Goals Of This Section

• To continue the discussion of the differences between single sale and membership sites, and what each has to offer your business in terms of time, budget and income.
• To introduce an additional type of membership site that includes the best of both worlds from single sale sites and membership sites.
• To talk about some additional problems and solutions to each of the membership site types and show you how to solve them before they even arise.
• To look more closely at the advantages of the membership site in particular, and it’s little brother, the limited membership site.
• To hand down to you some additional real life experience and the information that I personally gained through the launch of my first all out and rather ambitious attempt at a membership site.
• To introduce the concept of building websites, specifically membership sites to build your resources for you, sites that make little or no up front profit, but stuff bundles of cash in your pocket long term.
• To discuss four of the traits that a membership site owner needs to be a success, all of which can be learned or developed. It’s not a case of you have them or you don’t.
• To talk briefly about the tools you need to run a successful membership site, and to show you that they’re not as dissimilar to single sale as you may have been lead to believe in the past.

Single Sale Vs Membership 2

Greetings, and welcome to single sale versus membership part two. In part one we looked at the time constrains and some of the monetary and flexibility aspects that can influence the decision to select one type of presentation over the other. We also introduced a third option, mixing a matching both single sale and membership to bring to the table limited, and we also looked at what type of products compliment each type of site.

You may already have made up your mind as to which of these you’re going to choose, but before you make a one hundred percent final decision, there are a few more aspects I’d like to share with you from my past experience with each of the three types of sites. So lets get started.

In the previous section we talked about flexibility of the membership and limited membership sites to turn customers into long-term customers, and in a way turn your membership sites into single sale by offering for example a years membership at a ten percent discount and how powerful this is.

The Other Side Of The Coin

Now we’re going to flip the table and look at something that you can do with a single sale product far more easily and readily than you usually can with a membership site. Again, this depends on your product, but more often than not, a lot of your promotion power will be coming from deals you’ve made with other marketers, whether your contacts, list owners, your top affiliates, your customers, whoever they are, the usual thing to do is give your product away to form part of this deal, or even as a bonus.

Understand that it’s far easier to be adding value or building trust with a deal that includes a single sale product rather than a membership site.

Of course this doesn’t apply all the time, again it depends on your product. Lets look at a standard online marketing example and show you what I mean. The first mistake a lot of people make is try and make their product actually valuable in such deals, but often it’s just a preview of what your contact, top affiliates or JV’s are promoting. It’s far quicker and easier for such marketers to get an instant feel and look at your product if you’re offering single sale, and thus building trust again, but this time with the people that are promoting with you, instead of the people buying your products.

If you’re hosting a product or service that someone else is going to be promoting for you, especially if they have their own resources in abundance, they can read your info product, take a snippet and check out the quality and decide if it’s worth their time. This as you can imagine is very hard to do from a membership point of view. They’re not going to be promoting an unreliable service, are they going to have time to hang around for weeks to check if you’re reliable? Of course this isn’t a problem if you’re well known, but take it from me, when you’re first starting out and your name hasn’t been heard or been around the block a few times, your promotion partners, affiliates and JV’s won’t necessarily take your site at face value.

The second point I’d like to make here is the actual value of your product itself. Sometimes, not always but sometimes, the product does hold value in these types of deals, and in this case, it’s far easier to say ‘Here you go, here’s my one thousand dollar piece of software for your use’ than to try and pull off something like ‘Here’s my $30 per month membership site, and here’s your two year membership’. So on the occasions where your product does hold value in these types of deals, the instant gratification of landing a $1000 product in someone’s lap is going to have a much more positive effect than the gradual 10, 20, 40 or even 50 dollar per month deal. It’s important to know that you hold more power to strike these types of deals with a single sale site than a membership site, and they are extremely important to say the least.

Tools Of The Trade

Ok lets move on now and look at some of the tools that you’re going to need to run each site, a checklist of sorts, or even a little bit of hindsight to show you exactly what each entails. You might be surprised at just how similar these are.

