free to your viewers but you make money from the businesses that advertise on your site.

You can sell information products – such as PDF files, videos, diagrams, etc as I’ve mentioned in previous posts. But a unique and lucrative alternative nowadays is to set up a virtual learning environment, also known as a membership site or continuity program. This is a protected area of your website and sets you up for recurring revenues.

One method that is often successful is to set up what’s known as a liquidating offer. When someone buys a fairly low priced product from you, you give them the option to join a training program at the time of purchase, that will give them access to lots of great content each month. They will also be billed a monthly basis – a great way to take advantage of the 80/20 rule which says 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your clients.

To learn how to create and market your own content or others, and much more, stay tuned for an exciting announcement tomorrow regarding a relaunching of an awesome online training environment or teaching online.

When selling other people’s products via affiliate programs, I use a variety of methods to educate my readers such as articles, blog posts, videos, diagrams, twitter/facebook posts and so on. But I also create educational content for sale, also known as information products. I’ve chosen for the time being to sell information products that are completely digital – in other words the content is fully online. This is for a variety of reasons such as no physical delivery to worry about, and I can improve the content over time based on feedback from my customers. It’s also great for the customers because they get instant access to the content.

Information products could be e-books (I do PDF files), audio files (mp3s), videos, or web pages. I create my content in Microsoft Word and ‘print to PDF’ using a free PDF driver. For video I use a Logitech Webcam Pro 9000. I also bought 3 point lighting and a background with support frame to make the videos more professional. You can attach these files to an email or send the customer an email with a link to a web page. I’ve automated this process using a service called 1ShoppingCart. When someone buys a product, 1Shoppingcart handles the payment and sends the customer an email with the product location (either attached or via a link). The beauty of digital delivery is that it is automated and the link expires after 24 hours so that it can’t be shared with others.

It’s great to sell information products but it will be challenging to find an ever increasing number of customers. If you know the Pareto Principle, 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your clients. This is because a small number of customers will buy from you again and again. This means you either need to have a large number of products offerings or you can set up what is called a membership site, members-area, or continuity program. I’ve set this up myself over at Online Guitar Coaching for learning how to play guitar.

The idea is that you create a protected, members only area that houses all your content, in whatever format you choose. I prefer to protect a series of web pages that contains the content such as videos, PDF files, etc rather than just a directory of files. I’ve actually created 7 courses which are a hierarchy of pages in a structured format. You can also ‘drip’ content over time, where you might deliver a module of content once a month, week, etc.

To get this working I now use Wordpress (free), hosted on a HostGator Server, with the Wishlist Member plugin. It’s actually pretty easy to set up. Let me know if you have any questions.