• The membership site. The first thing you’re going to need is an affiliate system capable of calculating recurring commissions.
• The second thing you’ll need is a payment processor capable of processing the payments you’re looking to charge, which is not as easy to find as it sounds. Some won’t let you reoccur your billing forever, some have trial price limits, some don’t do free trials, some have a maximum recurring price and so on.
• Next you’ll need a membership manager. Something that ties into the affiliate program and payment processor that revokes access from a member on auto when they cancel. With all that maintenance going, you won’t have time to do all this yourself.
• Next up, you’re going to need your content. Whether it’s scripts, information, business admin, consultation services, whatever it is, it needs to be planted inside the members area.
• Next on the list is your hosting. A massively important aspect due to the importance of keeping tools that are invaluable to your members and possibly even their businesses functioning at all times. Take into account your bandwidth if you’re offering audio, or if your scripts are particularly demanding.
• Freelancers on demand. Create yourself an account at freelancers’ site, Scriptlance or Elance, or similar. This is handy when you need emergency work doing. Set this one up even if you don’t have scripts as primary product, because it takes a real programming pro to make fixes in a live reoccurring system without screwing anything up, something I wouldn’t dare attempt myself. Once you have a good programmer it’s worth sticking with them.
• Autoresponder system. Of course for the management of your resources, your list, your customers, your affiliates, your long-term customers and for follow-up purposes. You’re also going to be needing a system of this type for notifying members of changes to the site, cancelled memberships and so on.

That’s it, that’s all there is to a membership site. It doesn’t seem like a huge amount, and in fact it isn’t, when everything works. It’s also not expensive to set all this up, and the best thing about it? Once you have everything you need, and you’ve created one membership site, or single sale site, you have what you need to create another, and another again and again, making the outset costs look even less significant.

So now we’ve had a look at the basic tools needed for running a successful membership site, lets move on and take a look at what it takes for a single site.

Without repeating a bunch of stuff that we’ve just talked about, I’ll tell you that actually, things are very similar with only very slight differences.

• In single sale your affiliate system doesn’t need to be capable of recurring incomes.
• A payment processor is much easier to find and use, and there will be no problems with trials, trial price and length, recurring limits and tying all of this into an affiliate system and access manager.

That’s it. I can tell you that through my own experience, these are the only differences in set up. As you can see there’s not a lot more going on in the membership site compared to the single sale site aside from the obvious regular content updates and little bit of recurring fun with affiliate software and payment processors. The conclusion? Cost is not something you need to take into account when deciding between the three options of membership, single sale and limited membership. Your time and your product are the two biggest factors when making your choice.

Commitment Factors

Ok next up is the commitment factor for membership sites. When I began my first one, of course I had no intention of closing it down, or even closing it to revamp it, but due to the scripts that were up there and the huge amount of resources it took up I had to do exactly that. So the first lesson is plan ahead a little better than I did, especially if you’re looking at any script with accounts per member where things can get out of hand very quickly if you’re not careful, so plan for these resources.

Once I re-opened, I put the price up and limited the numbers for this very reason, and to this day many remain on the waiting list. Just something to put down to experience. One word of warning, in this case, unlike the single sale site that you can just pull and be done with, a multi script or ongoing membership site will take a long time to take down or revamp.

The reason is quite simply the customers. There’s no way that you can keep your good name and pull down a membership site in a few days just because it’s eating up more resources or doing something unexpected that’s very hard to solve. It can take months to move customers along, as they slowly pull their resources from the site and all their information and find alternative services. It’s not something I like to talk about, because it was big mistake on my part in my early days, and no one likes making mistakes, especially when it affects customers in this way. If you’re unsure whether or not a membership site will go well, it’s best to stick with single sale due to a membership site being an ongoing commitment to customers that can prove costly and even hurt your reputation if handled incorrectly through normal operation, and even worse, when something unforeseen pops up, like my unsolvable without drastic measures resource problem.

Next up is another little tip for membership sites, something that may seem obvious and has been drilled into us all for a long time through the sale of autoresponder sites and the like and that’s to automate.

Automation Contemplation

This is even more important with membership sites than single sale, because quite simply if you want to deal with any aspect of single sale sites, you’re only dealing with them once per customer. When you’re looking at monthly or even weekly recurring membership sites, you might just find yourself managing a lot of people taking up your valuable product creation time, development time and time to move your business forwards. When your membership site is automated in every way humanly possible, it makes it a lot easier to be proactive and not get stuck in the infinite loop of maintenance.

So membership sites aren’t all bad, and another point to make here is relating to your affiliates. It’s far easier to get your members to promote for you when they’re visiting your membership site over and over again compared to a single sale.

I have a feeling a few marketers might argue with this point and say that it isn’t the job of the membership base to promote, this isn’t the role of your customers, and they would be right, except in one rather clever circumstance.

Secrets To Success; Multi-Role Sites

The situation that I’m talking about is taking a product and creating a membership site with the sole intention of building resources. The typical composition of such a site is marketing or business based, either with tools for running a business or with educational material talking about promotion, or even making promotion a part of the membership and tying it closely into the tools and information contained within the members area.

Be careful when doing this, because not having a good product and only selling the payment scheme is tantamount to pyramid selling, or as I like to call it, ripping people off. Saying this however, there is no reason why you can’t create a membership site just for resource building purposes, and making the affiliate program an asset of the members’ area. Often, more often than you may think, products are created not to make sales, but to build massive amounts of resources in the way of affiliates, JV’s, customers, long term customers and lists, profit being the furthest thing from the site owners mind.

This is a pretty clever way of doing things, and something that may not be apparent unless you actually ask the site owners themselves. Lets continue to concentrate on single sale versus membership sites and limited memberships.

Traits Of A Membership Site Owner

There’s a couple of important traits that you have to have if you’re running a membership site that you don’t necessarily need as much when running a limited membership site or single sale, each one is of the highest importance if you want to keep your members.

First, you need to be technically minded or willing to learn. Unless you have a big budget, you’re going to be dealing with a lot on your own, and can’t always get freelancers at short notice to fix scripts. At the very minimum I would suggest learning how to design and layout sites if you haven’t done so already, of course, this involves learning html at the very least and if you have time, dabbling in some simple PHP doesn’t hurt either, even if it’s just for your forms.

To add to that list, make sure that you’re familiar with the scripts that you’re using, not just the ones you may be selling to your customers (again depending on the product itself) but also those that you’re using to run your site. Spend some time before launch testing and getting to know your affiliate script and handling live data with a few example cases. The same goes for your membership script, keeping people in and out of the members’ area. Also make sure you’re familiar with any scripts you’re selling to your customers, both on the front end and in the admin area at the very least.

In addition, if you’re short on cash and can’t hire freelancers all that often, have a bit of a practice installing a few PHP and Perl scripts if you have them. As small as a simple installation might seem, it’s very handy for getting to know how the script works, especially when messing with the config files, which may indeed need changing or checking at a later date. Don’t worry about programming or scripting, I’m not asking you to be able to write any programs as such, just get familiar with them before you launch, even if you only take a browse through those config files. Be sure to do this on a mock up and not live data when you’re practicing.

Often scripts will come with installation instructions anyway, which is a simple case of uploading the files to your server, setting the permissions for each file as outlined in the manual, and finally opening the config file and setting the options to dictate how the script functions.

If you can do this already great, if this sounds a little daunting to you don’t worry, in all honesty, simply through messing with scripts, mock ups and problem solving through my very first site, it’s become a breeze to maintain and fix problems with no real schooling or course taking or anything like that. Once you’ve done two or three, you’ve done them all. Most importantly though, if you’re not prepared to do this, or in any doubt whatsoever, or even handling live data, backup before trying anything, and if all else fails, hire a freelancer, which is something you may prefer to do right off the bat. It’s all down to how much time you have and what you want to learn, and whether or not you have the funds to fix a problem. More on that in a moment.

Trait number two is you need to be quick to fix problems. If a problem arises with a long term membership site, especially if it’s with one of the primary tools, as we already discussed, you have to be fast to fix it, or the members, who are often using the tools either to run their business or an important aspect of their daily life, will understandably leave for a more reliable service.

Number three relates to the first trait. That’s have spare cash just in case. Never leave that pot empty, even if it’s just a few hundred dollars, there may come a time when a job arises that needs to be fixed through live data or something that you haven’t yet learned. Sure it’s ok if you can build sites and web based scripts already, but for those of us (including me) who prefer to stick to marketing side of things, a few hundred dollars put aside in the pot as a backup fund can never hurt, and often it can help a heck of a lot.

Trait number four is communication. Good communication and lots of it. It totally depends on your product, but when running a membership site there’s many ways of building trust with your customers, keeping maintenance time down, and keeping members up to date without taking up a bunch of your time. Communication does all three.

For example, instead of just putting your contact details up (which is something I first did with my original site) take the plunge, put up faq’s or even short snappy step by step tutorials if you need to, especially when hosting scripts, and even a bit of guidance when hosting content in a membership site wouldn’t go amiss either.

It’s quick, it’s one off, finish it and it’s done, and it keeps customers in the know and severely cuts support requests, leaving you more time to work on your next project instead of answering e-mails all day.

Couple this cut in maintenance with a short note each week, site news, updates or additional info. This does three things; first it fills the membership area with your presence. The customers and members know you’re there, and the place doesn’t feel cut off and stagnant to them. This alone was one of the prime aspects that doubled the length of time people were staying members and of course paying me also, and why many claim that memberships last a shorter time than they actually do. Five minutes of work per week to double your income? Not bad at all. Be a good communicator, but at the same time, the key is to keep maintenance low with automated a pre written information for your members. It never hurts to pop up every now and then and enhance your customers’ experiences with a simple update on the entrance page. A paragraph is all it takes.

Finally, get it right and make it good. Make it the best. This is a combination of many aspects, from professionalism to problem solving, to quickly fixing anything that breaks, making your presence known, and above all, having a good worth while product. Of course this goes without saying, but for a membership site, get it wrong, and you’ll lose more than a few sales as with single sale. You’ll lose members who may have been paying you for services for years to come. Thousands of dollars down the drain in one foul swoop.

A Final Word: Licensing

If memberships are not for you, and you want that reoccurring income and to charge a high price and get your moneys worth for your product right away, there is one more alternative. Licensing.

The reason licensing can be a good alternative to membership and single sale is that holds many of the good aspects of all of both of these types of sites. It’s low maintenance, it’s got a reoccurring aspect to it, where the customer is paying yearly or every quarter for a new license to use the product itself, it’s got all the traits of single sale, where you pull a lot of the profit from a high ticket item in a short space of time, instead of having to wait years for it, and if the customers want to keep using your product, you’re going to receive a high ticket license fee every year. It doesn’t suit all products, that’s for sure, but this is something that I’ve been studying closely in my most recent software venture, and in some cases, mostly related to software, it works incredibly well.

Ok that’s all we have for this section. I hope you’ve gained a little insight into each of the three types of sites and now have the ability to choose for yourself the method that best suits your product and your business. Even though you may have stumbled across the odd bit of this section that screams obvious to you, take it from me, it’s amazing what you can miss until it hits you in the face, no matter how obvious it is. I want to make 100% sure that we’ve covered all bases with everybody so there’s as few mistakes and as many successes as possible.

Summary

• Greetings, and welcome to single sale versus membership part two, where we’ll follow on straight away from part one and compare the two methods of delivery, and introduce a third, very effective middle ground, and demonstrate just why this is so effective.
• In the previous section we talked about the flexibility of membership and limited membership sites to turn customers into long term customers. Now, we’re going to flip the table and look at something you can do with a single sale product far more easily and readily than you can with a membership site. As we noted in the previous section, much of this depends on your product.
• A lot of your promotion will be coming from deals struck with other online marketers, whether they happen to be your contacts, your list, your affiliates, your customers, whoever they are, the usual thing to do is give them your product as a preview of the quality you’re promoting, and sometimes even add value to the deal if the prospects are interested in your product.
• When forming these types of deals, don’t expect to be able to give away a membership as easily as you can give away a single sale product to secure a deal, and using single sale for this purpose makes it far easier to build trust and connect to your prospect. That’s not to say it’s impossible with a membership site, but understand that if you go the membership route, it’s going to be harder to pull joint ventures.
• Lets briefly look at why, without overlapping the subjects. Many budding joint venturers on the lookout for that next sweetest deal with big names make the mistake of assuming their product is going to be valuable to their prospect. More often than not, unless the product is very focused, specialized and targeted at a niche market, this isn’t the case at all and the product is more of a preview of the quality of your product that they will risk their name on and promote to their resources.
• Take it from me, when you’re just starting out, if you have a membership site and are delivering products over time that aren’t pre-written and require maintenance, it’s not always easy to get your prospect to take your word and your product at face value. It’s easier with single sale because you can say ‘Here it is, this is it’, and they can immediately judge whether it’s of satisfactory quality, something that’s not possible with a membership site.
• You sure won’t catch any of us legit marketers promoting unreliable services. Not that yours will be, but how do we know without extensive work on our part? This is the brick wall I hit very hard when I launched my first site.
• The second point I’d like to make is about the value of the actual product. Again, it’s far easier to say to someone ‘Hey, here’s my $1000 piece of software’ than it is to say ‘hey, here’s a membership to my $30 per month membership site’. It just doesn’t hold any real value with these types of deals.
• Ok lets move on now and look at some of the tools you need to run each type of site, a checklist of sorts and a bit of a heads up to show you exactly what each entails. Lets start with the membership site.
• The membership site. The first thing you’re going to need is an affiliate system capable of calculating recurring commissions.
• The second thing you’ll need is a payment processor capable of processing the payments you’re looking to charge, which is not as easy to find as it sounds. Some won’t let you reoccur your billing forever, some have trial price limits, some don’t do free trials, some have a maximum recurring price.
• Next you’ll need a membership manager. Something that ties into the affiliate program and payment processor that revokes access from a member on auto when they cancel. With all that maintenance going, you won’t have time to do all this yourself. (Again watch out for the mail. When this is finished you’ll be the first to know, and the first to get rather large discount).
• Next up, you’re going to need your content. Whether it’s scripts, information, business admin, consultation services, whatever it is, it needs to be planted inside the members’ area.
• Next on the list is your hosting. A massively important aspect due to the importance of keeping tools that are invaluable to your members and possibly even their businesses functioning at all times. Take into account your bandwidth if you’re offering audio, or if your scripts are particularly demanding.
• Freelancers on demand. Create yourself an account at a freelancers site, Scriptlance or Elance, or similar sites. This is handy when you need emergency work doing. Set this one up even if you don’t have scripts as primary product, because it takes a real programming pro to make fixes in a live reoccurring system without screwing anything up, something I wouldn’t dare attempt myself. Once you have a good programmer it’s worth sticking with them.
• An autoresponder system for the management of your resources, your list, your customers, your affiliates, your long-term customers and for follow-up purposes. You’re also going to be needing a system of this type for notifying members of changes to the site, cancelled memberships and so on.
• That’s it, that’s all there is to a membership site. It isn’t a huge amount when everything works, and it’s also not expensive to set this up at all (I launched on day one with the most basic tools after having spent $600 on everything, bear in mind, none of which was one off, everything script wise was re-used over several sites, and ended up costing me $200 per site before I upgraded my stuff).
• So single sale, what’s the difference? Lets take a look. I won’t repeat everything we just talked about, instead, we’ll just make two simple amendments.
• In single sale your affiliate system doesn’t need to be capable of recurring incomes.
• A payment processor is much easier to find and use, and there will be no problems with trials, trial price and length, recurring limits and tying all of this into an affiliate system and access manager.
• That really is all there is to it. There’s not much more going on set up wise with membership compared to single sale, so through my experience, my advice would be don’t let your budget dictate what type of site you set up.
• This is even more important with membership sites than single sale, because quite simply if you want to deal with any aspect of single sale sites, you’re only dealing with them once per customer. When you’re looking at monthly or even weekly recurring membership sites, you might just find yourself managing a lot of people taking up your valuable product creation and development time to move your business forwards. When your membership site is automated in every way humanly possible, it makes it a lot easier to be proactive and not get stuck in the infinite loop of maintenance.
• Next up, long term commitments for membership sites. Be prepared. When I first started my membership site I had no idea that it would entail so much, and of course, when you’re creating a product closing it down doesn’t even cross your mind, but due to the heavy demand on the resources, unfortunately I had to do exactly that, and re-open later as a limited numbers membership site. Plan ahead a little better than I did, especially if you’re looking at running scripts with an account per script per member, things can get out of hand very quickly. Again, it depends on your product here so I can’t go into too much detail without writing a 1200 page guide on single sale and memberships, 99% of which would be irrelevant to your business, but look at your product, look at how much bandwidth people are going to be using, look at how much they’ll be downloading every month and plan carefully in this sense, and you have a far greater chance of success.
• The reason is quite simply the customers. There’s no way that you can keep your good name and pull down a membership site in a few days just because it’s eating up more resources or doing something unexpected that’s very hard or expensive to solve. It can take months to move customers along, as they slowly pull their resources from the site and find alternative services. It’s not something I like to talk about, because it was big mistake on my part in my early days, and no one likes making mistakes, especially when it affects customers in this way. If you’re unsure whether or not a membership site will go well, it’s best to stick with single sale.
• Next up, think about automation. Automate the heck out of everything if you’re going the membership route. It’s quite possible to run a single sale site totally un automated (but definitely not recommended) but when membership comes into play, and you’re potentially managing hundreds, or thousands of members on a monthly basis, that won’t happen, and if you try, you will undoubtedly find yourself in an infinite loop of maintenance.
• Some of the traits that you will need to successfully run a membership site are as follows:
• You need to be technically minded or willing to learn, fast. Unless you have a big budget, when dealing with site updates, script modifications and updates (especially if scripts are part of your product) at the very minimum I’d suggest learning how to design and create a site if you can’t already, adding into the mix a little PHP even if it’s just for forms, which doesn’t hurt ether. Also scripts. Got your own? Great, upload and test them yourself, because the knowledge you gain will be invaluable. Most scripts come with instruction manuals and step by step install guides anyway, and believe me, if you’ve installed one, you’ve petty much installed them all. Doing this gave me a great insight into my scripts and allowed me to fix problems, and change their configurations after only one or two installs. You don’t have to be a wiz at it, but it really is that easy and worthwhile for long-term plans and prospects if you’re on a budget. Not something you have to do right now, but keep it in mind.
• Trait number two is you need to be quick to fix problems. If a problem arises with a long term membership site, especially if it’s with one of the primary tools, as we already discussed, you have to be fast to fix it, or the members, who are often using the tools either to run their business or an important aspect of their daily life, will lave for a more reliable service.
• Number three relates to the first trait. That’s have spare cash just in case. Never leave that pot empty, even if it’s just a few hundred dollars, there may come a time when a job arises that needs to be fixed through live data or something that you haven’t yet learned. Sure it’s ok if you can build sites and web based scripts already, but for those of us (including me) who prefer to stick to marketing side of things, a few hundred dollars put aside in the pot as a backup find can never hurt, and often it can help a heck of a lot.
• Trait number four is communication. Good communication and lots of it. Again, it totally depends on your product, but when running a membership site there’s many ways of building trust with your customers, keeping maintenance time down, and keeping members up to date without taking up a bunch of your time. Communication does all three.
• For example, instead of just putting your contact details up (which is something I first did with my original site) take the plunge, put up faq’s or even short snappy step by step tutorials if you need to, especially when hosting scripts, and even a bit of guidance when hosting content in a membership site wouldn’t go amiss either. Members love this kind of straight- forward time saving tool.
• It’s quick, it’s one off, finish it and it’s done, and it keeps customers in the know and severely cuts support requests, leaving you more time to work on your next project instead of answering e-mails all day.
• Couple this cut in maintenance with a short note each week, site news, updates or additional info. This does three things; first it fills the membership area with your presence. The customers and members know you’re there, and the place doesn’t feel cut off and stagnant to them. This alone was one of the prime aspects that doubled the length of time people were staying members and of course paying me also, and why many claim that memberships last a shorter time than they actually do. Five minutes of work per week to double your income? Not bad at all. Be a good communicator, but at the same time, the key is to keep maintenance low with automated pre written information for your members. It never hurts to pop up every now and then and pull a simple update on the entrance page for the members either. A paragraph is all it takes.
• Finally, get it right, make it good, make it the best you’ve ever created no matter what you choose.
• Ok that’s all we have for this section. I hope you’ve gained a little insight into each of the three types of sites and now have the ability to choose for yourself the method that best suits your product and your business. Even though you may have stumbled across the odd bit of this section that screams obvious to you, take it from me, it’s amazing what you can miss until it hits you in the face, no matter how obvious it is. I want to make 100% sure that we’ve covered all bases with everybody so there’s as few mistakes and as many successes as possible.
• Remember, there is no correct answer here. No one can decide but you.